Doug Quaid said:
What about today's glorifying of premarital sex, abortions, gay marriages, religious tolerance, politcal correctness, interracial marriages, super high divorce rates, drug use, music promoting the degrading of women, violence and drugs, girls dressing more provocatively at much younger ages, and the attempts to take God out of America?
This is right on the edge of a complex question.
Premarital sex: Through large chunks of Christian history, marriage was something folks did on their own, and the Church recognized it later. The notion of solemnizing a marriage as a
prerequisite is an invention of the last millennium or so. Throughout history, many people have had a great deal of premarital sex, and it's not detectably more prevelant today than it was in, say, 1500. There was a brief decline in America for a while, but I don't think it was sustainable.
Abortions: Abortions in one form or another have been around forever. The abortion rate is high, but this does not necessarily reflect a purely moral position; it also reflects changes in our understanding of what human life is.
Gay marriage: The same was said about interracial marriage fifty years ago. Most importantly, the only harm anyone can ever cite for this is the claim that it is "part of the moral decline". That's question-begging. Note also that this is not new; gay marriages have existed in other cultures. (Some people will claim that all such cultures have collapsed. Nearly every culture has collapsed, including those that rejected it; we don't have a good sample space here.) Furthermore, gay couples have lived together in our cultural history for a long time; they just didn't have any official sanction.
Religious tolerance: This is one of the most fundamental Christian virtues. It is indeed on the rise, and this is one of the clear moral victories for modern culture; when you compare it to the devestatingly blasphemous things done in God's name in medieval Europe, or during the first major Protestant/Catholic wars, I think it is clear that it is a moral triumph.
Political correctness: This is not a moral decline. Rather, it's other people trying to do to you what you are trying to do to them: Impose a distorted and horrific simplification of "morality" on others. Don't like it? Take it as an object lesson.
Interracial marriage: Since Moses, and Ruth, we have known that God actively encourages and blesses interracial marriages. That you would cite this as an example of moral decline suggests that it is you, not society, that is having problems with the basics of morality.
High divorce rates: Yup! A real, live, problem. We should be doing something about this. One thing we could do is stop trying to blame everyone else for our own shortcomings. Honestly, I think one of the largest causes here is poor societal support for marriages, and in particular, a lack of recognition of the realities of marriage. If I could do one thing to reduce the divorce rate, my pick would be to eliminate the use of the word or concept of "soulmate" as a thing you just find lying around.
Drug use: Been around forever, in various forms. It's not obviously worse now than it was a thousand years ago. Of some interest, though, is the lesson of Prohibition: Naive attempts to eliminate the use of a given drug can make it much more lucrative, and actually lead to more people having problems with it.
Music promoting the degrading of women: Compared to the centuries of systematic degredation imposed on women by the Christian majority in our history... Is it bad? Yes. Is it worse than what we had a hundred years ago? No.
Violence and drugs: You already counted drugs. Violence? You could make a case for this, but it's not clear that it's actually substantially worse; honestly, the main source of violence in the U. S. is inner city gangs; see Prohibition, above.
Girls dressing provocatively: Standards of dress vary so much it's hard to draw anything from this. There's people who have gotten by just fine with grass skirts for hundreds of years, and a proper Victorian lady would seem incredibly immodist to a strict Muslim.
Attempts to take God out of America: No one is attempting to take God out of America. What is at issue is stuff like whether God should be in the pledge of allegiance.
On this, my friend, you are not just a little wrong. You are about as wrong as it is possible to be, as a matter of faith, as a matter of history, as a matter of theology; in short, you have managed to find what may be the worst possible position to hold on this issue.
First, the history: The "under God" in the Pledge was added, recently. It is not part of the historical Pledge. It is an addition; taking it away does not "remove" God from anything He was in previously; it merely restores a status quo.
The reasons for which "under God" is in the pledge are among the most disgusting and reprehensible phases of the abuse of "Christian" beliefs and words in the history of our faith; McCarthy's abuse of Christian words and names to attack people was purely evil, and cannot be reconciled with or justified under any Christian belief system worthy of the name. It was simply wrong, and it was blasphemously wrong.
Let us stop and consider the question of the Pledge. Clearly, Christians should not be saying it at all. We are told not to swear at all, and certainly, we cannot honestly swear an unconditional oath to any country. Worse, the Pledge clearly distinguishes between the flag as an object and the flag as a symbol for a country, and pledges allegiance to
both of them. This is, quite simply, idolatry. There is no justification, no excuse. It is wrong.
Furthermore, the main use of the Pledge which is being challenged is its recitation in schools. Thoroughly disingenous dodges are made on the topic; children are not "forced" to say the Pledge. There are several problems with this:
1. Often, teachers are not aware of this subtlety. I was punished when I refused to say the Pledge as a child.
2. Even if there is no "force", there is coercion; when thirty-nine children act together, and one stands alone, that one has been harmed, and substantially so. Children are social creatures.
3. It is not clear at all that any religious claims at all belong in an organized school activity of this nature, even if some can withdraw. How would you feel about it if it were a Wiccan prayer, and your child "had the option of not participating"?
But, we're not done.
Children, as you are well aware, cannot sign legally binding documents in their own name. More generally, they cannot make binding oaths. (This is to say nothing of the prohibition against doing so; it is merely to observe that, even if it were not prohibited by Christ, it would not be binding in the eyes of any secular or religious authority.)
Thus, any oath a child takes is invalid. When we ask children to recite oaths, we are teaching them that it is permissible to simply recite an oath as empty words, without consideration for its meaning, knowing that you will not be bound by it. And we wonder that they grow up to perjure themselves in court without a second's hesitation!
So, we have millions of children reciting false oaths.
To this mix, we add the phrase "under God". What are we doing? We are making millions of children blaspheme. We have large-scale, ritualized, standardized, blasphemy, in nearly every school in our country.
To say that ending this would be a decline in morality is well past laughable, well past ludicrous; it is simply the direct opposite of the truth.
You have cited, as examples of moral "decline", a number of things. Two of them, it turns out, are not moral decline, but rather, a step back from truly unconscionable things to a state of affairs that is, at least, potentially compatible with morality.
I am unimpressed.
