(December 24, 2018 at 5:32 am)Agnostico Wrote: Ancient Greece and Rome exibited these signs. Abortion was infanticide, homosexuality was open, kids were sexualized, adultery was legal and divorce was open.Actually no. While Romans and Greeks had some gay culture between older guys and young guys they were quite homophobic.
(December 24, 2018 at 5:32 am)Agnostico Wrote: All of which contributed to the downfall of these great civilizations
They weren't that great, like Romans. After all over 50% were slaves which doesn't seem to even ring any bells to you.
But when it comes to abortion and fall of society there was a recent experiment about that. In 1960s Nicolae Ceausescu made abortion illegal in Romania as well as all contraception and sex education were banned. Government agents known as the Menstrual Police regularly rounded up women in their workplaces to administer pregnancy tests.
Within one year of the abortion ban, the Romanian birth rate had doubled. These babies were born into a country where, unless you belonged to the Ceausescu clan or the Communist elite, life was miserable and these children would turn out to have particularly miserable lives.
On December 16, 1989, thousands of people took to the streets of Timisoara to protest his regime. Many of the protestors were teenagers and college students. Days after Ceausescu and his wife were captured, given a crude trial, and, on Christmas Day, executed by firing squad.
Just imagine of all the Communist leaders deposed in he years bracketing the collapse of the Soviet Union, only Nicolae Ceausescu met a violent death. It should not be overlooked that his demise was precipitated in large measure by the youth of Romania--a great number of whom, were it not for his abortion ban, would never have been born at all.
Nicolae Ceausescu learned the hard way (with a bullet to the head) that his abortion ban had much deeper implications than he knew.
Then take American crime in the 1990s, but this time story is a reversed. While Ceausescu was biting his bullet crime in US was just about at its peak. In the previous 15 years, violent crime had risen 80%. It was crime that led the nightly news and the national conversation.
When the crime rate began falling in the early 1990s, it did so with such speed and suddenness that it surprised everyone. It took some experts many years to even recognize that crime was falling, so confident had they been of its continuing rise. What caused its fall was Roe v. Wade in 1973. In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v. Wade was hitting its late teen years—the years during which young men enter their criminal prime—the rate of crime began to fall. What this cohort was missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals. And the crime rate continued to fall as an entire generation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted to bring a child into the world. Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime. So new criminals simply weren't born.
Also legalization of abortion in the United States had myriad consequences. Infanticide fell dramatically. So did shotgun marriages, as well as the number of babies put up for adoption.
You know when a woman does not want to have a child, she usually has good reason. She may be unmarried or in a bad marriage. She may consider herself too poor to raise a child. She may think her life is too unstable or unhappy, or she may think that her drinking or drug use will damage the baby’s health. She may believe that she is too young or hasn’t yet received enough education. She may want a child badly but in a few years, not now. For any of a hundred reasons, she may feel that she cannot provide a home environment that is conducive to raising a healthy and productive child.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"