Ancient World Review

Christian Basilica In Paris No-Go Suburbs Heavily Vandalized

Video from 2012.

"The over 800-year-old Basilica of Saint-Denis in France was heavily vandalized this week, with vandals smashing stained glass windows and severely damaging the nearly 200-year-old organ." Source: Breitbart.

"The destruction was discovered on Sunday morning by the basilica’s organist, who found that the engine of the organ had been damaged along with other parts of the massive instrument, designed between 1834 and 1841, Le Parisien reports."

"...The vandalism comes just under a year after the Basilica was stormed by far-left activists and illegal migrants who occupied the place of worship to protest a law directed at curbing illegal migration into France."

Video from March, 2018.

Note: I'm guessing that Muslims committed this sacrilege, but French leftists could have been involved as well. The left has vandalized Saint-Denis in the past:

"In July 1793, heralding the first anniversary of the French Republic that ousted the Bourbon monarchy, the new government issued a decree that shocked Europe and haunts France still. To punish the vanity of the deposed 'tyrants' and to cleanse the nation of their memory, the National Convention [first government of the French Revolution] ordered the destruction of the ancient royal tombs, most of which were in the basilica of St-Denis, near Paris—for centuries France’s royal necropolis, deconsecrated in 1793 and its Benedictine monks disbanded." Source: Yale - Center for the Study of Material & Visual Cultures of Religion.

The radical left has always been a problem, but Muslims are definitely enriching French culture.

Related: French church is the ninth in 11 days vandalized across the country. (Some of these attacks were apparently robberies instead of deliberate acts of desecration.)

Terrorism & Neglect: Current Threats To French Gothic Cathedrals

"French Gothic architecture is a style which emerged in France in 1140, and was dominant until the mid-16th century. The most notable examples are the great Gothic cathedrals of France, including Notre Dame Cathedral, Chartres Cathedral, and Amiens Cathedral. Its main characteristics were the search for verticality, or height, and the innovative use of flying buttresses and other architectural innovations to distribute the weight of the stone structures to supports on the outside, allowing unprecedented height and volume ..." (Wikipedia)

Comment: If France becomes a Muslim country, something that could very well happen if current trends continue, these beautiful old cathedrals could end up being destroyed or turned into mosques or museums like the Hagia Sophia, the former Greek Orthodox cathedral in Istanbul. There have already been several terrorist attacks right outside Notre Dame cathedral and how long will it be before some ISIS-inspired or connected scumbag tries to blow up the cathedral itself?

Report from 2016. More information here.

Video from 2017. More information here.

In the case of Notre Dame, there may be no need to blow up the cathedral since the French state (which owns the cathedral and seventy other churches in Paris) has been doing a good job of letting it fall into disrepair:

"For 13 million visitors per year, Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris soars in splendor. But beyond its façade, look closely, and you'll see that the majestic medieval monument is falling apart. Now, a foundation in France hopes Americans will donate money to help save the place that's home to some of Catholicism's most important relics, including the crown of thorns said to have been worn by Jesus." Source: CBS News (2018).

I'm not sure if any renovation work has actually started. More information about the damage to the cathedral and how to make donations can be found at the Friends of Notre-Dame de Paris site.

How Far Back In Time Could You Go And Still Understand English?

Comment: Another change which has occurred over time -- most of it fairly recently -- has been a radical simplification in our written language. Take popular novels, for instance. As recently as a century ago, they commonly used longer and more complex sentences, and the material in general was denser, more detailed and requiring more concentration to read. For example, compare the writing style in Dracula, Bram Stoker's 1897 masterpiece, with that in most contemporary bestsellers. Modern books tend to use much shorter, simpler sentences and paragraphs and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they also use smaller vocabularies as well.

Much of this simplification has occurred as a result of the dumbing down of the schools, the general decline in reading, and the diminishing attention spans that have gone along with the rise of computers and the internet. Now that we're living in the "information age," the majority of the population doesn't seem to have the focus to read much of anything that requires sustained attention, and by "sustained" I mean anything that goes on for more than a few sentences at most. So how much information are people actually absorbing?

Related: As Attention Spans Get Shorter, Content Gets Even Shorter

This decline in reading has been called an "epochal transformation," but I think it would be more accurate to call it a symptom of the catastrophic decline of western civilization. In response, the tendency in publishing, at least in fields aimed at a general audience, has been to push for shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs and faster-paced writing, a trend that can be clearly seen in writing for the internet.

