WHAT LET TO THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE (according to Bing.com)? The fall of the Roman Empire was influenced by multiple factors, both internal and external. Some of the internal factors were political corruption, weak leadership, economic decline, high inflation, heavy taxation, unemployment, slave labor, and diseases. Some of the external factors were barbarian invasions, looting of the treasury, trade deficit, and the spread of Christianity. Edward Gibbon, in his book "The History of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", had a controversial theory that internal strife was the main reason for the fall of Rome. Economic deterioration was another significant factor. As is the case with all great empires, Rome was founded on a strong economic foundation. However, constant wars and overspending had significantly lightened imperial coffers. Oppressive taxation and inflation had widened the gap between rich and poor. In the hope of avoiding the taxman, many members of the wealthy classes had even fled to the countryside and set up independent fiefdoms. At the same time, Rome's economy depended on slaves to till its fields and work as craftsmen. Its military might had traditionally provided a fresh influx of conquered peoples to put to work. But when expansion ground to a halt in the second century, Rome's supply of slaves and other war treasures began to dry up. The rise of Christianity also played a role in Rome's decline. The religion's emphasis on a spiritual kingdom undermined Rome's traditional civic values and encouraged people to turn away from civic responsibilities. Barbarian invasions were another significant factor that contributed to Rome’s fall. The most straightforward theory for Western Rome’s collapse pins the fall on a string of military losses sustained against outside forces. Rome had tangled with Germanic tribes for centuries, but by the 300s "barbarian" groups like the Goths had encroached beyond the Empire's borders. The Romans weathered a Germanic uprising in the late fourth century, but in 410 AD, Visigoth King Alaric successfully sacked the city of Rome. The Empire spent the next several decades under constant threat before "the Eternal City" was raided again in 455 AD, this time by the Vandals. In conclusion, it was a combination of these factors that eroded the stability and prosperity of Rome over time.
THE HISTORY OF LABOR IN AMERICA Why Has Our Society Changed Such That Many Families Cannot Live Under One Income? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing Now we're going to turn to questions and again, always interested in what questions are being asked by very intelligent listeners of The Briefing. Jonathan writes in and he's asking a very interesting question. He says, "I think if my history is correct, in times past, families were able to live under one income. I was thinking why for many families this cannot be the case today?" Well, Jonathan, very interesting question. You make an assertion and that assertion is that your understanding is that in times past, families were able to live on a single worker wage and then you ask the question, "What happened?" Well, lots of things happened, but boy is that a smart question, and it does point to a major transformation of our society and our economy, and I don't think it's a good thing. So let's just step back for a moment. Let's understand that if you take the 20th century, at the high point of the 20th century, about the midpoint of the 20th century, what economic planners saw as the center of the American economic system was what was called a worker who was paid a family wage. Now, that's very crucial because you're talking about a worker who is paid a family wage. Now, World War II and the Great Depression caused some interruption in this and you understand why. This is the whole, the legend. Of course, it was in reality so many women going into the workforce and even going into factories that made weapons, you had Rosie the Riveter, very famous symbol of World War II, but after World War II, when you had the men coming back, there was a return to the national priority of a family wage. And this is what a lot of the labor unions were pressing for. So what a lot of the employers of even the big titans of industry were working for, you had basically an agreement between the industrialists, you might say, who owned the companies and managed the companies and the workers, who provided the workers by the millions in the US that the goals should be to pay workers a wage that could support their family. Even a figure such as Henry Ford, long before World War II, was a part of helping to create the idea of the family wage. Now, if you look at the long span of history, the issue here that doesn't fit as the word wage because there were wage earners going all the way back into antiquity. As a matter of fact, the worker is worthy of his wages or of his hire is a principle found in