I have a feeling that He who is behind Christianity will be here Himself not before long to fix things directly.

Err… that’s trying to protect.

Believe me, I don’t like my answer either.

“…such as restricting who can vote based on some sort of cognitive or meritorious qualification.”

Doesn’t work, because the corrupting deginerative forces quickly come to control the selection process and use it to disqualify the very groups you are trying to correct. Else, the group set to protect the society from the deginerative forces, gets all proudful and self-righteous and before long they aren’t just limiting who is enfranchised, but who has access to basic civil services, then basic civil rights, and not long after that they are loading some scapegoat group onto box cars and wheeling them into gas chambers.

You don’t have to take my answer on religious terms. The important point isn’t whether or not my religion is the right one, though I would argue that it is, the important point is that you can never create the requisite culture through statist policies. Attempting to solve all the worlds ills through Statist means – as if man was primarily a political animal and his problems fundamentally political – is the great error of the 20th century. It’s visible in dramatic ways with the failure of Communism, and less dramatically but equally visible with the rise in America of Christianity as a political movement rather than a spiritual one. Christianity isn’t a political movement, and it will fail as a political movement. If terms like ‘spiritual’ make you uncomfortable, then Christianity is cultural technology which has evolved to create a literate, tolerant, progressive society with a high degree of personal integrity. The dream of the Left through the 20th century has been to replace Christianity with an irreligious social technology that accomplishes the same purposes, but so far from where I’m standing they seem to be failing pretty miserably.

Our system of government requires a populace of a certain education and self-control. Self-control is out the window.. and education is rapidly denigrating.

I attribute a lot of this to the Left (if I had to pick a quick and simple label) and their purposeful deconstruction of the foundations of the nation. (I really dont want to use the term Left but cant think of another)

I see no way of countering this without the creation of structures that are specifically designed to guard against the deconstruction… such as restricting who can vote based on some sort of cognitive or meritorious qualification.

You can’t force men to be good. If you try, you only increase the evil.

Christians generally believe that once this falling away begins, the only way to get out of it is wait until the culture decays into an unsalvagable wreck. Then and only then will the hubris of man change into an honest and humble quest for answers, and then and only then will the divine muse find ready vessels with which the voice of God may be amplified.

So, pretty much the only thing you can do is store the salt away so that when things do fall apart, you’ll have something salty left to rebuild the culture with. Meanwhile, you pray that God will be merciful and shorten the days of our suffering.

When the salt of the earth are all the remains and truly our as a voice crying out in the wilderness, then comes the promise of redemption. Meanwhile, try not to fret to much about things outside your control. We aren’t called to save the world, just our neighbor.

The poet Randall Jarrell said, “People in a golden age complain how yellow everything looks.”

According to one of the links, none!

I can’t shake from my head the notion that there comes a time in the lifecycle of a nation where some group of people have to step up and enforce some sort of loyalty/cultural-change regime onto the political system. Something like a non-religious Council of Guardians that Iran has.

Or do we just let the culture decay into an unsalvagable wreck?

Not in 2000 BC.

There was a time in this country when ‘steely eyed engineers with thewes of steel’ were celebrated as heroes.

Whose names do our children know? Soldiers? Doctors? Scientists? Engineers? Inventors? Can we ourselves even name the great men and women of our age? Yet we all, even those who seldom watch TV or go to the movies, could probably rattle the names of 200 or so actors off the tops of our heads. Ditto atheletes. Something has gotten out of proportion.

If you want to trace back why things are falling apart, you need to look beyond the bandaids and vagaries of politics and look at the changes in our core cultural values.

Communications satellites
Refrigeration
Transcontinental flight
Reverse osmosis filtering (the whole ‘greening the desert’ thing)
Really long bridges
carbon nanotubes

I also disagree that skyscrapers were done with less than cutting edge technology. There often were technological innovations that let us get just a little higher. That’s why having the tallest building still gives national bragging rights.