What are considered the greatest civilizations in the history of humanity each took decades, if not centuries, to build. They often borrowed essential and proven elements from preceding civilizations, such as political, educational, economic and legal models, among others. Such models, however, were not the antecedent of reaching their plenary summit. What propelled continual advancement was, first and foremost, their culture. A civilization's culture is what animates its progress or regress, what defines the shape and scope of its polities, and, ultimately, what determines its success or failure. Great civilizations are only limited by the desire to attain new heights, a desire generally fueled by the consummation of wisdom and knowledge, the parentage of morality - the relentless quest for that which is good, for that which is God. Venerable societies fervently seek God at the apex of human existence - our individual consciousness. For one to find 'evidence' of God, one must look no further than within one's own human consciousness. Our ability to reason, to think, to ponder our own existence, to know right from wrong...where does it come from? That which is our soul. It is not the work of physiological processes. It is neither psychological, chemical, nor anthropological. It is our transcendental ability to seek God that so substantiates God's existence. Reason is the voice of God; truth is God's discourse with us; and virtue is our response. The fruit of this symbiotic exchange is the birth of eminent civilization. The civilization that was America flourished at the confluence of these principles. It was built with the integral components of marriage, family, work, education, responsibility, charity, a respect for law, and a passion for self-order - all held fast by a fixed constitution and a manifest, universal moral code. This does not mean that there was no vice, but that we knew vice to be vice, and, in spite of its commission, we rarely befriended it; neither did we, as a custom, make excuses for it, rationalize it, nor contort it into virtue. As morality has become subjective and arbitrary, in turn, so has immorality, which we no longer hold to account. We legislate endlessly against the rampant effects of immorality while at the same time ignoring immorality itself as the cause. 'One Nation, under God, Indivisible, ' once marked a civilization in which each member thrived with the purpose, conviction and the certitude of comprehensive personal character and organic thought. God is the origin of this apodictic being and, widespread, a civilized people. The absence of God is the origin of a relativistic being and, widespread, a disordered people...leaving us all susceptible to demonic tendencies that are no longer rare and isolated but instead are now decimating our culture with regularity and normality. We all see the symptoms, and the symptoms we fruitlessly attack. We also see the causes, yet the causes we willfully ignore. After each incident of mass murder, government malfeasance, school shooting, opioid death, child abuse, sexual assault, financial crime, youth suicide...we feign incredulity, pass yet more laws, and blame everyone and everything save the one obvious reality that now so thoroughly defiles our culture - the veneration of our immorality and the conscious rejection of our God. Such is the darkest folly of our post-modern American civilization as we contort that which establishes God's existence into that which denies it - the radical rejection of human consciousness and its surety - objective truth. At the core of Conservative ideology, the individual and, by projection civilization, is consummated, not constrained, by objective truth. When one commends the whole of his integrity to the legions, however, he becomes a slave to collective relativism and mere chattel to the master of his affirmed immorality - and he chaperones his culture's descent.
