Yes, I think that’s about right.
And they stopped believing because they lost their moral ‘center’, just as the so-called post-Christian west seems to have lost ours? Funny how the social experimenters think they can change the fundamental building blocks of society, such as marriage, family, sexual mores, with absolute impunity.
How the true, first century Romans must have longed for the values of the early Republic, (I’m thinking preface to Tacitus’ Histories here, or Seneca; although Juvenal and Martial provide a biting look into the shortcomings of the ‘new’ Roman society).
Liberals claim great devotion to the Precautionary Principle.
"The precautionary principle or precautionary approach states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
This is used to oppose fracking, nuclear power plants, genetically modified crops, and a host of other proposed changes. The idea being that we should err on the side of caution, since the full impact of changes are often not known in a complex system.
Yet somehow this principle is never even considered for application to the most complex known system, a human society. When it comes to making changes to society, they promote "Hope and Change." With the implication that any change at all will be an improvement and that the burden of proof should fall on those opposing the change.
IOW, exactly the opposite of the Precautionary Principle is applied to society.