The claim is often made that traditional books and newspapers are in decline because people have shifted to internet reading, but I really doubt if most people are actually reading anything but the shortest pieces on the internet. Web surfers skim; they don't read. That takes too long. Regular English is giving way to textspeak, an even more radical simplification of the language driven by the widespread use of smartphones. The situation has gotten so bad that some linguists think emojis may evolve into an entirely new language.

The evolution from Old English, which might as well be a foreign language, to modern English is nothing compared to the transformation which is taking place now. What we are seeing isn't just another step in the natural evolution of English, but the rapid disintegration of English and perhaps the whole concept of language itself. If this keeps up, our descendants will be living in the ruins of a collapsed civilization, speaking in one-syllable grunts and scribbling emojis on the walls of buildings left over from a time they don't know anything about because they can't read the few history books still moldering in the wreckage of ancient libraries.

The Digital Dark Age

Comment: There's no need for the government and computer industry to "develop practical solutions" to the problem of long-term information storage. The problem is the direct result of the proliferation of digital technology and the solution already exists -- acid-free paper and archival storage methods. Nothing's perfect, of course, but I can guarantee that if you take reasonable care of it, a paper copy of a document will last a lot longer than a digital copy of the same document, not to mention the computer that it's stored on. And by "a lot longer," I'm talking about decades, if not centuries or even millennia.

A thousand years from now, if any historians still exist, how much will they be able to reconstruct about our civilization? Most likely, this period will be a digital black hole. They'll have to try to figure out who we were and what we were like by studying our garbage dumps. Buried in landfills along with all the TVs, Coke cans, dead batteries, plastic bags, hypodermic needles and toxic sludge, the rusted remains of millions of laptops and smartphones will probably be the only things left behind by the Age of Information.

Related:

A Digital Dark Ages? Challenges In The Preservation Of Electronic Information (PDF)

Coming Soon: A Digital Dark Age? (CBS News 2003)

The Kali Yuga

The Hindus believe that we're living in the Kali Yuga, an apocalyptic Dark Age ruled by the demon Kali, the source of all evil and destruction. The Kali Yuga, also known as the "Age of Vice," is a period of warfare, chaos, social decline and spiritual decadence brought about by Man's separation from the gods. Kali himself is frequently pictured as a deranged figure dancing on corpses and wearing human heads as jewelry. I don't believe in demons, but this bloodthirsty lunatic with ten arms is the perfect symbol of human history.

Most writers use the term Kali Yuga to mean "end times" or the "last days," but technically this isn't accurate. The Hindus see Time as a cycle of four ages or Yugas known as the Yuga Cycle. The other three periods are called the Satya Yuga, the Treta Yuga and the Dvapara Yuga, and they all go spinning around like a cosmic ferris wheel. So the Kali Yuga isn't the end of the world. It's just the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next.

The Yuga Cycle describes a fall from grace--a loss of enlightenment. The first age, the Satya Yuga, is a golden age of supreme goodness when the gods rule and the average human lifespan is thousands of years long, but, like the Garden of Eden, it's all downhill from there. The other Yugas follow in order, the gods withdraw, the situation deteriorates and bottoms out with the Kali Yuga, then the whole thing starts all over again. Time is a circle--an infinite, recurring progression of Yugas in which the gods advance and retreat like the tides or the phases of the moon.

Now, this is good stuff and very ancient, but is it an accurate description of Reality? That probably sounds like a strange question to ask. The Yuga Cycle is a symbolic, mythical cosmology based on the Hindu concepts of samsara, karmic cycles, rebirth, reincarnation and cyclic change. Taking it literally misses the point, but is it possible that Time is actually circular? Does the Yuga Cycle or at least its concept of Time have some basis in fact? Personally, I think the idea of circular Time is more interesting than the linear Christian view of history as moving in a straight line from Creation to Apocalypse, but I don't see any evidence that the universe actually runs in cycles like this.

Time is a one-way thing. The future changes into the present which changes into the past in an infinite stream of Becoming. There are cycles in nature, but they're more like recurring patterns with thousands of variations and they never repeat themselves in exactly the same way. The fossil evidence shows a gradual evolution from the simple to the complex punctuated by catastrophes, mass extinctions and sudden bursts of new life forms like the Cambrian Explosion. If there are cycles in nature, they are cycles of chaos in the mathematical sense. The gods of this world are fractals and strange attractors.

