Saw this post come through on FB the other day along with a number of comments. The article is about the replicating of machines that were used to hoist wild animals into the Collosseum to fight the gladiators and of course later to kill Christians. Someone posted a comment on the Facebook share asking how such a thing could happen in civilized society.
It’s a slow slide but it occurs when a society has lost a firm grasp on right and wrong, when good becomes evil and evil good. It happens when a society can no longer discern leaders who are evil that begin to enact illegal laws. It happens when people no longer care about others, when people selfishly turn their backs on suffering and cannot feel the pain of their fellow souls.
I submit to you that America is well down this path. One sign of the heath of a society is the way it treats it’s animals. In America, on one hand you have the FBI classifying animal abuse as a felony because they have finally acknowledged the connection between people who hurt animals and people who will eventually hurt other people. On the other hand we have politicians participating in the passing of ag/gag laws that make it illegal to film the horrific abuse of animals in factory farms, effectively making it illegal to do the right thing. There were great strides made in the 1970’s to identify endangered creatures and create laws to save them from extinction. Now we have politicians who, for the sake of greed and money, want to undo those laws and wipe out the inconvenient animals that the Endangered Species Act was designed to preserve. We have politicians in several states that actively encourage barbaric activities such as trapping and hounding. Dog fighting is illegal everywhere, but our leaders do not have the moral compass to make the connection between the suffering of wildlife and the suffering of domestic animals. While making it illegal to harm domestic animals, they advocate for the right to abuse domestic animals on farms.
We see the demise our our society in the politically correct movement. We all know it is wrong to just let people pour across the border unchecked. We know they bring in crime and disease. We know they drive the wages down for Americans and for legal immigrants who are trying to make a living here. We know they fill up our hospital emergency rooms and cost untold tax dollars their care. But we are not allowed to say so without being called a bigot. And our leaders are complicit when they obstruct the enforcement of immigration law, when they create sanctuary cities that refuse to cooperate with federal efforts to protect citizens. I can think of two incidents just this week, including the woman who was shot for no reason in San Francisco, a teen who was killed in Aurora by a drunk driver, where their blood is on the hands of our leaders who could have but failed to protect us.
Moral slide happens in a society where the idea of a moral absolute is considered old fashioned and ignorant, when words are twisted to mean things they have never meant before. The Nazis were experts at creating euphemisms to make their crime sound better, where words like resettlement were used to cover for the mass murder of the millions transferred to gas chambers. The early success of the Nazi movement is synonymous with the use of propaganda and euphemism to sell it’s evil message to the public. In our society we see the same thing happening, Illegal immigrants are called undocumented workers, terrorists are called freedom fighters, animals and even people are harvested instead of slaughtered for their fur and organs on the black market. A religion who’s bible advocates the murder of non-believers and is responsible for the barbaric death of hundreds of thousands in modern times is called the “Religion of Peace”. The word conservation no longer means to preserve or protect, but to kill and destroy. Abortion is called choice, homosexuality called gay.
We see the slide in our society when our highest court can no longer interpret the plain meaning of the words in the document that defines the law of our land. The Bible is banned from our schools and workplaces and sin is elevated to a God given right. Rights are created from thin air and rights that are spelled out in the Constitution in plain English are eliminated. The mentally ill are elevated as heroes and Christian businesses are sued out of existence for their adherence to the hated Book. Once there is no written absolute truth, law is whatever those in power want it to be and throughout history what politicians with absolute power and no moral restraint want the most is the blood of their dissenters.
