dale: It sure is a puzzle.
If Alexander Solzhenitsyn were alive he’d advise you to begin the quest for solving the puzzle with the following:
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts…Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.” Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
And if members of America’s early intellectual conservative movement were still here they’d suggest you consider the following:
Inside every man, said Eliseo Vivas, lay “brutality” and a “natural tendency” to “define value in terms of his own interest.” Richard Weaver concurred, saying Original Sin is a “parabolical expression” of the “immemorial tendency of man to do the wrong thing when he knows the right thing.” Bernard Iddings Bell argued that “exaggerated optimism about man” was “the chief cause of our decay.” (The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, George H. Nash, p. 53)
Starting from backgrounds of atheism, Communism, socialism, and liberalism, the apocalypse of evil unleashed during the 30’s-40’s convinced early conservatives that these ideologies were evil but the truths of Christianity were in fact true and they advised Americans to restore to our vocabulary a word discarded long ago, namely sin. The dreadful implications of original sin were obvious to early conservatives and Solzhenitsyn. What will it take before they finally become obvious to us as well?
Well said. I’ll up the ante a bit, though: I believe it isn’t just an acknowledgement of sin that is needed, but that America needs to, once again, turn to God the Father. Our forefathers did (despite many claims to the contrary). We were a nation founded upon Christian principles and was dedicated to God by G. Washington himself.
That is why we have prospered so; no other reason.
Now that the country has so turned away from God (I’ll spare you the countless examples), how can we expect to remain under His protection? It’s going to take a revival the likes of which this country hasn’t seen in over 100 years.