The decline of morality then and now, and the importance of Christianity
Given the many parallels between ancient Rome and the United States , the one that resonates the most with me is the decline of morality of both. In his book "How Christianity Changed the World" by Alvin J. Schmidt, he documents the morals, or lack thereof, of the pagan world prior to Christianity. His focus is primarily on the Greeks and Romans, though these pagan "values" were virtually universal in every culture on earth. It's also a glimpse of where we are headed as Christianity continues to erode in the West. See if you can spot how close we are to those parallels today. The British historian Edward Gibbon says in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that the breakdown in sexual morality began after the Punic Wars ended in 146 B.C. People engaged in all sorts of sexual methods, many of them obscene. Sex was openly displayed, there was no such thing as modesty or privacy. This was also true of the Greeks, whose athletes routinel...