scripture. But the reality is that in an agrarian society where people live on the farm and when the entire family's involved in farming and you live in a small community with a barter economy, wages are not so much the issue. Wages are a function of the modern age, of the Industrial Revolution, of the urbanization of population and the fact that people are living increasingly in cities or in towns. Dads working in a factory, he's working at the plant and the responsibility of those companies was to pay each male worker a family wage. Now, again, there were female workers, but the understanding is that the national interest is in supporting families which would support the entire society by making sure that men were gainfully employed. Some would be farmers, some would be working in a barter economy, but the vast majority would now in the modern age be working for a wage. And it was the responsibility of the society to work towards a wage structure that would allow a man working as a husband and a father to provide for his family, and certainly when it came to all the basic needs. Now, that was a consensus in terms of this country all the way into the 1960s. And then of course, Jonathan, you asked the question, "What happened?" And a lot of things happened. So for one thing, second wave feminism happened. Second wave feminism sometimes, called the movement for women's liberation or women's lib as it was called in the 1960s and the 1970s, it emerged with the argument that it is fundamentally wrong to say that there is a male sphere in the economy and there's a female sphere in the economy and in the culture, and thus women should be equally free to hold jobs and earn a wage as men. Now, an interesting complicity in this came from the industrialists, from the employers, from the capitalist class because they saw the opportunity to expand with a whole new class of workers. If they could assume that men would eventually be wage workers, they had a certain employment base, but if all of a sudden they could now double their employment base potential, well, they could expand their businesses exponentially. That's why you have so many of the major economic interests who are all for women being in the workforce and for that matter, getting into the workforce as early as possible, staying in it. This is why they're pressing for things like daycare and childcare because their most important issue is getting women in the workforce as wage earners. But here's the deal, once you began to redefine a wage earner apart from the family wage, then employers were no longer in any sense, obligated to pay a family wage. If everyone is an autonomous individual, that's the other big development of this age, if everyone's an autonomous individual, then the wage structure is based only on the individual. I think it would be shocking to many people, how many individuals and thinkers, economists who would identify as conservatives, how they basically have bought into the idea of personal autonomy and the individual economic unit being one person rather than a family? I'm going to suggest to listeners of The Briefing that one of the biggest and most catastrophic changes that has taken place in American society is that the basic unit of the family has been replaced, for that matter and most moral legal and economic considerations by people, with the economic unit of the person, of the individual. And that is destructive of the family, it's subversive of the family. It just eliminated the goal of the family wage. And so Jonathan, to answer your question, second wave feminism came, the Chamber of Commerce came in one sense, the Industrial Revolution was expanded and you had personal autonomy that also landed flat in the middle of this with everyone claiming that the individual is the most basic unit. Well, if the individual is the most basic unit, then the family wage is nothing more than an historical fiction. Now, one final thought before we move to another question, and that is this, that policymakers now on the other side of this revolution, they want to in some sense return to a family wage, but they want to make it a part of every individual's income pattern. That's just not going to work, and for that matter, the damage is already done to marriage in the family. It's just a fact that sometimes social movements and for that matter, social developments change the economy. It's also true that the opposite happens. The economy in terms of the incentives we put in place, the wage structures we put in place also changes society. And the fact is that at this point, because of this aversion of the family, it's hard to imagine how we could return this economy to the goal of a family wage. But you know, Jonathan, that was a very intelligent question and there is a history to this. It's a very troubling history, but it affirms for Christians the fact that marriage and the family are for us, non-negotiable. The economy may change the terms, but we can't.