Human history repeats itself, but only in the sense that high cultures are subject to universal laws of growth and decay as described by Oswald Spengler. Personally, I think there's a good argument that civilization in general has deteriorated over the last two thousand years, but I'm more inclined to blame it on the Second Law of Thermodynamics than the Yuga Cycle. Entropy and chaos are the natural state of things and organized systems tend to deteriorate over time. It takes energy and intelligence to keep a civilization going and both are in short supply.

The Yuga Cycle is appealing because it explains the decay and turmoil we see around us and because it suggests that things will change for the better as the cycle turns once again. Unfortunately, these cycles are so long that they don't really have any meaning for the human race in general, never mind individuals. The Kali Yuga is supposed to have started around 3000 BC and they say it will last for 432,000 years, almost half a million years. Considering the fact that only 5000 years or so have passed since the Kali Yuga started, we've got a long way to go.

Note: Many cultures have legends about a mythical Golden Age and a subsequent fall from grace. For instance, "Both Hesiod and Ovid offered accounts of the successive ages of humanity, which tend to progress from an original, long-gone age in which humans enjoyed a nearly divine existence to the current age of the writer, in which humans are beset by innumerable pains and evils. In the two accounts that survive from ancient Greece and Rome, this degradation of the human condition over time is indicated symbolically with metals of successively decreasing value." (Wikipedia)

Christianity Is Becoming A Third-World Religion

1,707 years after Galerius's Edict of Toleration ended the persecution of Christians which started under Diocletian, the religion that once exercised absolute dominion over the West is rapidly disappearing from Europe. That's not very surprising, though. Even the United States is becoming less religious and Christianity as an institution has been in decline for a very long time now.

The history of Christianity has been one of schisms and fragmentation, a long process of disintegration caused by theological disputes, administrative squabbles and church corruption. When the Catholic church lost its monopoly during the Protestant Reformation, Christianity as a unified institution (1) ceased to exist. Protestantism itself went through a long chain-reaction of schisms with the result that there are now hundreds of Christian denominations in the world.

(1) Early Christianity wasn't a single movement with a unified belief system, but this gradually changed after Catholicism became the official religion of Rome and the church began its centuries-long process of stamping out "heretical movements." Very roughly speaking, and taking into consideration the fact that the eastern and western churches of the time had distinct differences, Christianity survived as a near-monolithic religious institution for about a thousand years before it started to fall apart.

Video from 2016.

The rise of science and the spread of secularism accelerated the decline of Christianity in the West. Some denominations have attempted to "adapt to the times" by dropping or "interpreting" their mythology and transforming themselves into little more than progressive social-work institutions, but these congregations are in rapid decline. Conservative churches which preach a defiant fundamentalism are thriving in the United States and Christianity is apparently exploding in the Third World.

According to Chuck Colson, "the percentage of the world's population that is, at least by name [emphasis added], Christian will be roughly the same in 2050 as it was in 1900. By the middle of this century, there will be three billion Christians in the world -- one and a half times the number of Muslims. In fact, by 2050 there will be nearly as many Pentecostal Christians in the world as there are Muslims today.

"But at that point, only one-fifth of the worlds Christians will be non-Hispanic whites. The typical Christian will be a woman living in a Nigerian village or in a Brazilian shantytown."

Video from 2016.

After almost 2,000 years, the historical trajectory of the rise and fall of Christianity is becoming clear. The religion originated in the Near East, spread into the Roman empire, rose to the height of its power in medieval Europe, then began to fragment and decline. This decline has been a long, complex process that started centuries ago and it has accelerated dramatically during the last hundred years or so in the western, developed world:

"The decline of Christianity is a widespread, ongoing phenomenon that has affected the Western world, developed countries and denominations in the post-World War II era, which have shifted towards a post-Christian, secular, globalized, multicultural, and multireligious society. Infant baptism has declined in many nations. Thousands of churches have had to close or merge and mainline Protestant denominations in the United States lost many members of their congregations." (Wikipedia)

Christianity has been struggling to survive the transition to the so-called postmodern world, itself a symptom of the overall decline of the West. The religion has been under attack for a long time now, but the biggest problem is that religion in general is no longer believable to most educated people. In Europe, even the church's own leaders don't seem to believe its teachings anymore, a sure sign that the religion is in its last stages in countries like Britain, where many churches are being closed, turned into historical museums or converted into mosques. As a result, Christianity is dying off in the West and thriving in the Third World. It will survive in the form of die-hard fundamentalist sects and the various syncretic mixtures of Christianity and native religions now spreading through places like South America, Asia and Africa.

