I always tell everybody that I only had a year as a Philosophy and Religious Studies Major at Yale so my theories aren't worth much without any credential, I was only sketching out some kind of a prospective thesis topic, but this therapist with a Masters in Psychology with whom I was talking said they weren't that bad. Plus I almost graduated from R.G. Dunbar's Mountain Heights Bible College at neo-Pentecostal Open Bible Lighthouse Temple in Colorado Springs and was ordained as a music minister, but they closed the school just before we were supposed to graduate and be ordained as Pentecostal ministers. I took a course called Church History.
I had this idea that maybe Bush 43 was like Roman Emperor Constantine I was reading about in Gibbon's The History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire who was converted to Christianity, his son Theodosius, and his sons Arcadius and Honorarius. The thesis would be that Christianity was responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire. After they were all converted to Christianity, the barbarians sacked Rome. In The City of God by St. Augustine, a Christian book, he is trying to answer those of that time who are blaming the fall of Rome on the abandonment of the pagan Roman religion. Rome had lasted for 1000 years. They said that because the Christians were focused on the "next world", when the pagan religion stopped caring for "this world", because the Christians didn't really care, anyway, the barbarians were able to sack them, rape their women, and carry off their gold.
Maybe 43 and the Assemblies of God have helped the Fall of the American Empire, the longest war in its' history, the worst or second greatest depression, global warming, climate change, or whatever you want to call it, possible extinction of all species by the year 2100, not just the Fall of the American Empire, the Fall of World Civilization, another Ice Age, the End of the World, but the Total Destruction and Devastation of the Planet Earth. Like they say about Adolf Hitler, he didn't care if his means were legal, moral, or honorable. Hitler said the Third Reich was to last 1000 years and it actually only lasted 12 years—ala` The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich by William Shirer, the American Berlin war correspondent who also wrote The Berlin Diary.
Constantine had a dream before a battle with the Moslems, where had a vision of a cross, and heard the words: "In hoc signe vinces," "In this sign you shall conquer." So he put crosses on all his men's shields, the Roman torture-execution device, it terrified the enemy, he conquered Istanbul and renamed it, what else, Constantinople. The other theory is that he murdered his eldest son to keep him from overthrowing the throne and everybody thought the son was innocent, and he murdered his first wife, and possibly his second wife, by boiling her in her bathtub water. So the pagan priests could not forgive this, but the Christian priests could, so he converted to Christianity, and made everybody else.
The difference would be, like compare and contrast, that in the case of the Romans, the barbarians did it to them. In the case of modern America, the Christians did it to us, or we did it to ourselves. Hitler did it to himself too—he and his wife committed a double suicide.
