The Death Penalty should be applied equally to all ages
- Thread starter JudgeRightly
- Start date
Exactly.
It doesn't change the fact that society as a whole has rejected that principle, and it has resulted in our current situation.
They've forgotten the "why" for such laws.
They've abandoned the spiritual/moral foundation upon which our civil society was built.
History teaches us that it is not the society that reflects it's laws but the laws that reflect the society. The singular exception is when God gave human government (i.e. law) to mankind after the flood. Since then, it has been an exercise of man deteriorating the law until the society collapses and the remaining population then restoring laws that rebuild society which then degrades the law until collapse and round and round the wheels on the bus go. There's nothing new under the Sun.
As fas as I'm concerned, our nation is in the midst of such a collapse.
I can't see how that could possibly be debated. It's completely obvious.
Incidentally, it is also not stoppable. Barring divine intervention, western civilization will succumb to pressures both from within and without. The low birth rate alone makes the society unsustainable, never mind our near complete lack of moral foundation upon which to raise the children we do have. Left to itself, the situation is quite entirely hopeless, though it may yet be several generations away from total collapse.
I've heard a few people suggest ways to fix our country.
But you can't put new wine into old wineskins.
Additionally, you cant put new wine into broken wineskins. And our nation is completely broken.
Things ebb and flow. Things are much better now than they were even three years ago. Perhaps they'll continue to improve for some time or maybe we'll lurch back toward near total depravity.
I don't think they forgot. We went from the greatest generation to the worst (Boomers). And I believe they just don't care. They abandoned what they know is right, and don't give a damn.
It's more fundamental than that. Our decline runs deeper than a single generation forgetting what is right. The more urban our society has become, the more it has drifted from the moral structure that once held it together. Families who lived on farms were woven into an economic and relational fabric that reinforced virtue. A father was not only a parent but the first and often primary employer. Children were not merely offspring, but were contributors to the household economy. Life itself created incentives to maintain strong, healthy, disciplined family bonds. Once society was liberated from the physical labor that sustained agrarian life, it was also liberated from the natural need for families, and the foundation of civil society began to erode.
A similar unraveling is now happening in our social relationships. The need for real friendships, genuine community, and actual human connection is disappearing. Social media has already produced a tribal mentality so hardened that the only remedy is either civil conflict or socioeconomic collapse or both. The trend emerged early in the social media era, and the political left seized upon it in a way that ensured it could not be reversed. They are committed to the destruction of America and will pursue it to the bitter end. They will proudly burn the whole place down rather than acknowledge failure.
When the collapse finally arrives, those who remain will return to an agrarian way of life because nothing else will be left standing. The cycle will repeat, as it has throughout history, until the second coming of Christ. Only then will the world learn that a stable society requires both freedom and justice. The closest we ever came to such a balance was in the first century of the United States, and even that was achieved almost by accident and under a flawed system of government. Christ will establish it deliberately and with a rod of iron.
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In 1860, about 1.26% of the US population owned slaves (per Gemini).
That is the metric you want to use? The 1860 census counted 3.9 million slaves, about 12.5% of the US population. Sorry if my comment led you astray, it was meant to point out that Clete's desire to return to the 1800's is misguided.
I'm not sure the Good Ol' Days were all that great.
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You said "we should ALL own slaves".
My point was that very FEW people (less than 2%) actually owned slaves in 1860.
Mea culpa, but that time period that Clete seems to like had almost 4 million people enslaved in the US which is the more important part to consider
It was imperfect, as every era is, yet it was also far freer and far more just than what we tolerate today. The result was the single greatest expansion of personal liberty, economic prosperity, lifespan, innovation, and overall human flourishing that the world had ever witnessed. The modern world is still coasting on the momentum created by that century.
Quite so! Neither should men!
Stupidity. That is a childish caricature. If this is the level of argument you find persuasive, you should ask yourself why.
America didn't start slavery, we ended it, and spent a lot of American blood and treasure to do so. And it was precisely because of freedom and justice that it was even possible to do so at all!
Incidentally, enslaved persons’ labor, and the output derived directly from it, made up somewhere in the ballpark of 10-15% of national product in the United States prior to the civil war. That isn't a statistically insignificant number but the point is that America was not principally built on the backs of slaves. Indeed, the economy grew at a faster pace after slavery was ended than it ever did while it was active.
If America had remained as free, as socially cohesive, and as economically unshackled as it was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the level of technology and standard of living you would enjoy today would exceed anything you can imagine. The only reason you have the modern world at all is because earlier generations built a foundation strong enough that modern political decay has not yet fully destroyed it.
You might consider reading a serious book instead of treating social media and partisan propaganda as if they were sources of history.
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