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The following is taken from Christian Overman's Assumptions That Affect Our Lives: How Worldviews Determine Values that Influence Behavior and Shape Culture.
Take this short history quiz. What time and place in history do the following statements describe?
- People, especially educated ones, have rejected traditional religion.
- Cults from the East have been accepted.
- Astrology is practiced.
- Patriotism has declined.
- Men practice manners which have previously been considered effeminate.
- The upper class is consumed with the pursuit of pleasure.
- Education stresses knowledge more than character, and produces masses of half-educated people.
- Public athletic games have turned into professional contests.
- Homosexuality is popular.
- Men who want to watch dances by unclad women do not have to go far to find them.
- The dramas of the day are full of seduction and adultery.
- A women's liberation movement has brought women into active roles in a previously male-oriented culture.
- Motherhood is devalued, and the bearing of children is viewed as an inconvenience.
- Abortion is commonly practiced, as well as infanticide.
Choose the best answer from the following:
A. America, during the 1950s
B. Ancient Greece, during the later stages of its decline
C. America, today
If you selected B or C, you are correct. Either one will do.
He goes on to say, "The similarities between decadent Greece and present day America are stark and sobering. Even more sobering is the fact that many of these descriptions so fitting for today would have been unthinkable in the 1950s. We've come a long way in a short time. The descriptions of ancient Greece listed above are those given by historian Will Durant in his well-known book, The Life of Greece, published in 1939. He writes about these characteristics of Greek culture near the latter part of the book, in a subsection entitled, "The Morals of Decay." This was Greece near the end of her life.
Some readers may question the inclusion of infanticide as a distinctive mark of American culture today. But in the year 2000, America's likeness to dying Greece was made complete when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Nebraska State law prohibiting so-called "partial birth abortion." This procedure is nothing less than blatant infanticide, in its cruelest and most painful form. It embraces the pagan assumption that the lives of certain children are better left unlived. Even as far back as 1973, Nobel Prize-winner Dr. James D. Watson urged, "If a child were not declared alive until three days after birth, then all parents could be allowed the choice that only a few are given under the present system. The doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so chose and save a lot of misery and suffering." Dr. Watson's suggestion is one up on the ancient Greeks. In Athens, parents were given ten days to decide whether or not to accept a newborn in the family."
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