Ben Carson needs a new advisor on gun issues

MommyLiberty5013

nkjacobsma said:

MommyLiberty5013 said:

@BlueBirdMB, you have asked multiple times "what is wrong with our nation now that we have so many violent crimes?" Or, you have asked some variation of the question.

I think you are getting at the deeper issue behind the guns and even behind the mental illness/hatred/hate crimes.

DH is a commercial pilot. One of the guys he flew with a few times is also a volunteer fire fighter here in our town. He told DH that the main calls they get are car accidents and suicides - very rarely do they go out on true fire calls. He said that many times in suicide situations, they find the deceased in a room or home that is quite dirty and often times has, what many would call demonic writings on the walls and surfaces.

Now, we can go round and round all day on whether or not the supernatural good versus evil REALLY exists. But, for the sake of this discussion, let's just say that it does, in fact, exist.

If good (God) exists and He therefore protects people from evil, then the argument for WHY all this increased violence is that as we have removed the idea and the permission for a divine being to be in our homes, public square, or even mentioned in our schools. When we remove the divine good then people have nothing ABOVE themselves and they become the highest, most elevated being in their own lives. It just breeds selfishness, vanity, meanness, and evil.

Whether or not people believe in God, the actual or perceived presence of a divine, being in a society limits the tendencies toward evil behaviors, words, and actions. We can say that the absence of God/religion frees people and removes that "opiate of the masses," but maybe we actually need God or perception of Him in society to keep people in check.

Personally, I do believe in God and in Satan as well as in angels and demons. I have my own very personal and intellectual reasons for doing so. I accept that others do not share my beliefs.

All I am saying is that up until the 1980s, many/most of our population had a true, professed faith in a divine being. After this time period faith waned extremely, people became increasingly less-religious (and even increasingly violent and hate-filled toward the religious group). Prior to the 1980s we had less instances of violence and obscene troubles as a culture. Once in the 1980s we saw more troubles almost in every area of life - drugs, STDs, teen pregnancies, hatred, violence, divorce rates, break down of families, problems with TV, movies and media, etc..

I DO totally think there is a pattern here. More faith in a divine being tends to make people less prone to selfishness, meanness, and violence-prone. No, it is not an absolute. But, I think there is a pretty decent amount of evidence to more than suggest that the loss of faith in this nation has led to the increase of hate and violence.

This is actually what Nietzsche was talking about when he said "God is dead." He thought that the "death" of God in society would give rise to, essentially, post-modernism.

Yes. And so if that's the case, is post-modernism "God is dead" really SO good for a culture?

smerka

By most accounts, things like violent crimes, teen pregnancies, and STDs are lower now than they were in the 80's. Divorce rates and the breakdown of families is a hard one because it is hard to say if it is better for people to stay in an unhappy or abusive marriage. I do find the rate of unwed mothers startling. I think it is human nature to believe that things were better when they were children because they were sheltered from a lot of the bad stuff. I also wonder what the incidence rates of acts of religious extremism are now. As in people doing horrible things in the name of their God.