[Lake Living]

My wife and I made many trips to Belgium while we lived in Stuttgart, Germany (left 2010). We drove through Antwerp a few times on our way to Brugge (a beautiful place). Believe me there are places the police don’t go. Whole ethnic neighborhood with chickens running in the street, children naked and garbage everywhere. Scary! “Kingdom against kingdom and nation against nation,” political, ethnic, class, and financial upheaval. Used to be it was those “other countries over there” but now it’s coming here as well. Western democracies got a pass for awhile because of their strong Christian influence. Now it’s gone and the wheels are coming off.

[Steve_Seattle]

We all know the story of the frog being placed in a pot of water that gradually grew warmer until it was too late and the frog was cooked. That is what is happening to Europe and the USA.

The fulcrum years where sometime about 1966-1968, when the gradual tipping of the West occurred, when overt paganism gradually insinuated itself into popular culture, when Christian values could no longer be assumed as normative, and which are now threatened with legal sanction in areas such as gay marriage.

Initially, this was a move away from Christianity towards secularism, and that is still the dominant pattern especially in the USA. But nature abhors a vacuum, and nihilism (the dirty little secret of secularism) is difficult to sustain. So now Islam is emerging to fill the void vacated by Christianity, a void which secularism cannot fill. In my view, Islam is acting as the punishing arm of God, just as God used Israel's ancient enemies as means of chastisement.