Daily Archives: March 30, 2016

An Old Man Remembers how the Great Apostasy Began in the 1960s

The European Orthodox Times, 16 July 2054

On this Day of Solemn Repentance, the Millennial Anniversary of the Western Folly, which started by replacing God with a small step for one sinful man and finished by replacing God with a giant leap into the abyss for sinful mankind, we publish an interview with one of the few remaining eyewitnesses of the tragic events which began in the 1960s.

Q: I know it is nearly a century ago, but can you tell us your memories of what really happened in the Great Apostasy, from the 1960s on? Many of our younger readers are fascinated by it. They simply cannot understand how so many people could have acted in such a suicidal way and yet still thought it normal. It sounds as though people were possessed by the spirit of folly.

A: Well, although I was only a child when it all began, I can still remember quite vividly what it was like. Possession by folly is indeed a good description of it. I think the process of apostasy suddenly sped up in about 1964. The old world petered out and the new world of the Great Apostasy began, a world of plastic, of false values, was born. Everything suddenly changed, as though an order had gone out from above and most people blindly obeyed it, like sheep to the slaughter.

Q: How had it all come to that? And why did it all happen so suddenly?

A: You have to remember that at that time there had still been no repentance for the two Great Wars of 1914 and 1939 and since then there had been various scandals and depravity among the ruling elite: that explains a lot, it meant the ground was ready for a fall. There was spiritual emptiness all around and the devil always fills a vacuum. So the masses at last began to say, ‘Well, we too have lost our Faith and we too declare that for us God is dead, just like you, the elite, and we will now live in the same folly as you’.

Of course, those words, ‘God is dead’, had first been pronounced almost 100 years before by a German philosopher who later went mad, but only the elite had ever heard of him. Following his words, there had taken place the two mass slaughters in Great Wars, carefully prepared and organized by the selfsame elite. However, it was only in the early 1960s that the folly of the elite finally filtered down and the masses lost their faith too, following the example of the ruling class.

In the 1960s in England, for example, there were corrupt politicians and faithless bishops from the State religious organization who, following the examples of German Protestant philosophers, committed apostasy, writing that they no longer believed in the Son of God become man. Rather they believed that they, the sons of men, fallen and sinful, had become gods. With their loss of faith, they at once lost all sense of the sacred. They began preaching intellectualism or infantilism, but in any case secularism, that is, they decided that merging with the world was the only way.

They wanted to be ‘like everyone else’, to renounce their Christian birthright as ‘a peculiar people’, nobody wanted to confess their faith, people were ashamed of it. One bishop called his loss of faith ‘honesty’. So, naturally, people deserted their churches in their masses. Outside England the same thing was happening, Roman Catholics also renounced their faith and the sense of the sacred in the 1960s. They too began to collapse into the same apostasy of secularism that gradually led to the folly of atheism. Thus, they abandoned fasting and within two generations they faced a crisis of obesity.

A: What happened in the Church Herself? Was Orthodoxy infected too?

Q: Only on the margins. From the 60s, and in some cases even before, the Westernmost fringes of the Orthodox world, in the USA and in Europe, for example in France and Finland, were infected by new calendarism and various other forms of secularism and aped the Western world. Many frauds appeared and the naïve were tricked and then disbelieved those who denounced the frauds. Fortunately, it was only on the fringes, where some, although baptized in Orthodoxy, lost the sense of the sacred. This was because they had stopped living an Orthodox life and began living like others, which they justified.

Of course, there were reactions to this decadence, some so negative that people began breaking away from the Church and founding old calendarist sects by reaction. This was understandable, but, as the old saying goes, although you can find some muddied water in a river, it is always muddied in a puddle. However, most of the Church world was protected from this decadence, ironically in part through the persecutions of atheist Communism. In the countries where that atheism had come to power officially, people retained their understanding of the Church and their sense of the sacred, helped by the witness of the New Martyrs and Confessors.

Q: What happened next in the West?

A: Well, as you know, every civilization, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Pagan Roman, Inca, Aztec, Indian, Chinese or any other, is based on spiritual beliefs and values. So when Western people renounced the underlying, founding beliefs and values of Western civilization, it simply collapsed, just like a tower standing by the seashore that suddenly collapses because its foundations have been gradually washed away by the waves over the centuries.

You see, if you say that God is dead, that is a purely subjective statement. What you are saying in reality is that God is dead for you, that you have lost your faith in God, which means that your soul is empty, it has died, in other words, you are spiritually dead. God looks on and sees that He has been rejected by that individual soul and knows that only the suffering, created by His rejection, can bring that soul to repentance.

