After Thanksgiving dinner my daughter-in-law handed me a book and said, “you need to read this.” The book was HARBINGER II by Jonathan Cahn and she was right, I did need to read it. No spoiler alert needed, Mr. Cahn spins a compelling narrative comparing modern day America and its all too apparent rush toward dystopia to the fall from grace of ancient Judea. The author cites an amazing series of events from the present time that parallel occurrences recorded in the Bible and then ties them all to biblical prophecy.

While Mr. Cahn’s work is based entirely on the Judeo-Christian perspective I could not help being reminded of something said by Swami Vivekanada (circa 1898) during a lecture series given in London, England, “The nation that abandons morality will not survive.”

The bedrock of our nation is in Judeo-Christian morality and reverence for a benevolent Supreme Being whose guiding principles steered the newly founded ship of state. The first Europeans, those who established the initial foothold of what was to become our nation, came here primarily to escape religious persecution. This is indisputable fact, without regard to what revisionist historians would have you believe.

Time has marched on since Mr. Cahn penned his Harbinger series but the events that have occurred in the interim serve only to emphasize the points he made. America’s lurch toward the dark side was not organic, not a natural consequence of our cultural development, it was a purposeful, orchestrated shift away from morality, engineered to normalize deviance. It doesn’t take deep thought to discern the reasons why our elders, the political elite, and those who command the course of America’s economic sphere would prefer immorality. As I observed in previous postings, evil people do not look into a mirror and see evil people staring back at them. What they see are persons, thought to be more clever than most, who are goal driven and guided solely by expedience. For them morals are not only abstract, but also impediments to achieving their goals. These so-called leaders learned long ago that those who believe in nothing will fall for anything.

Remove morals and ethics from a society and you effectively neutralize any consideration of Divine Retribution and any code of conduct based on the dictates of a higher power. You create a populace guided by narrow self interest with a credo of, “if it feels good, do it.”

Laws, whether spiritual or secular, exist for the law abiding and to serve as a means to check the activities of those not obedient to the restrictions imposed by those statutes. If morality and ethics do not exist in concrete form to underpin law then the law becomes merely a body of suggestions, to be ignored if and when they interfere with the pursuit of someone’s desired goals. And this is exactly what we see being played out in the halls of government, the corporate boards of industry and in a more violent fashion, on the streets of our cities.

Whether or not it’s possible to reinstate morality into our nation’s ethos is debatable, what is not is that if we continue along this current path America as a nation will cease to exist.