Posted on 01/08/2014 6:30:19 AM PST by IbJensen
I see I didn’t answer your actual question very well.
I would consider a significant increase in the incidence of such horrible incidents clear evidence of moral decay.
Let’s say they occurred at a rate of 100 per 100k population per year in 1950, 200 in 1980, and 400 in 2010.
The problem is that we’re unlikely to find such accurate statistics, for a host of reasons.
As I said, personally I believe we are in severe moral decline. It just isn’t possible to prove it by citing appalling anecdotes.
As countervailing evidence where we do have (fairly) good statistics, murder and other violent crime hit an all-time low about 1958, then climbed for 30 years. We have since been in a decline for about the last 25 years, and 2013 will probably come very close to being an all-time low year for murder.
That most Americans nevertheless believe crime is increasing proves my point about anecdotal evidence being an unreliable way to judge the truth.
I agree that statutory laws had been passed earlier than the Industrial Revolution in England; but as in today's India, enforcement in the countryside was probably only related to spectacular scandals. The main push for enforcement to a degree that would markedly change social custom came, as I suggested, with the confluence of industrialization and feminism pushing for greater rights and protections for women and children, and probably was influenced by the new types of poverty created by urbanization. With a "workhouse" (instead of welfare) system and universal opprobrium and blame placed unilaterally on the females for the implicit immorality and the cost of illegitimate offspring, their exploitation in urbanizing areas needed to be addressed more forcefully.
Certainly Rome and other centers of the HRE had always had brothels. However, English common law formed the backbone of legal reference points for our nascent republic, and the UK is still more influential socially than perhaps any other culture, so I focused my comments on its grappling with the age of consent.
I do appreciate your response and the information. More evidence that my education was in fact subpar!
Very interesting.
I do thank you for your responses and insight. I can now appreciate where you are coming from and have a greater understanding of how you came to it. I know, bad grammar, sorry!
It is a bit discerning that I seem to have come at this from an emotional angle which is the hallmark of a dim lefty. Maybe it’s having children, or simply the added bonus of being female...your answers are one of the reasons I stay at this site, it gives me the opportunity to have an adult discussion and gain a broader perspective.
Aside the lack of statistics et al, I wonder, does the rise in support for gay unions indicate moral decay? I’m struggling to explain to some in my life, how this leads to something even more vile, and who is behind this desire to normalize this behavior.
Thank you again
You are most welcome. As I’ve said, I do think we’re in steep social decline, I’m just unclear how to document or quantify it in any meaningful way.
Morality is an interesting subject. It basically means right/wrong, and not just sexually speaking.
While I think it is indisuptable that our sexual morality as a people has gone done a LOT, in other ways I think we’re much more moral than in the past.
150 years ago we got rid of slavery, which had existed from the dawn of time. Women, racial minorities and other historically oppressed groups have a great many more opportunities than in the past. That’s moral improvement, to set alongside moral decay in other ways.
Most of us never dreamed we would have to research the history of sexual practices in order to defend the cultural accomplishment of Christian marriage in the United States against its current neopagan enemies.
I believe it is a sign of moral decay, chiefly due to decades of material comfort that have enabled the Nanny State. The FedGov grew powerful through floods of tax money that poured in after WWII from an increasingly robust economy; it passed ever more egregious neofeminist rulings that destroy the role of men in the family and replace the father with the All-Powerful State, delegitimizing the entire concept of the natural family.
Heterosexual divorce is one of the main supports of homosexual marriage -- it is an open abandonment of the traditional importance of marriage, enabled by women's nearly imaginary ability to support the children without the help of a man and expect the outcomes to be just as healthful as they would have been with dad at home, which statistically, they most certainly are not for too many children of divorce, cohabitation or casual hookups.
Materially comfortable people, whether by postwar affluence or through the support of welfare and other government programs, often forsake God and His teachings. Material advantages remove fear and need, giving the illusion that they are invincible over adversity and don't need a God. If bad things happen, it's someone's fault! This, combined with the extremely focused and deliberate incursion of cultural Marxist ideology into every institution of our society have laid the groundwork for the destruction of the church and true belief in individual salvation.
In Marxism, salvation is collective -- there is no salvation of individuals, because there is no God. Every person and every behavior is decreed by the elites to be "equal" as long as it's politically correct. For Marxists, there is only salvation through a tightly, centrally planned economy and society run by utopian elitists who solve every problem through their superior intellects, forcing those who support them by their labor to conform to man-made fantasies of equality, no matter how vile and anti-Christian. Every time this hubristic theory has been tried, it has failed. But power-mad individuals are the children of the Deceiver; and he will continue to send his chaff among the wheat until the End.
I'm wandering off-topic a bit; but it's hard to wake up one day and hear that your child is being taught about homosexual practices in elementary school -- that's how suddenly it has seemed to break on the average American parent -- yet such an outrage against Christianity has been in the works for over a century.
Christians must learn to stand up for their religion, their right to practice it under our First Amendent, and their right to protect their children from moral harassment in schools, just as earlier generations of atheists and non-Christians have fought to "protect" their children from such calamitous -- to them -- indignities as hearing the Lord's Prayer, hearing Christian schoolmates discuss their beliefs, that Chrisitans founded this nation and its tenets laid the foundations of our Constitutional law, and even hearing that a mom-and-dad family is considered normative.
Christians have allowed mainstream churches to be invaded by feel-good hippie leftists who no longer believe in sin, and only disapprove of persons who disapprove of sin and sinners -- even though traditional Christianity requires that we all recognize that we are all sinners in need of a savior. The "Church of Nice" believes that homosexual marriage is just like heterosexual marriage and does not contain higher rates of promiscuous infidelity, domestic violence, high-risk types of sexual behaviors and higher rates of child sexual abuse -- but it does. "Nice" Christians forget that Jesus took a bullwhip to moneylenders in the temple. They are sentimental instead of "wise as serpents" -- in no small part because most people who have aspired to a life of chastity before marriage and sacramental, sacrificial love within marriage have never even wanted to think about what homosexuals do -- as evidenced by the homosexual lobby's own outrage when Phil Robertson recently pointed out in blunt terms what homosexuals do, and how their practices differ.
The primary harm to society from gay marriage is the accompanying demand to raise children in man-made, rather than God-made "families." A few loud leftists in every town and village have been using our legal system to force the views of a tiny minority on the children of the majority, using parenthood as one of their main public relations campaigns to appear normative -- as if a child does not need nor deserve to know his or her own blood parents and relations, or to know why they could not raise him or her themselves. To a child, this is a no-brainer: "Where is my mother? Who is my father?" They do not deserve a life of long-winded political speeches from both mommies, or Daddy and Poppa, about Utopian equal outcomes for GLBTQ-Americans.
A great migration is taking place within our nation, under the noses of the self-satisfied elite. Believers are abandoning politically correct denominations and finding Bible-believing congregations wherever they can. There is strength in numbers.
Glad you did and are willing to share!
Thank you, I will have go back and read your words again tomm. bkmk
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