I love crap like this because it's so willingly deceitful.

Essentially Ben makes the following arguments:

1. Natural disasters like Katrina happened because we've--as a nation--become more secular.

2. We stopped disciplining our children with spankings, and now they have no values and so they murder strangers/schoolmates/themselves

Now I say willingly deceitful because I don't for a moment believe either of these things above are true... Natural disasters don't seem to me to be particularly related to church attendance. There's no recent upswing in them that I find credible (and neither do any of the people who believe Ben's screed above, because if they did, Global Warming would be a far more reasonable explanation, which is surely impossible).

As far as our children being corrupt murderers, you can feel free to investigate the *actual* violent crime rates in the US and note that they're at lifetime lows. So any change that has happened in Ben's years on this planet are POSITIVE and Ben should be thanking Dr. Spock and the other positive progressive changes we've made (including policing, policy, and -gasp- legalized abortion) which all have plausible linkages to crime rates declining.

The thing that HAS changed, the thing that I think makes Ben so unhappy, is that he lives inside his little echo chamber with a number of you. The big thing that has changed is not the arrival of natual disasters, nor is it the increase in violent crime... It's the speed/sensational news culture, selectively amplified by agenda-driven news networks and blogs. If you choose to live in those, you can easily convince yourself the world of the 50's (or Reagan) were utopia.

But it wasn't.