Video from 2010.

Christianity is finished in Europe and declining in the United States, but it will continue to thrive in its original form as a prescientific, preliterate religion in the Third World. "In 1900, 80 percent of Christians lived in Europe and North America. In 2000, 60 percent lived in Africa, Asia and Latin America, with many in developing countries." (Facts and Details) By 2050, if present trends continue, "four out of every 10 Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa" and "the number of Muslims will nearly equal the number of Christians around the world." (Pew Research Center (2015))

Updated Feb. 2019

Related:

Why There Is No Way Back For Religion In The West.

Is Religion Dying Out?

Where Churches Have Become Temples of Cheese, Fitness and Eroticism

Tattoos In The Ancient World

"Tattooing has been practiced across the globe since at least Neolithic times, as evidenced by mummified preserved skin, ancient art, and the archaeological record. Both ancient art and archaeological finds of possible tattoo tools suggest tattooing was practiced by the Upper Paleolithic period in Europe. However, direct evidence for tattooing on mummified human skin extends only to the 4th millennium BC." Source: "History of Tattooing," Wikipedia.

"... tattooed mummies have been recovered from at least 49 archaeological sites including locations in Greenland, Alaska, Siberia, Mongolia, western China, Egypt, Sudan, the Philippines, and the Andes." In 2016, Nature reported the discovery of "[a] mummy from ancient Egypt ... heavily tattooed with sacred symbols, which may have served to advertise and enhance the religious powers of the woman who received them more than 3,000 years ago."

According to Smithsonian Magazine (2007), "... the earliest known examples [of tattoos] were for a long time Egyptian and were present on several female mummies dated to c. 2000 B.C. But following the more recent discovery of [Otzi the Iceman] from the area of the Italian-Austrian border in 1991 and his tattoo patterns, this date has been pushed back a further thousand years when he was carbon-dated at around 5,200 years old."

"Otzi had 61 tattoos across his body, including his left wrist, lower legs, lower back and torso." Smithsonian Insider (2015).

"Some tribal cultures traditionally created tattoos by cutting designs into the skin and rubbing the resulting wound with ink, ashes or other agents; some cultures continue this practice, which may be an adjunct to scarification. Some cultures create tattooed marks by hand-tapping the ink into the skin using sharpened sticks or animal bones (made like needles) with clay formed disks or, in modern times, needles." Source: Wikipedia.

Related: Ancient Tattoo Techniques.

Otzi the Iceman's tattoos may have been a form of acupuncture. According to the International Business Times (2015), "eighty per cent of [Otzi's] tattoos had been found along acupuncture meridians used to treat back pain and abdominal problems, which Otzi suffered from ... If correct, the tattoos would predate the first recorded use of acupuncture in China by 2,000 years."

"Pre-Christian Germanic, Celtic and other central and northern European tribes were often heavily tattooed, according to surviving accounts, but it may also have been normal paint. The Picts may have been tattooed (or scarified) with elaborate, war-inspired black or dark blue woad (or possibly copper for the blue tone) designs. Julius Caesar described these tattoos in Book V of his Gallic Wars (54 BC). Nevertheless, these may have been painted markings rather than tattoos." Source: Wikipedia.

Note: According to Caesar, "All the Britons dye their body with woad, which produces a blue color, and shave the whole of their bodies except the head and upper lip." (The Conquest of Gaul, Book V.14)

In Greece and Rome, tattoos were mostly used for identification purposes -- much like brands on cattle -- but this changed over the centuries, at least among certain classes of society:

"... amongst the Greeks and Romans, the use of tattoos or 'stigmata' as they were then called, seems to have been largely used as a means to mark someone as 'belonging' either to a religious sect or to an owner in the case of slaves or even as a punitive measure to mark them as criminals. It is therefore quite intriguing that during Ptolemaic times when a dynasty of Macedonian Greek monarchs ruled Egypt, the pharaoh himself, Ptolemy IV (221-205 B.C.), was said to have been tattooed with ivy leaves to symbolize his devotion to Dionysus, Greek god of wine and the patron deity of the royal house at that time. The fashion was also adopted by Roman soldiers and spread across the Roman Empire until the emergence of Christianity, when tattoos were felt to 'disfigure that made in God's image' and so were banned by the Emperor Constantine (A.D. 306-373)." Source: Smithsonian Magazine.