The Numbers Are Staggering: The Tidal Wave of Homeschooling Surges Throughout the U.S. R. ALBERT MOHLER, JR. If you could look all over the nation at the entire educational landscape, say for K through 12 students, and you were to look at the most remarkable development in the last several years? Well, would it surprise you to know that that most remarkable development is a radical surge in homeschooling families? And now it has reached the front page of The Washington Post in a massive investigative report. The headline on the front page of the print edition simply announces, "Homeschool Nation. A remarkable rise. Form of education has moved from the fringe to fastest growing in the United States. A Post," (that means Washington Post) "data analysis finds." A team of reporters was on this, and frankly, they've done a very good job. They're also honestly shocked. The Washington Post and others are shocked at the radical growth in homeschooling. And here's the deal, the most radical increase did not come as a result of COVID. The most radical increase has actually shown up after COVID. So, this is counterintuitive and it's getting the attention of many people. Now, let me tell you the main reason it's getting attention. The main reason is there's big money at stake in education. Public school systems have budgets largely allotted on the basis of enrollment. And so a fall off an enrollment - and this is largely the same when it comes to federal money going to the states - it has a lot to do with how many students are in the system. If the students aren't in the system, the systems don't get as much money. And never fool yourself, when you're looking at this kind of equation, this kind of issue, particularly at the state and national level, yes, it's about money. But as much as that is true about governments and departments of education; school systems, it's not true of parents. Parents aren't doing this for the money. They're not withdrawing their own children from the public schools because of the money, because if anything, this is going to cost them money, certainly in most parts of the country, and yet they're doing so. And so that raises the huge question, why are parents doing this? And the answer turns out to be something that's not only predictable, but frankly greatly weighted with importance from a Christian worldview. It has to do with parents actually caring about what is taught to their children. It's about parents being concerned about the environment, even the institutional context in which their children are learning, or at least in which they are seated in a classroom and you hope learning is something that takes place. What you have going on here is, of course, a crisis in the larger society in terms of confidence in the public schools. But when it comes to evangelical Christians--and evangelical Christians are not alone in this movement, but certainly right now are the vanguard in this movement--it's not primarily about the money, it's not even primarily about the institutional context. It's not even primarily about who was doing the teaching. It's about what is being taught. And so that appears to be the greatest urgency. The other issues are, as we understand, interconnected and related. So let's begin to look at them for a moment. The reporters for The Post tell us, "Homeschooling has become by a wide margin, America's fastest growing form of education. As families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe, a Washington Post analysis shows." The article goes on, "The analysis based on data, The Post has collected for thousands of school districts across the country reveals that a dramatic rise in homeschooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the '22/'23 academic year defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other COVID-19 restrictions." All the data seems to indicate that there's actually a continued rise in homeschooling. So COVID may have been a catalyst, but COVID is not the reason. Something else is the reason, and I think most of us know what that reason is. It is because of grave concerns about what is happening to children in the school systems, and most importantly, what they are being taught. And at this point, things get really interesting because The Post mentioned there, Manhattan and Eastern Kentucky, and that's not an accident. They mentioned Manhattan and Eastern Kentucky because they're trying to make the point that this is not happening in just one part of the country. If you're going to think about two parts of the country that might be most different? Eastern Kentucky, rural, Manhattan, incredibly urban. To put the two of them together in one movement really does underline the fact that something systemic, something big, something structural, something seismic is taking place here. And from a Christian worldview perspective, this raises an interesting question. What would commonly unite parents in Manhattan, and parents in Hazard, Kentucky; what would commonly concern them that would lead them to pull children out of the public schools? Because we're talking about two very different communities, and frankly we may be talking about two different worldviews. But the common theme seems to be that there is decreasing confidence in what the public schools are accomplishing, decreasing confidence in what the public schools are teaching. A part of this is easily definable pathologies that are clearly articulated in numbers, and in reports, and in test scores, but there are also anecdotes, there are narratives, there are stories being told by parents to other parents about what is happening. And frankly, there is a messaging about what's going on in the public schools that is filtering down to the question, why exactly do we have public schools? In order to think about this we're going to leave The Washington Post and its massive report and we're going to look at a bit of history. So, as we think about the United States of America, the early schools were either church schools, or they were parents teaching, or they were community schools under local control. And that would often mean that where