Hello Publius,
You are correct in your assertions. How ever if one chooses to read the Christian Scriptures you would find that this is the beginning of the end times. It is a time of quickenning. A time for choosing just which side you be on before the end. Either GOoD or evil. (please excuse my Caps for the word God in the word good. After all I am a Rev.) There will be no fence sitters. No gray area to hid in. God has fore told that this is the time of the Devil to capture as many souls as wish to choose that way to go without interference from Him. It is up to each and every individual to make the choice without prompting from either side. The Devil;s tool is temptation and if you are not aware of this the Devil can not force any body to sin. The sinner must first accept the choice between what God has taught the what the Devil is offering. After all God has given each and everyone of us FREE WILL. The knowledge of right from wrong exists in our hearts placed there by God in our creation. Your heart will always tell you of your wrong doing prior to you choosing. However as you have so rightly pointed out, your your statement, man has not changed much from his origins. That is because the mind gives us many reasons not to listen to the truth in our hearts.

Good Advice Sir. Our fore fathers knew of the dangers of a strong central government to the peoples living under them. This precisely why our founding fathers deemed governmental as a necessary evil. This why we have the Bill of Rights and Amendments to protect us from it not to protect it from us. This is why only the right to the Feds was in world state affairs and interstate commerce. All other rights were to remain with the state governments. But over the centuries of our existence this wildly huge federal government has bribed, yes BRIBED, our local states with lavish amounts of money to let them do what they want and disregard our founding fathers framework. No body complained when they were getting huge money to capitulate to the demands of the power hungry feds. Abe Lincoln was once quoted as saying, “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”― Abraham Lincoln

Back then my friend this muzzle loader was the equivalent of our latest weapons in comparison to what was the norm then as compared to their pre-muzzle loader ways of killing.