Comment: Tattoos, piercings and scarification are usually associated with barbarian tribes and the lower orders of society. In the classical Mediterranean world, tattooing as a decorative art seems to have been practiced mostly by the more primitive cultures of Europe, Asia and the Orient. In a way, the popularity of tattoos in any given culture could be seen as an indicator of that culture's social development. The more barbaric the culture, the more tattoos. There also seems to have been an inverse relationship between tattoos and social status. In Greece and Rome, for instance, soldiers, slaves, criminals and some priests and acolytes were frequently tattooed, but I'd be amazed to find out that someone like Tacitus had a tramp stamp.

Tattooing seems to become more widespread in civilizations on their way down.  For instance, "the decline of the Ptolemaic dynasty began under the reign of Ptolemy IV," the tattooed Egyptian pharaoh, according to Wikipedia. This is just a theory, but I'd say that the rising popularity of tattoos is a symptom of cultural decay. For example, I don't think it's an accident that the use of tattoos "spread across the Roman Empire until the emergence of Christianity" or that tattoos are becoming a cultural norm in modern Europe and the United States. I guess you could call this the Tattoo Theory of Social Collapse. As a civilization declines into the Third World, more and more people start to cover themselves with body art. I have no idea why this would happen, but maybe the masses are responding in an unconscious way to the barbarism that is slowly engulfing them.

Pompeii - Life & Death In A Roman Town

Pompeii had grown into a popular resort for wealthy Roman elites by the time it was destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD, but the town had a long and complex history that dated back to the time of Greek settlements in Italy.

According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised), "the oldest architecture [in Pompeii] (fragments from the Doric Temple and the Temple of Apollo) belongs in the Greek milieu around the Campanian apoikiai [overseas settlements, colonies] of the 6th cent. BC [and] scattered finds suggest links with the Etruscan cultures of the Archaic and Classical periods, and the wider Mediterranean world."

The early Pompeii apparently didn't have a city center as such, "but ... appears at present as a village on the lava hill above the sheltered mouth of the river Sarno, with a couple of prominent sanctuaries and a likely role as an anchorage for coasting vessels and a local market." (OCD)

Over the centuries, Pompeii grew into a major political center in the heart of the critical agricultural region of Campania, but by the time of the eruption, its political influence was apparently in decline as power shifted to other cities in the region and Pompeii was still recovering from a severe earthquake in 62 AD when it was destroyed.

"The sudden destruction crystallized a problematic moment: the damage of the earthquake of 62 was still being patchily repaired and the opulence and modishness of some private and public projects of the last phase (the temple of the town's patron Venus and the 'central' baths were both ambitious in scale) contrast with chaos and squalor." (OCD) Note: the town was apparently restoring and possibly expanding the baths and temple of Venus after the earthquake. I don't think these were new construction projects.

Pompeii also had a thriving sex industry.

"In both Greece and Rome, prostitution was considered to be as necessary an institution as the institutions of marriage, concubinage, or slavery. Social attitudes and legislation generally stigmatized the prostitute who -- whether male or female -- generally was of low status." (Source: "Prostitution, secular" -- OCD)

The Decline Of Religion In The West

Comment: This is an interesting lecture. I can see the generational change he talks about in my own family. My grandparents were highly religious, my parents less so -- though still churchgoers -- and I'm probably the first outright atheist to come along in my family in a very long time. I might even be the first one, for all I know. Some of my relatives still pay lip-service to going to church, but the churches they belong to are of the Unitarian variety which don't really have any shared creed at all. None of my friends are religious in any way whatsoever. It's not something relevant in our lives.

In the United States, various forms of fundamentalist Protestantism are still thriving, religions like Islam are growing, and there's a fairly large New Age movement which has turned away from traditional Christianity altogether, but things have changed radically over the last century and for all practical purposes we live in an almost entirely secular society. The situation is even more dismal for religion in Europe, where Christianity is basically dead and the remaining churches are little more than Liberal/Socialist community organizations preaching the usual "progressive" gospel of self-destructive Cultural Marxism.