you have a small town, they might have to go looking for a teacher who might come to live to the town, might be someone with a bit more learning than people who were in the town as parents and business people, largely in an agrarian context, lots of people were farmers. You had to hire a teacher, you brought a teacher, and that teacher might teach in a one room school and might teach ages all the way from the first grade until what would amount to what's now considered high school graduation. You'll be talking about very young children and teenagers in the same room, and they were progressing at some point under the tutelage of a teacher. But of course, now you're talking about an educational industrial complex of massive schools, and school systems, and comprehensive school structures that frankly would defy the imagination of early Americans. By the midpoint of the 19th century. Most towns, not to mention cities in the United States, considered education to be something of a civic responsibility. It wasn't just a small town in early America where parents said, "Let's get together and hire a teacher." It was actually the establishment of formal schools. But thinking about that, it's also interesting to note that there was an ideology that went with it. There was a cultural concern that drove it. The cultural concern was, how can we be one nation? Especially in the second half of the 19th century into the early decades of the 20th century when so many immigrants are coming from European nations, in particular places like Italy and also Ireland. Furthermore, you had an influx of say Jewish families coming largely from Eastern Europe. They landed especially in the eastern seaboard in the big cities, also in some of the great lake cities as well. And you had the development of the vision for what was called the common school. The common school became the public school, but the issue of the common school was that children from many different backgrounds, from all kinds of different families will be brought into one school to have a common school experience. This was a part of understanding how civics would be taught to Americans. But of course then you raise some other questions, who's going to determine what is taught? And so by the late 19th century and in particular into the early 20th century, you had the development of teaching as a profession. You had the development of educational expectations, of college and university degrees before one could teach. Then you had the development of education schools with even graduate degrees within colleges and universities. And what that means is the standardization of education, because if you're going to have a common school, well, it's not just for those who happen to be commonly living in a neighborhood. Eventually it becomes a far larger context of common. In the United States, by the way, local control of the schools has been a prized concept, but it has been eroding. It's been frankly subverted in recent decades. And one of the reasons is because you have the impulse towards standardization. You ought to know, it is claimed, that what is taught in say, Birmingham is what's taught in Berkeley. At least when it comes to say math, common curriculum and all the rest. But there was another thing going on here, and that had to do with the fact that there was grave concern that in particular the children of immigrants will be marked by what many educational progressives called the prejudices of their parents. And thus, one of the ideals, one of the ideologies of the common school movement was to separate children from the cultural prejudices of their parents. No one made that point more emphatically than the American philosopher, and frankly the most influential person in the public school movement in the 20th century, that's John Dewey of Columbia University and Columbia University's Teacher's College. A couple of other things also developed at the same time. For one thing, the ideal had been not only local control, but neighborhood schools. But then in the 20th century, we also had the invention, and yes, I'll use that word, the invention of adolescence. Now, let's be honest, adolescence is a physical process, even as a cultural hallmark had been taking place throughout all of human history. But when it comes to adolescence in the 20th century sense, well, the development of the teenager as something of a subspecies became a great educational focus, and that's why you had the development of the high school. And the high school was often intended to be not just neighborhood, but comprehensive. You also had the urgency towards efficiency. People were saying, look, you have all these neighborhoods, you have all these children. It would be better to consolidate some of these districts, some of these neighborhoods into schools that were larger. They could offer, it was promised, better facilities. They can have larger athletic programs. They can offer a larger array in the curriculum. And for some time, bigger is better seem to be the mantra of much public education. By the time you get to the second half of the 20th century though, the cracks are beginning to show. The cracks aren't in enrollment. At that point, enrollment just kept getting bigger and bigger. Particularly with the baby boomers and the children of the baby boomers, school districts were more worried about buying enough buses, hiring enough teachers, building enough buildings. Of course, right now, the situation is almost the reverse. Actually in numbers in many places it's dramatically the reverse. But there were other developments, two in particular, that demand our attention here. For one thing, you have the exodus of many people from the public schools into private schools. And those private schools were often established because parents that were dissatisfied with the public option. There were some private schools that were established on the basis of educational concerns, a different educational model. There were some that were established explicitly on the basis of religious, or theological, or doctrinal concerns. The rise of the Christian school