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Edited on Tue Dec-02-08 12:46 PM by KCabotDullesMarxIII
Many non-believers see no connection between what historical, mainstream Christianity considers serious sins and the breakdown of society on many levels, including the criminal level. The resultant increase in the cost of policing, while not to be dismissed as a matter of no significance is only one of a whole confluence of negative effects on an increasingly degenerate society.
Of course, as the Italians say, fish rot from the head down. The UK is an example and should be a warning to other countries. It has been known for some time now that early teenage sex is a contributory causes of cervical cancer. And guess which country's young women have been rated the most promiscuous? Hardcore pornography is readily available even on the TV, not to speak of the Internet. Guess which European country has the highest prison population and still finds a million ways to avoid giving a custodial sentence for violent offences (not to speak of categorising crimes of "murder" in a more anodyne form)?
The standards of our university degrees are acknowledged to have significantly fallen. According to a letter to a newspaper, when her son, brandishing a letter, triumphantly announced to his mother that he'd been awarded the degree he'd been studying for, she thought to herself, "Thank heavens for falling standards.
Violence in schools is a major problem, mostly arising from the hopelessness that has been Thatcher's legacy for successive generations of young people. Personnel of the emergency-services, firemen, ambulance men, etc, are attacked - not to speak of the medical staff in hospitals. I believe the old Edinburgh Royal Infirmary had a mini-police station. Slabs of concrete are dropped from Motorway bridges onto traffic; heavy scrap material is placed on railway tracks to derail trains. The list goes on and on.
But the thing I'm driving at is that all these things have arisen from an atheistic, "laissez-faire" culture, right across the board, ousting the country's traditional Christian culture, under which many of these things were unthinkable, even to the worst villains. Licence masquerading as freedom.
What has happened is that where actual, as opposed to formal, criminality was institutionalised at the top of society among the monied people, it was controlled and most of its excesses that had not been institutionalised everywhere since the dawn of mankind, punished under the law like the crimes of the rest of the population.
A strange situation, however, has occurred. The monied classes scandalised the poor, with their bizarrely conflicted attitude towards money and worldly ambition, which had kept the population down, in dire poverty, completely contrary to the Gospel (though not alas the Church), with the result that once Keir Hardie, a devout Christian, had formed the Labour Party, it was soon taken over by atheists, many of whom could arguably be forgiven for dismissing the faith as the "opium of the people". World War II had been the last straw.
Yet, having scandalised the populace, and lost much of their political power (never more so, on either score, than today, when the Tory party contains only their own riff-raff), those same monied classes were to become one of the last bastions of Christianity, however curiously selective, in the land, at least until Thatcher's coronation by some of the country's louche super rich underbelly and a crypto-fascist press. And now today's Tories are virtually indistinguishable from NuLab(c), just more primitive and impatient in their lust to plunder the people. Well, it looks now as if Brown has "seen the writing on the wall", and not before time.
But the bottom line is that, while we shall all be judged on our practical compassion towards others, not on our formal church affiliation and credence, as far as countries are concerned, an over-arching Christian culture for the West is now more essential than ever.
When I was in the army in Germany in the early sixties, I was told by a local lad that they were obliged by law to pay a tithe, a tenth of their income to their Church. Maybe it wasn't a tithe, but another amount, but it was some proportion, and obligatory.
Naturally, I was shocked, as it seemed kind of taking proselytising a bit far! If you get my drift, and I'm CERTAIN some of you will! But the thing is, given the Nazi propaganda the country, but particularly the young, had been subject to, it was a very enlightened project. If you plot the course of the two countries, Germany and the UK, post-war, you can see how the former has prospered, while the latter has sunk into depravity and anomie. I'm not suggesting that Germany would have been unaffected by the growing anomie in the UK and US, in particular, but in comparison it appears to be "in a much better place" all round.
It was interesting to read in Will Hutton's bok, The State We're In, for example, how the Germans handle their industrial relations, and how their banks study the needs of even the small businesses in their local community, the better to serve them. Of course, that is not to say that their large banks haven't beeen affected by the crash, but not as much, apparently, as many others. I expect part of their success is also down to having had generally better leaders since the war.
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