God's wrath cannot
be assuaged at this point because we, the people of the
former United States and Western Civilization, are the
most guilty, culpable, iniquitous society to ever exist
by many orders of magnitude. In terms of our
guilt, we are far, far guiltier than the people of late
Rome. There were aspects of late Roman culture
that were prima facie worse than our culture,
specifically the torture blood sports, but we are far
guiltier than the late Romans, and thus deserve far, far
worse. And that is exactly what we are going to
get.
How can we be orders of magnitude guiltier
than the late Romans, or any other culture for that
matter?
Because we are willfully ignorant due to
extreme intellectual and especially moral
laziness. If there was ever a group to whom the
words "YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER" applied, it is
us. And we have absolutely, positively no excuse
whatsoever for our ignorance.
1. We were a free culture. This isn't
Saudi Arabia or North Korea. We have been free
to read ANYTHING, learn ANYTHING, subscribe to
ANYTHING. This has been the most licensed
culture in all of human history. Male, female,
white, brown, old, young, you name it. There
hasn't even been a military draft in this country for
forty years. We have had the near-universal
societal leisure to pursue and ponder anything and
everything. And we have chosen Honey Boo Boo,
the Kardashians, and mentally retarded giants who
chase balls in stadiums like dogs. We have
chosen to be ignorant losers who revel and glory in
our own inhuman stupidity, when we could have chosen
to be excellent.
2. We are wealthy. We are the
wealthiest culture ever to exist. In all other
cultures poverty has meant starvation, disease brought
on by filth, and daily hard labor just to
survive. In this culture, poverty means that
your TV is under 42" and that your ObamaPhone is
running Android Version 3, not Version 4. No one
starves to death here. People don't die from
ingesting human fecal matter in their drinking
water. The necessities are totally taken care
of, and thus people are free to spend the vast
majority of their lives at leisure. Even our
jobs are leisure, because we all get to choose what it
is that we do for a living. Neither family ties
nor the government have mandated, under pain of death,
what any of us do vocationally. Whatever it is
that you are doing or have done vocationally, you
chose it and consented to it, and you were free to
pursue your own interests. Since our culture has
been so wealthy, most people have been able to support
themselves with a 40 hour workweek, leaving in excess
of 40 hours per week for pure leisure, free to pursue
and ponder anything and everything.
3. We could have been educated. We are
not. Most people in this culture, even though
education was possible, are totally uneducated, and
contra-educated. I would classify this culture
as "barely literate". People can read and sound
out a small core vocabulary of words, but there is
very little comprehension of what is read, and that
which is read is either ignorant, insipid or morally
degenerated. What people are almost universally
incapable of and totally unwilling to do is think for
themselves - not just to be spoonfed "answers", but to
actually ponder and parse information, to
independently synthesize data, make connections, and
to think through logical progressions. I don't
care how many bee-ess college degrees you have,
because all "education" today consists of is pumping
and dumping information onto multiple-choice tests and
occasionally faking a short-answer or occasional
paper. That isn't education. That's beta
pack animals learning the gestures of submission to
the alpha. This culture is operating just
epsilon above the animal plane - and those are the
"college educated" people. The inner cities are
operating on the purely animal level. But we
COULD have been the most truly educated culture ever.
4. Every single one of you reading this has
the sum of human knowledge literally at his
fingertips. The most damning aspect of the
internet won't be the pornography, I suspect.
The internet pins every single one of us into moral
corner because it completely removes any ability to
argue that "I didn't know - I didn't have the
information."
Whether you are a priest or a professor, or a
politician or a wild-eyed blogger, there is NO EXCUSE
for making incorrect public statements, no matter how
trivial. If you speak, you have a grave moral
obligation to be right, that is to speak the
Truth. The cascading consequences of factual and
moral errors are massive and horrifying, and we will
only see those consequences at the General
Judgment. When you have the sum of human
knowledge at your fingertips, and thus the potential
to extrapolate BEYOND the sum of human knowledge, thus
expanding the domain of human knowledge itself; when
you have been given that ability and are still so lazy
that you can't even get the already-known
facts-at-your-fingertips right, there will be hell to
pay for that sloth.
5. Finally, we have far more guilt and
culpability than any other culture because we WERE a
Christian culture and turned our back on God with full
knowledge and conscious forethought. The Romans
of the 4th century were pagans who either knew very
little or nothing at all of Christ. They had the
Natural Law as their only guide. We have Christ
Himself, with our culture *allegedly* built on Him,
and yet we have utterly denied and rejected Him and
have reverted all the way back to the worst pagan
cultures. The only revolt that is worse in
enormity and scope is the revolt of Lucifer.
Even the Jews of the Old Testament in all of their
many episodes of falling away from God, didn't have
the knowledge of Christ (obviously, because the
Incarnation had not yet happened).
We have nailed Christ to the Cross, and when
He looks at us and asks us why, we have the
unmitigated gall to say, "It's not my fault. I
didn't see You there. You should have spoken
up."
WE are going to burn like no other culture
has burned before, including Rome, because we have, by
far, the most guilt. Ignorance due to laziness
in the face of unprecedented freedom and license,
wealth and leisure time, potential education,
technology and availability of information, and the
knowledge of and physical presence of Christ Himself
is why we must and we will burn. No one has
ever, ever deserved it more.