movement, particularly from the 1960s to the present is a big part of that. We can also note that frankly, we shouldn't deny: there were some parents who made the decision to pull their children out of the public schools out of other concerns, including the fact they didn't want their children with other children from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. It's hard to believe that that was once a big issue in America, but it was. But that is clearly not the driving issue now. Another big issue that arose was the development of what is now called homeschooling, and that's the focus of this front page article in The Washington Post. But it's really interesting, and frankly will be shocking to many conservative Christians, to know that homeschooling in the United States was not won as a right by evangelical Christians, nor was it first popularized by evangelical Christians. In terms of a constitutional right for parents to educate their children, that was not undertaken by evangelical Christians, it was undertaken by the Amish. In a series of court decisions, you had several states claiming that the state had the authority to educate Amish children, and those Amish parents, in a series of court victories, won the clear right and recognition of parental privilege. We need to recognize how important those court decisions are when evangelical Christians make the decision to exercise our responsibility and privilege to educate our own children outside of the public schools. The second big factor, and this is going to be shocking to many, is that as I said, homeschooling really didn't begin on the cultural right, it began on the cultural left. As a matter of fact, it began among the people in the sixties who were often called hippies, and it wasn't called homeschooling, it was originally called unschooling. The hippies weren't complaining about too much sex education or intersectionality in the public schools. No, they were complaining about the institutionalization of education. They didn't want their children taught by the man and the machine. They wanted their children taught in a more organic setting. And you had the hippies who simply said, "We're going to unschool our children rather than school them." You had all kinds of experiments on the left in alternative education. But here's the thing, once you had the Amish win the court decisions, and then you had the cultural left begin the experiment in unschooling. Well, that led many conservative Christians to understand, "We can do this too. Maybe we not only can do it, maybe we ought to do it." And then conservative Christians begin to think more seriously about the fact that, "Not only could we do this, but maybe there's a biblical responsibility that is invested in parents, and maybe parents need to take that so seriously that we will homeschool our children." By the way, my serious word to parents here biblically and theologically is that that is your responsibility from God to take primary responsibility for the education of your children. And furthermore, the biblical worldview makes very clear that all parents, biblically defined, are homeschoolers. Now, that doesn't mean that your children aren't in any other school context part of the day, but it does mean your primary responsibility, a non delegatable responsibility as parents under God's authority, is to teach your children, to raise your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Now, that means Christian parents may choose so many different options, but just to speak honestly at the most basic level, all Christian parents must be homeschoolers. And to put it another way, every Christian home should be a school. But that's not the sense that has caught the attention of The Washington Post. They're thinking about formal homeschooling, which means pulling children out of the public schools, even out of most institutional educational settings, and instead making the primary educational setting the home. Now, The Washington Post suggested several data points that are worth our consideration. Number one, in states with comparable enrollment figures, the number of homeschooled students increased 51% in the past six school years. Private school enrollment grew 7%. So 7% private school enrollment versus 51% increase in homeschooling. Public school enrollment during that period dropped 4%. The second point, "Homeschooling's surging popularity crosses every measurable line of politics, geography, and demographics." They point out the number of homeschool kids has increased 373% over the past six years in the small town of Anderson, South Carolina. But the very next statement is this, "It also increased 358% in a school district in the Bronx." That means highly metropolitan, highly urban New York. When something's happening in Anderson, South Carolina of that magnitude that's also happening in the Bronx and the key decision makers, the agents of change here are parents and the issue is homeschooling? Guess what? This lands on the front page of The Washington Post. It announces, "This is an absolutely massive story," and quite frankly, it represents a clear and present threat to the entire edifice of the public schools in the United States. And as this article makes clear, homeschooling is a part of a larger set of challenges and competitors that may mean a much reduced enrollment in public schools, and that's going to raise huge cultural and economic issues in the United States. Now, this at least is partly during the period of COVID, but listen to this, "In the 390 districts included in The Post analysis, there was at least one homeschooled child for every 10 in public schools." Now, when you considered it, COVID meant that the majority of American school children were homeschooled in some sense during that period, this particular data point means ongoingly. This is not just because of COVID. Now simply because of time, I'm not going to look much more at The Post's massive analysis here. It's most important not only for what's in it, but for the very fact that it exists as a front page article in the most influential newspaper in the nation's capitol.
