Okay, I heard something the other day that I've been hearing from time to time since I was in High School, and it's become a sort of "pet peeve" with me. There was a preacher on TV and he was railing about how decadent and depraved the U.S. was becoming and "just like the Roman Empire" that will lead to our fall. Okay, the U.S. might be becoming more decadent and depraved, although having lived through the 1960s, I think we might actually be doing a little better in that regard - hard to say. And this may well lead to our ultimate demise and fall. I'll leave that up to you to decide. My beef is with the idea that this is "just like the Roman Empire". You know, all those nasty pagan degenerates of ancient days. As if what happened to them is some sort of proof of what is going to happen to us. And THAT is just plane WRONG - I'm sorry - WRONG! That isn't what happened to the Roman Empire and doesn't "prove" anything. ******************* First off, it's hard to be more depraved than the Romans were in the first century A.D. - when they were "rockin' and rollin'" and everything was going great. It was in the first century when they had the famous "sicko" emperors like Claudius, Nero and especially Caligula. And it was in the first century that they built the Coliseum. But the Roman Empire didn't fall in the first century, it went on until 476 A.D. That's more than another 350 years - if that's all the time we have left, I can live with that. ******************* If you remember, Christianity rose during this same period, was legalized in 313 A.D. and in 380 A.D. became the official state religion of the Roman Empire - making it the first officially Christian country. Within about 100 years all of the pagan temples were converted to be churches or were torn down as the Empire became thoroughly Christianized. Some scholars have even stated that it was this infestation of Christianity that brought about the fall of Rome. WHOA! WAIT! Nobody wants to hear THAT! ******************* But don't worry, that's NOT what happened either. The problem is, scholars can't tell what brought down the Roman Empire and here's why. In the third century A.D. the Roman Empire had just plain grown too big for one guy to run it. They had what is referred to as the "Crisis of the Third Century" during which they had 26 emperors in 50 years - none of which reached retirement - if you know what I mean. Finally, Diocletian rose to power and divided the empire in two with another emperor and two co-emperors. He called this the Tetrarchy or "rulership by four" and it stabilized things things pretty well. Constantine reunited the two and moved the capitol from Rome to Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey). The reunification didn't last and the empire broke in two again after him. We call the eastern empire the "Byzantine Empire" but they considered themselves to still be "Romans". Imagine if the U.S. broke in two and the western half had it's capitol in Los Angeles. I think most westerners would still think of themselves as "Americans". ******************* And this is the problem, both empires were essentially the same, yet the western empire fell in 476 A.D. and the eastern empire went on until 1453. That's another 1000 years! Pretty good run by historic standards. Both empires had barbarians knocking at the gates - barbarians who usually had lived along the borders for at least 100 years prior and were also Christianized long before they moved in. Some of these tribes did come in raping, pillaging and burning, but most simply migrated in over time - more like Mexicans moving into California. ******************* So why did Rome fall? Why did the same ideas work so well for one empire and so poorly for the other? Who knows, but it's hard to argue that the morals in the one Christian empire were particularly worse than those in the other Christian empire. You're going to have to prove that one to me. And it did take hundreds of years. I'm a great believer in learning from history, but it doesn't work if you just make stuff up :-)