RE: The New Comprachicos: Destroying America's Children
The decline of Western Christendom began with the "Great Schism" when upto three "Popes" excommunicated each other before expiring. With the moral legitimacy of Western religion, and consequently its culture, tarnished, political and merchant scum lobbied to influence religious and cultural hierachy of the Western Church. The resulting corruption gave rise to the rebellion of the Hussite scum and eventually to the Luthern revolution, which essentially declared individual revelation on equal legitimacy as the established Church tradition, history, culture, and doctine.
The emphasis on individual merit, divorced from any connection with social, cultural, religious heritage, is a curse under which the Western civilization ate itself from Wesphalian lunacy to the viciousness of the Revolution. The humanist/Marxist utopian delusion is but a natural consequence of a populace drunk on infallibility of their own illiterate opinions; after all, if divine revelation is individually merited to formulate religuous doctrine, what couldn't an ignorant peasant be entitled to formulate policies ranging from complex politics to intricate social issues? Modern "democratic" sociopolitical organizations are all headed towards the egalitariam utopia of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, only the velocity of their descent varies.
Maybe, I would argue that it began with Nicea when Christianity became an institution and centralized.
Without the first Church council, Western Christianity would not have established itself. The internecine conflict between Arians and Trinitarians would have devolved Christianity into fragmented, competing, regional superstitions and a curious footnote in annals of Roman history, to which the likes of the Eleusian mystery, Mithras worship, and Isis religion are consigned. Without a defined, institutionalized, uniform religion, it would have been to Mithras, and not to Jesus, to whom the West may have turned their worship, resulting in a much different type of civilization than the current Western culture. Though many perceive centralization and institutionalization of doctrine in negative bias, without defined, uniform, ritualized belief system, religion devolves to mere fad.