America was given a wake-up call in Sept 2001 and again in Sept of 2008. Let's see how the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage goes this summer for one. Steve Peterson, must you criticize everyone's comments in this thread? And since when did God care about his word being ridiculed by unbelievers?
So instead of believing that 9/11 was a deranged act of terrorism murdering hundreds of people, that it was a divine act to "wake up" America?
As far as the Supreme Court, I hope it rules in favor of civil rights--because denying basic rights to American citizens is fundamentally unjust.
This narrative that America is somehow significant--or more significant than other nations--in the great big goings-on of history or "prophecy" is, quite frankly, nauseating.
Scripture has nothing to say about the United States.
The United States doesn't have a role in "prophecy".
Wealthy white Protestant men invoking a narrative of moral downfall because they no longer have the power and sway they have in the past is meaningless.
There are certainly all sorts of things wrong going on in this country. The wealthy get wealthier on the backs of the poor and the ever shrinking middle class because lobbyists buy out our politicians. Media coverage feeds a paranoid and largely uninformed public about what goes on so that they remain afraid and in line so that they don't ever challenge the status quo. We refuse to initiate real policy to benefit the sick, the poor, the homeless, the disenfranchised. We insist that racism isn't a problem despite the fact in just the last several months there has been a growth in police violence against African Americans, when African Americans protest or speak out against inequality and injustice they are at best dismissed because--after all--racism is over. We have politicians in many states who insist that voter fraud is a real thing despite the fact that all evidence points to it not being a problem--and so legislation is put into effect to make it difficult for the "wrong people" to vote and thus those politicians can keep their seats of power. Women still lack economic equality. We still have people insisting that the Affordable Care Act was a tragedy despite the fact that it has helped many thousands of people have coverage where they had little to none before. We have a constant barrage of anti-science nutjobs insisting that climate change and evolution are false and would have our public school systems teach pseudo-science instead of actual, fact-based science.
We continue to call our country the greatest in the world despite the fact that we are, objectively, not--and we never have been. We've never been the greatest country in the world and we've never had the great moral high ground that we pretend to have had. With a history of genocide against the Native American nations, slavery, and Jim Crow laws, not to mention the fact that we constructed concentration camps and put our own citizens into them during WW2 because they were Japanese Americans.
So yeah, there's a lot of bad things going on. We've had 250 years of bad things going on as a country.
No America, you are not God's special little snowflake.
-CryptoLutheran
