If we acknowledge that God is concerned not just with our individual souls, but also with the souls of peoples, nations and whole civilizations - with what we might term the 'group soul' - then we may interpret current trends in terms of the teaching, the education, the disciplining of the group soul in The West.
Whatever we may believe as individuals, and however we may behave, our time (and this era of some hundreds of year - exacerbated in recent decades) has been one of apostasy - of leaving the Christian religion, of actively rejecting Christianity.
We rejected God, then we came to believe that God is Dead, now that God had never been alive and the history of humankind was one of mass delusion. We believe that only modern Man has woken-up to realize his total freedom. Total freedom from all constraints, total freedom to do whatever he thinks is good - or evil.
This radical cutting-off from God, religion, the past - this is something, as a civilisation, we absolutely insist upon.
During this period of apostasy there has been (up until a generation ago, anyway) a great growth in prosperity, diversion, comfort, convenience - also, ever since the French Revolution there has also been wave upon wave of extermination, repression, torture and death. The twentieth century was one of the darkest in the history of the world.
It is clear, however, that there is no repentance in The West, no heed is paid to the writing on the wall. The culture has become ever more explicitly nihilistic - the major policies from the leaders of all Western Nations will have the effect of destroying the West with a very high degree of certainty.
The peace, prosperity, diversion, comfort and convenience are - pretty obviously - not meant to be 'an end in themselves'; but intended to be a means to some higher end. And everybody used to acknowledge that until the mid-20th century.
But, as a civilisation, all that 'higher' stuff has since been rejected. Yet, the leaders, the poets and artists and thinkers, the 'commentariat', are not even trying to safeguard the prosperity, comfort, convenience and radical freedom by which they justified apostasy.
Think of it: as a group soul we reject the past, and we reject all spiritual aims, and we reject defending that radical freedom which was supposed to be the justification of all the other rejections.
As a civilisation we aggressively refuse to think to learn, to perceive our true errors, to repent and change. It seems that even if all our worldly freedoms are to be lost - nonetheless we still want to be free from God at any price, at any cost, even if it causes us pain, misery, fear and an abject and cowardly death without honour.
Despite the ever-open doorway to repentance; it seems that our cultures, nations, and civilisation - the group soul of The West - insists upon playing this out to the very end.
It looks very much as if we have implicitly decided to insist upon bringing on ourselves the consequences of mass apostasy - in this world, and presumably the next.
As individuals we can, and should, opt-out of this act of civilisational suicide in the name of a 'freedom' we cannot even be bothered to defend, but instead take steps to annihilate. We should save our souls.
But the group soul? It cannot be saved if it is determined to be damned - and not damned in the end for any positive benefit, but simply from the negativism of what it does not want: it does not want God at any price; at any cost, it craves its own annihilation.
