Starting the Year Off Badly

Our western culture is in serious decline if the pictures and stories from London, UK are any indication.  Similar scenes are common in every major western city in Europe and the USA.  I may be getting older but I did live through the 60's and 70's in this country which in a few decades upended a way of life that had existed for centuries.  I would have to say that people have become much coarser in manners, self absorbed and more morally decadent in the past two generations as behavioral  rules were discarded.  I do not see any movement  that can change the downward trajectory of the culture.  Only a revival of religious faith has the possibility of reversing the moral decline.  This looks unlikely to happen in a increasingly agnostic and decadent culture such as our own.

Parents need to speak truth to their children whether they want to hear it or not.  Obviously, many parents allow their daughters to dress in a manner that would have landed them in jail only a half a century ago (see the attached picture for evidence)  Without a moral compass themselves many parents do not have any norms in which to guide and lead their children.  Without faith or an ethical system to guide them each new generation increasingly becomes more hedonistic.  Unfortunately in many cases parents of young adults act and dress worse than their offspring and do not provide examples for them to copy.  We are a culture is decline and many people who share similar moral viewpoints realize that we live in a transitional period of history between the collapse of a Christian based civilization and a new civilization that in its emerging manifestations is Neo-pagan and has substituted religion for a belief in the possibilities of Science.

The noted British cultural historian Christopher Dawson's major theme in all his works is the linkage of religion to the vitality of a culture or civilization.  His life was dedicated to the study of world cultures which led him to claim that: "It is the religious impulse which supplies the cohesive force which unifies a society and a culture... A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture."