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Peter Darcy's avatar

Great insights and perfectly true. I would only add that we need to get on our knees. Societies fall apart because they are not bolstered by the preserving force of faith. America has lost its Christian identity and is about spent before its 250th birthday. The faith-filled Middle Ages preserved an entire multi-cultural civilization for a thousand years. It was really the Black Death that transformed it into a lesser age of faith. Prayer is needed so that we don't die spiritually and every other way.

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Prodigal's avatar

Reminds me of what I call "The Church of Bad Shit Happens to Other People". It virtually never crosses the minds of the faithful that fate might step up at any minute and turn their lives inside out. Only people on the news die in plane crashes and house fires, have surgeons remove the wrong kidney, get mauled by their neighbor's pit bull, have their daughter disappear without a trace, and you name it.

Pains me to say I strongly suspect these types make up a majority, at least in the western world. What could possibly go wrong as we ride the endless wave of technical progress and zombie prosperity kept alive on equally endless credit?

In the Middle Ages, truly faithful, who believed in the eternal and not the temporal, kept little "memento mori" motifs and objects nearby to remind them of the everpresent reality of Death. Misfortune did not come as a shock to them, I would wager.

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