That was the case of Western civilization: it was rotten from inside. By rejecting the Church and Her Orthodox Faith, it showed that it had been carrying within it the seeds of its own destruction ever since 1054. When enough people in Western civilization said that ‘God is dead’ at the same time, then they effectively said that their civilization was dead. And spiritual death is always followed by physical death. It is a law of history. It is only a matter of time. For example, by the end of the nineteenth century the European elite had lost its faith and so within the first two generations of the twentieth century, they produced the suicide of two Great European Wars. Loss of faith always and inevitably leads to death for all around.

Q: But wasn’t Western civilization already so weak before the 1960s that its collapse was inevitable?

A: Of course, it had been greatly weakened by the two Great European Wars in the twentieth century, let alone before, but the point is that people could still have realized what the origin of their problems was and returned to the source, to Holy Orthodoxy, which they had had in the beginning. Even in the early 1960s it was still not too late. There were enough vestiges left for people to return to the fullness of the Faith.

God is patient and you can always turn back, even on your death-bed. But no, instead of turning back, even after the blinding light of the atrocities on the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people refused to repent. A whole civilization gone. So sad. Instead of returning, people went even further in their folly of self-destruction in the next generation, that is, precisely in the 1960s. As a popular American song of the 1960s, written in regret for the past, said:

And in the streets, the children screamed,
The lovers cried and the poets dreamed,
But not a word was spoken,
The church bells all were broken.

And the three men I admire most,
The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost
They caught the last train to the coast,
The day the music died.

These words, ‘the church bells all were broken’ meant that society had renounced the Holy Trinity, they had departed ‘to the coast’, to the outskirts of Western society: the music of God had been silenced among men.

Q: Why did all this happen in the 1960s and not before or later?

A: Because, as I said, it is the next generation, the next 25 years. The first generation had seen the First European War in 1914, the second generation had seen the Second European War in 1939 and the third generation was 25 years later, in 1964. Degeneration, like regeneration, always takes three generations to become widespread throughout society, then it requires further generations for the rot to infect every branch of human life, right down to the level of the family and to the individual.

Q: So what happened in the 1960s, once the masses had been contaminated by the loss of faith, declaring that for them too ‘God is dead’?

A: All kinds of things. First of all, in the 60s there followed a wave of sexual depravity, people began living like cats and dogs. They called it ‘living together’, though old people called it ‘living in sin’. Divorce became the norm, the family began to die out. After a generation of that, husbands and wives ceased to exist and became ‘partners’, as in a business, because everything had become monetized, a question of money and contracts. There were no longer people, only consumers and customers. People were measured economically only, as units of cost and spending.

It no longer mattered who you were, but what you had. What was important was not to be, but to have. People became possessed by what they possessed. People had fewer and fewer children and, within two generations, you saw mainly older people on the streets. Most children were the children of immigrants, often Muslims. The talk was of retirement, pensions, dementia and old people’s diseases, as though that were normal. Society was quite literally dying out.

Q: Why was society ageing? Because of the breakdown of the family?

A: This ageing of society took place above all because hundreds of millions had been killed as a result of the depravity that began in the 1960s, I mean, as a result of abortion. Over the decades tens of millions of little babies were sent off to be turned into ashes in incinerators, just as the Nazis had done with the corpses of their slave camp workers. I think over forty years, it was about six million just in this country.

When you add in all the other Western countries, the figure came to well over one hundred million, far greater than in the two Great Wars. It was the greatest genocide in history, in fact a self-genocide, a suicide. As I said, when for you God is dead, then you are dead too and physical death inevitably follows. God, Who exists, despite the denials of those possessed by folly, looks on and weeps. It was a period of folly, for the greatest delusion, which rejoices Satan, is when people say that there is no God, as the Scriptures say.

Q: Did no-one protest at this wave of legalized mass murder that began in the 1960s?

A: Only small minorities. The masses actually soon began to consider abortion normal and, of course, the media all over the Western world supported this, brainwashing the people; any journalist who wrote otherwise was censored, sacked and would probably have been imprisoned for ‘infringement of human rights’. Abortion became a habit, like taking an aspirin. The profoundly abnormal became normal and the Western world actually condemned and boycotted societies that had normal values, whether their own society in the recent past or else others in the present outside the Western world. You can imagine the billions in profits made by the abortion industry over the decades. The main idea was profit, convenience and comfort, not moral principles, let alone the Truth.

Q: What happened to those who defended the Truth?

A: Defenders of the Truth were systematically accused of lieing….

Q: What happened next in society?

