Who or what is really to blame for the decline of the West?

Catholic intellectuals blame the Protestant Reformation for the decline of the Western world, but both religious perspectives roamed too far away from real human nature and natural law, and in doing so the decline of their religions was inevitable. Moral law and natural law are built into human nature, but we have to define human nature as it really is. Something built-in cannot be avoided, even if the will to power as a part of human nature can bypass or corrupt parts of human nature, for a time. Going against human nature in our cultural and religious creations is like swimming upstream rather than downstream.

Religious leaders often make the mistake of thinking that material knowledge is generally corrupt and that only revelation is what we need to see reality, when the healthiest position is to apply both. But science does the same thing in rejecting revelation.  Religion and science need to work together in trying to see reality.

The hedonistic 1960's showed us that good laws cannot be founded on what each individual thinks they want. When this happens the group-morality upon which each individual depends falls apart. Then there is always the problem of those individuals, and sometimes ethnic groups, who benefit, at least in the short term, from a borderless, hedonistic, motley world. In spite of all this, human nature remains kin-centered, gender defined, age-graded, heterosexual marriage-making, hierarchical, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, and religious-making, among other things, with group-selection as the primary unit of selection. Even the smallest change in human nature and our DNA structure, for example, in our immune system, takes hundreds of thousands of years to change, although now we are now learning ways to speed up that process, supposedly.

Human history shows us that empires always fall back into some sort of regional and ethnic separation, and this is precisely because they harmonize best with real human nature. Human nature, and the natural law built into human nature proscribe some form of ethnopluralism, that is, not a homogenizing multiculturalism but the separation of powers and states into virtual ethnostates, where real human nature can best function in harmony---with some form of federalism for the internal and external protection of the states. The common laws and institutions that evolve out of human nature (traditions) also become part of an improved order which needs to be accommodated, as Burke taught us, which means that reform rather than revolution is always preferred.

And where does religion apply in this worldview? We can live in harmony with nature and new technology, as we become part of the great adventure of our natural evolution on earth and beyond the human species out into the cosmos toward real Godhood. The ECC mission is to make evolution and history part of religion. To revitalize Christianity and religion in general. To bring back philosophical naturalism to philosophy and religion by way of theological materialism. To bring religion and science together. To re-position the Outward Path over the Inward Path while keeping both. To affirm that all life is evolving to Godhood, not from Godhood. To have the ethos of evolution involved in morality in general as part of the natural law. And to affirm the Ethnopluralism Hypothesis in political philosophy.

Can we do this? Yes, but not overnight. Human nature and the natural law will help us do this, with synchronicity, as well as with the aid of the Spirit-Will-To-Godhood, which always activates life inwardly toward the zenith of evolution, even as life is shaped outwardly by evolution.