To the Editor:

On Christmas Day, when about one-third of Americans recalled, with gratitude, the spiritual and eternal gift of the incarnation of Christ Jesus and about two-thirds recalled the material and temporal gift-bringing Santa Claus, I began to consider the past two millennia since that memorable night in Bethlehem.

That night eventually led to the coming together of three cultural streams — Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome — and created “Christendom,” and later, after several centuries, it began to devolve into a secular “Western civilization” that retained less and less of the Torah, the Prophets, and the Gospel of Jerusalem and more and more of a re-birth of cultures of ancient Athens and Rome.

That re-birth began with first, the Renaissance; second, the Counter-Reformation and the religious wars; third, the Age of Enlightenment; fourth, Germanic Higher Criticism of the biblical texts; and fifth, the Darwinian renewal of Grecian Empedoclean evolutionary theories. (Empedocles, who lived from 490 to 430 B.C., was a Greek philosopher in Sicily whom Darwin credited for his theory of natural selection.)

These five along with their pantheistic, Greco-Roman, Hellenistic philosophies and themes in which fate, fortune, luck, chance, moral relativism, and Man as a biochemical accident became dominant in Western civilization. They have largely replaced earlier Christendom’s Providence, Divine Design, Moral Absolutes, and Man created in the image of God.

Accompanying this transformation came the pride, power, vainglory, self love, radical economic inequalities, and the varied enslavement practices of that classical era — the Glory of Greece and the Grandeur of Rome — have slowly turned the last couple of  centuries into a set of toxic and pervasive planetary mixes of conflicted, often bloody, worldviews; existentialist angst; and the meaninglessness and ennui of our postmodern times.

Now we have a near fully mature, multicultural sensate society devolving into an intensifying decline, culturally and politically — a society that is being assaulted by barbarians within and without.

What other features of decline are obvious? We see we are a nation-state that is heavily militarized, in the midst of a horrendous economic bubble due to inordinate deficit spending, an ever-expanding governmental collectivism and favoritism as well as and corruption in high places regardless of which party is in power.

We are a newly revived metropolitan Roman Empire riven with worsening and interminable internal conflicts within and threats from without — Fundamentalist Islam, Resurgent Russia, Middle Kingdom China, lesser combative nation-states, and unruly and frequently antagonistic satrapies and client states that we call trading partners and military-defense allies.

The games have long been in place for the diversion of the masses — Bread (bloated governmental bureaucratic payrolls, food stamps, welfare, and subsidies) and Circus (TV, large-scale spectator events, and our  December Saturnalia) as have  hedonism, pan-sexuality, occultism, secret societies, mystery cults, ever-heightening stimulation-seeking, and blood lust.

“Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may … .”

Besides, how many people genuinely care about our progeny and their tomorrows anyway?

And, of course, the intolerant persecution of Christians in the face of the fear and hatred for the past and the “not us” is also growing at home and abroad.

It is just as it was in the days of the early church before Constantine the Great’s Edict of Milan in 313 A.D. (not C.E.) endorsing Christianity and stopping further persecution — though we are not yet quite so thoroughly bloody as were those three early centuries.

Of course, professing, but not practicing, hypocritical, commandment-ignoring, selective smorgasbording versions of Christianity over many, many decades hasn’t helped one whit or iota, either.

In fact, reading the Bible carefully suggests that contemporary abandonment theologies and churchianity practices may be the prime cause of the condition we are in across the planet and especially in the West.

Something to think about as we move into our next New Year, wouldn’t you say?

Victor Porlier

East Berne