The same liberal disease has infected the more moderate Protestant denominations in the US, which seem to have turned into cults of social work and have been losing members for decades. As for the Catholic Church, it's been shaken repeatedly by corruption and pederasty scandals and the current Pope is just another Social Justice Warrior demanding that Europe open its borders to the immigrant invasion. Christianity is expanding into the Third World, but collapsing in the developed West, and the historical rise and fall of the religion is becoming very clear now.

Once it was established as the official state religion of the West, the Catholic church became so corrupt that it led to the first schisms as well as the rise of dozens of different "heresies." These heretical movements were a direct reaction to the orthodox church's worldliness and hypocrisy and had to be suppressed with torture and executions. For more information on the church's really incredible level of corruption back then, read the first chapter in A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, by Henry Charles Lea.

Plagues, corruption and social decay undermined faith in the orthodox church, leading to the Reformation and eventually the Enlightenment. The schisms within the church continued over the centuries, setting off a chain-reaction of schisms within schisms which led to a proliferation of different denominations -- a process of institutional disintegration that was concealed for a while by the continued religiosity of the masses. But Christianity and religion in general couldn't survive the rise of science and the spread of secularism and rationalism that created the modern western world.

Religion is an archaic survival from thousands of years ago. Like the belief in magic, it's what we would now call a Third World or primitive way of interpreting reality. Spengler predicted that the final decline of the West would see a religious revival that he called the Second Religiousness. Many Spenglerians argue that the rise of Christian Fundamentalism fits the definition and that's probably accurate. As such, the surge in Fundamentalism with its gigantic megachurches is a sign of the West's terminal decline rather than its rejuvenation.

Spengler identified the West with Christianity in many ways -- he saw the great Gothic cathedrals as symbols of the spirit of western culture in its youth -- and he would probably have said that pre-Christian paganism was a feature of the completely different Classical world culture. Viewed from this perspective, the "paganism" of the New Age is a symptom of the decline of the West and the resurgence of irrationality common to the masses of drifting Fellahin existing outside of history. You could say that the New Age movement is a symptom of the Third World creeping into western civilization.

Whatever the case, religion has very little future here, at least for the time being. That could change, though. If these Third World invasions continue, I wouldn't be surprised if religion makes a comeback, just as various diseases thought to have been eradicated are making a comeback. This is where the lecturer in the first video gets it wrong, I think. Religion can make a comeback in the West, but if it does -- if these statistics regarding generational change and secularization reverse themselves -- it will be a sign that the demographics of the West have changed completely.

If that happens -- if religion makes a big comeback -- it will mean that the West no longer exists.

There Are More Witches Than Presbyterians In America

"Witchcraft is thriving in the US, with an estimated 1.5 million Americans now identifying as witches - more than the total number of Presbyterians. As Christianity declines across the country, paganism [1] has swung to the mainstream, with witchcraft paraphernalia for sale on every high street and practises normalised across popular culture. In the past two years, it has also become darkly politicised." Source: The Telegraph.

[1] Modern witchcraft isn't real paganism, of course. It doesn't even come close. That's obvious when you look at who these witches are.

"...Witchcraft is powerful," according to Dakota Bracciale, a "29-year-old transgender/queer witch," because of the 'intersectionality of feminism, sexuality, gender, the fight for freedom, eschewing the patriarchy and having sort of a vitriolic response towards it'".  I'm not quite sure what that means or what it has to do with witchcraft, but it's the kind of thing I'd expect to hear from somebody who recently tried to put a hex on Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh.

We've come a long way from the days of the witch Circe, who changed Odysseus's men into wild animals, and the river hag Jenny Greenteeth, who "would pull children or the elderly into the water and drown them," just for the fun of it, apparently. The ancient and medieval worlds had all sorts of fantastic witches, proper witches with dark powers, witches you could actually be scared of. All we have is Dakota Bracciale and a bunch of LARPing SJW types who prattle on about heterosexism and positive healing energies. That's a symptom of social decay right there.

The fact that there are now more of these so-called witches than Presbyterians in the US must be particularly embarrassing for the Presbyterians, but it isn't very surprising. The denomination has gone through a bewildering number of schisms over the years and its membership has been in decline for a long time, mostly due to its liberalism. In general, liberal churches are dying and conservative churches are thriving.

This is all a symptom of the collapse of the West into the Third World.

Related: Ancient Witchcraft in the Modern World (AWR)