Replies

We are certainly cursed for that and other sins, but not doomed (facing permanent punishment for all time that we will never recover from).

There are still some on here who have (unwise and ill-advised IMO) antipathy towards Lincoln, but it was his repentance (and the repentance, meaning praying and fasting, of those who heeded his call to repent) that saved the country from the Civil War, which almost destroyed the USA. There is one paragraph from the National Fast Day speech that would most certainly apply to us today, and I suggest we all heed it:

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious Hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us! It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.