“Scripture warns that judgment does not always arrive through catastrophe or conquest. Sometimes judgment comes quietly, in the form of permission. God hands people over, not because He is absent, but because He is righteous. When restraint is removed, rebellion accelerates. What follows is not freedom, but decay. Moral abandonment is among the most severe forms of judgment precisely because it feels like autonomy (Romans 1:22–24).” When Judgement Looks Like Freedom, Virgil Walker, Sola Veritas, Jan 16. 2026
“By losing its faith, Europe has also lost its reason to be. It is experiencing a lethal decline and is becoming a new civilization, one that is cut off from its Christian roots.” Robert Cardinal Sarah
Having rejected their Creator, millions of Westerners and Americans, imagine they are free, but are destroying themselves along with Europe.
They know they think and dream but because they imagine they are fleshy robots whose thoughts and dreams are of neurons and firing synapses they know that if the brain becomes damaged or dies they cease to exist, and this thought depresses them greatly,–but they are free.
Others know they are conscious but do not know where consciousness comes from or what it is. So they accept it as something that emerged from matter worked on by evolution. Others imagine that because evolution has become conscious of itself and because conscious evolution is within everything that machines will become conscious and even planets will become conscious. They do not know why they are conscious and where it comes from anymore than they know where life comes from. They live and are conscious but don’t know why. But hey–they are free.
These dreary and terrible examples of lost humans wandering in darkness are further examples of God’s Judgement when it looks like freedom.
@Linda
This idea of moral abandonment makes a lot of sense.
We could think of it as a sheep who no longer heeds the Shepherd and wanders off according to its own lights and becomes lost. Whereupon it is set upon by the lawless wolves of this world who are intent on the sheep’s destruction.
That sheep no longer has the Shepherd’s blessings.
That’s why we pray, “The Lord is my Shepherd…”, to remain in His fold.