Greg on Nostr: I would be happy if people would just raise the question of a root cause and pursue ...
I would be happy if people would just raise the question of a root cause and pursue it with an open mind. I believe the root cause is rapidly increasing moral relativism, but since most people may not be thinking along those lines, more explanation is required, so please forgive the long post.
I see the roots of this in the Renaissance with the idea that "Man is the measure of things" rather than God. While there were many good things that came out of this humanism, the moral authority of the Catholic Church was questioned, and the Protestant Reformation, which responded to genuine problems in the Church, further ate away at this authority. The Protestants replaced the authority of the Church with the authority of the Bible. The wars of religion that followed the Reformation further weakened Christian authority so that in the Enlightenment, Reason was proposed as superior to Revelation as a source of morality. Modern critical scholarship proceded to cast doubt on the texts of the Bible so that even the Bible came be seen as irrelevant.
These changes began first among the intellectuals of Europe, but their ideas spread through the universities and seminaries so that even priests and ministers began to doubt the truth of Christian doctrine and morals. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was common among the well educated to not take traditional Christian morality seriously. Sigmund Freud provided rationale for not only doubting Christian sexual morality, but believing it be actually harmful because it repressed our natural sexual expression.
In the United States, the common people tended to cling to religion, but movies and television romanticized sexual freedom that was at odds with what they were taught at church. Over the decades the Hollywood lifestyle seemed more and more normal while Christian morality looked too restrictive and old-fashioned. In the United States, the sexual revolution in the late 1960s threw off the traditional moral restraints and began a series of legal changes, including no-fault divorce, legalized abortion, and same-sex marriage.
In my lifetime (I’m 61), I've seen the following changes. When I was a child, all of the children of the neighborhood played with each other all over the neighborhood, and no one worried as long as we were home for dinner. My mom would sometimes send me to the convenience store over half a mile away near the highway to pick up something she needed when I was still pretty small. We had a non-sectarian prayer at the beginning of each day in the public school. School shootings were unthinkable even though guns were very common in Texas. By the time I was in high school, 1977-1981, things had become much different. In my public high school, one band director was fired for sexual misconduct with a student, and the college counselor was caught in the act with a boy in the school bathroom, and ended up shooting himself. There were rumors about our principal and one of my history teachers, but nothing was ever proven. Now, responsible parents will not leave their children unsupervised outside their own fenced-in yard, and even Catholic priests are no longer considered safe.
In summary, secularism leads to moral relativism where eventually anything is permissible (e.g. Ivan Karamazov). There are still good people, but the restraints on bad people deteriorate until chaos threatens to overwhelm the good. Bitcoiners blame fiat for the problems of the world, but currency devaluation was considered a serious sin in the Middle Ages, so that moral restraint had to be eliminated before we could have fiat currency. I believe the solution is a widespread revival of faith in God with the realization that He knows what makes for a fulfilling life. When we abandon the path He has shown us, we wander off into self-destruction.
I see the roots of this in the Renaissance with the idea that "Man is the measure of things" rather than God. While there were many good things that came out of this humanism, the moral authority of the Catholic Church was questioned, and the Protestant Reformation, which responded to genuine problems in the Church, further ate away at this authority. The Protestants replaced the authority of the Church with the authority of the Bible. The wars of religion that followed the Reformation further weakened Christian authority so that in the Enlightenment, Reason was proposed as superior to Revelation as a source of morality. Modern critical scholarship proceded to cast doubt on the texts of the Bible so that even the Bible came be seen as irrelevant.
These changes began first among the intellectuals of Europe, but their ideas spread through the universities and seminaries so that even priests and ministers began to doubt the truth of Christian doctrine and morals. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was common among the well educated to not take traditional Christian morality seriously. Sigmund Freud provided rationale for not only doubting Christian sexual morality, but believing it be actually harmful because it repressed our natural sexual expression.
In the United States, the common people tended to cling to religion, but movies and television romanticized sexual freedom that was at odds with what they were taught at church. Over the decades the Hollywood lifestyle seemed more and more normal while Christian morality looked too restrictive and old-fashioned. In the United States, the sexual revolution in the late 1960s threw off the traditional moral restraints and began a series of legal changes, including no-fault divorce, legalized abortion, and same-sex marriage.
In my lifetime (I’m 61), I've seen the following changes. When I was a child, all of the children of the neighborhood played with each other all over the neighborhood, and no one worried as long as we were home for dinner. My mom would sometimes send me to the convenience store over half a mile away near the highway to pick up something she needed when I was still pretty small. We had a non-sectarian prayer at the beginning of each day in the public school. School shootings were unthinkable even though guns were very common in Texas. By the time I was in high school, 1977-1981, things had become much different. In my public high school, one band director was fired for sexual misconduct with a student, and the college counselor was caught in the act with a boy in the school bathroom, and ended up shooting himself. There were rumors about our principal and one of my history teachers, but nothing was ever proven. Now, responsible parents will not leave their children unsupervised outside their own fenced-in yard, and even Catholic priests are no longer considered safe.
In summary, secularism leads to moral relativism where eventually anything is permissible (e.g. Ivan Karamazov). There are still good people, but the restraints on bad people deteriorate until chaos threatens to overwhelm the good. Bitcoiners blame fiat for the problems of the world, but currency devaluation was considered a serious sin in the Middle Ages, so that moral restraint had to be eliminated before we could have fiat currency. I believe the solution is a widespread revival of faith in God with the realization that He knows what makes for a fulfilling life. When we abandon the path He has shown us, we wander off into self-destruction.