A: Well, having killed God inside themselves, hundreds of millions of people went berserk. All these people, either committing or approving of child murder, began to go mad, so that they needed large quantities of anti-depressants to live. Others poisoned themselves with tobacco, alcohol and other even more lethal drugs, trying to forget and escape. They had no-one to tell their sins to and no-one to receive absolution from and so mental illness reached all-time highs. Others placed images of the demons, reverse icons, around themselves, they bought costumes for their children so that they would look like demons, calling them aliens or witches. And of course the demons are aliens for normal human-beings, but, as I said the abnormal had become normal, exactly as the Apostle had foretold. Paradoxically, as people were unable to face death, people killed themselves. Suicide rates went up and up. There was only one taboo – death, and the dead were usually discreetly incinerated in special centres outside the towns.

At that time, whatever human-beings created tended to be contaminated by the lack of faith and ugliness in souls. Some were condemned to living in ‘blocks’ of concrete and glass and other hideous buildings that were called eyesores. It was a society with the cult of ugliness. They only rarely made anything beautiful or tasteful: music was often just loud noise which actually made some people deaf, and what they called art was often laughable – at best. Films were often obsessed with war, violence, depravity, horror, aliens, zombies and monsters. In a word, the monstrous began to take over life, as the demons came up from hell to the surface and there were demonic manifestations, ‘signs in the heavens’, and so on.

As the decades went by, some even began deforming themselves, destroying the image and likeness of the human in themselves. Some men and women began dressing in rags, as torn and worn clothing became popular. Then some men started dressing like women, some women like men. You could not tell the difference. It was called ‘unisex’. Some people shaved their heads. Others began colouring their hair pink, blue, yellow, green, later sometimes going bald as a result of all the chemicals they used, then inserting pieces of metal into their faces and tattooing themselves, because they were so unhappy with what God had given them. You felt so sorry for those people.

At the same time, in order to escape death, others became obsessed with their bodies, spending billions on special food and in restaurants, ‘sport’, ‘fitness’, gyms and slimming. There was a cult of ‘health and safety’. Others had operations on their bodies and changed their shapes, a few even changed their sex. This movement became quite hysterical and you were not allowed to criticize this, as it had been deemed normal by the State. In fact, you could be arrested for criticisms because by that time free speech was considered ‘intolerance’. Some people tanned their skins, catching skin cancer, others coloured their skin orange or covered their faces with thick layers of chemicals and creams.

Some further deformed their bodies by poisoning their food with chemicals, syrup, hormones and genetic modifications and eating so much of it quickly (called ‘fast food’) that they became obese and developed cancers, diabetes and heart disease. You could no longer recognize some people – they looked physically different, they changed, something had taken them over, as their souls died. So people began dying younger and younger. This was suicide and a great tragedy.

Q: How did people come to their senses?

A: Well, of course, this tragedy brought many tears and all had to come to a crisis. A permanent sense of crisis became apparent in the generations after the 1960s. Only suffering could bring people to their senses. So, in 1989, another generation on, the Western elite in its arrogance started wars of terror all over the world in order to strip other countries of their natural resources and dominate them economically. This was much more ruthless than the old colonialism in the nineteenth century, which had at times at least been patriarchal and even beneficial.

In this way Eastern Europe was impoverished, its factories closed, its young people turned into economic refugees who went westwards, and the whole of the Middle East, as far as the Himalayas and all Northern Africa, from the Ivory Coast and Kenya northwards as far as Pakistan and Afghanistan, was ravaged by Western occupations, bombings and terrorist groups, initially created by the Western elite in order to divide and rule.

All came to a head another generation later in what some called World War III in 2014. With the violent overthrow of the Ukrainian government in that year and tens of millions of wretched refugees, mainly from Syria, sent into Western Europe by the Turkish government, the persecution of Christians in the Ukraine and the Middle East and waves of revenge terrorism, there followed a very dark period indeed. It was only after this, through the interventions of the saints, that people gradually came to realize that if they continued, they would destroy the world and it would end very soon.

Many saw no hope. But then, quite miraculously, in the face of death, on the very brink of Armageddon, some began to choose life over death, drawing back from the edge at the very last moment. Little by little people began abandoning the hell that they had created for themselves, they saw through the myths that they had been fed, they came back to ideals, to God and common sense and started living normally again. At last they saw through the consequences of Filioquization and returned to the Church.

Q: What do you mean by Filioquization?

A: The millennial process by which sinless God was replaced by sinful man.

Q: What happened next?

A: As you know, knowledge of the Church began to spread throughout the paganized Western world and several tens of millions repented of secularism and became Orthodox Christians, starting to venerate their own saints again. And then Jerusalem was freed by the Orthodox Empire, as Imperial forces swept down from Russia, liberating Turkey on their way. That was a real miracle because they had been preparing it for Antichrist. That was the beginning of how the Church delayed Antichrist. And that is why we are still alive on this day in 2054, the thousandth anniversary to the day of the Western Folly, that ruthless lust for supremacy which led to the Great Apostasy in the first place.