It never pays in the long run to leave your Creator out of your equations.  We may be seeing a financial meltdown of the world's strongest economy.  One of the reasons is that we are spending more than we can possibly tax.  It doesn't matter if we raise taxes on the rich, we can't possibly tax people enough to pay for a budget that spends over 20% of our GDP.

One of the reasons the debt is so high is that welfare and medicare/aid payments increase each year as more of the baby-boomers reach retirement age.  These programs were put in place in Europe and the US when legislators couldn't imagine a declining birth rate, BUT for the last 3.5 decades we have been aborting our children.  We have aborted more than 50 million of our children in the US between 1973 and 2008.

We are arrogant to the point of insanity.  We make decisions about who we will love, where we will work, what laws we will pass, what medical decisions we will make, and how many children we will have all without considering what God thinks of it all -- and then we are surprised when we find that our calculations don't reflect the realities of life.

What is more, the rich themselves will become poor if they scorn marriage vows, as that results in unwanted pregnancies that end fatherless children or abortion.  It is secure families with responsible fathers that make for wealthy and stable communities.  We are literally destroying our future generations through debt and abortion, and only now does it dawn on us that the two are related.  If we abort our children, why shouldn't we find one day that there are not enough workers to pay for our government programs, or manage our debt service?

So, we covet, murder, and dishonor our parents, overspend to have all the creature comforts we want, then when we feel guilty instead of repentance and love of neighbor, we turn and offer the same materialist life to those who are less fortunate:  we demand that the government pay for comforts for everyone, which runs our government into bankruptcy.  But then we control the future generations through abortion in order to save ourselves the shame, duty, cost, or trial of caring for the children we have conceived.  This is the very definition of madness.   Could this be our lot when we decide to leave God out of our decision process?  Read Romans 1 again.

"It does not do to leave a dragon out of your calculations if you live near him."  said JRR Tolkien.

God is much closer than any dragon, and ignoring Him is infinitely more dangerous.

“Seven Stanzas at Easter”
from Telephone Poles and Other Poems by John Updike.

Make no mistake: if He rose at all

it was as His body;

if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,

each soft Spring recurrent;

it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles;

it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,

the same valved heart

that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of enduring Might

new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping transcendence;

making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages:

let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,

not a stone in a story,

but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us

the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,

make it a real angel,

weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen

spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,

for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle,

and crushed by remonstrance.

(ed note - this version is a better reproduction of Updike's original layout).