(I thought I did this already. But, I'm now ready to purchase a new laptop to begin learning how to produce my own educational videos, except I am unable to find where I posted this information previously. So, here I go again...) List the least expensive laptops that can run Cartoon Animator 5 flawlessly: Here is a list of the least expensive laptops that can run Cartoon Animator 5 without any issues... ~cohesive.io | Laptop Model | Processor | RAM | Graphics Card | Price Acer Aspire 5 | AMD Ryzen 3 3200U | 4GB | Radeon Vega 3 | $389 Lenovo IdeaPad 3 | AMD Ryzen 3 3250U | 4GB | Radeon Vega 3 | $409 HP 15 | Intel Core i3-1005G1 | 4GB | Intel UHD Graphics | $439 Dell Inspiron 15 | Intel Celeron N4020 | 4GB | Intel UHD Graphics 600 | $349 ASUS VivoBook 15 | AMD Athlon Silver 3050U | 4GB | Radeon Graphics | $359 | Note that the minimum system requirements for Cartoon Animator 5 are... 2GHz Intel or AMD CPU 4GB RAM Inte HD Graphics 5000 or higher. The above laptops meet or exceed these requirements, so you should be able to run Cartoon Animator 5 without any issues. Prices may vary depending on your location and availability.
Does the Bible teach that the purpose of life on earth is to prepare for life in eternity? ~bing.com Yes, the Bible teaches that the purpose of life on earth is to prepare for life in eternity. According to the Bible, God's purpose for us is to become part of His family and to spend eternity with Him. The Bible also says that God has "set eternity in the human heart" (Ecclesiastes 3:11 NIV), which means that we were made to last forever and that every human being is going to live forever in one of two places: with God in heaven or apart from God in hell. Life here on Earth is preparation for eternity, and God is more interested in preparing us for eternity than he is in simply making us happy here and now. The Bible expresses two kinds of purpose for believers—general and specific. Both are meant to prepare the believer to live forever in God's presence, but also to encourage spiritual growth and ministry now.
Does the Bible teach that life is all about making choices? ~bing.com The Bible does not teach that life is all about making choices. However, it does emphasize the importance of making informed choices based on God’s principles. The Bible provides us with sufficient information to make informed choices. The very word "choice" presupposes at least two alternatives. Lessons about making choices are demonstrated throughout the Bible as they are throughout our lives. God commands us to make choices, but only after providing us with sufficient information so that our choices will be informed ones. Does the Bible teach that life is all about establishing strong, healthy relationships? ~bing.com Yes, the Bible emphasizes healthy relationships as one of the most important things in life. In fact, Jesus himself said that the two greatest commandments are to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. The Bible also provides guidance on how to establish and maintain healthy relationships. For instance, Colossians 3:12-13 provides a prescription for healthy relationships. It states that we should clothe ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving each other.
Can the Ten Commandments be conceptualized as an instruction manual all about how to love? ~bing.com The Ten Commandments are a set of biblical principles that are considered fundamental to both Judaism and Christianity. They are not an instruction manual on how to love [Oh, really?], but they do provide guidance on how to live a life that is pleasing to God and beneficial to others. The first four commandments focus on our relationship with God, while the remaining six commandments focus on our relationship with others. [This reinforces my contention that, in large part, life is all about relationships.] The commandments are not meant to be a checklist to prove our righteousness, but rather a reflection of God's character and attributes of those who are called by His name. That being said, the Ten Commandments can be seen as a guide to loving God and loving others. [Okay then, so you just contradicted yourself.] In fact, Jesus himself summarized the commandments into two great commandments: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind" and "Love your neighbor as yourself." [So then, the Ten Commandments ARE a set of basic instructions on how to love!] Therefore, if we follow the commandments with a heart of love, we can show love to God and to our neighbors.