Damn straight, Mr. Salemi.

The good thing though is that if the crackpots you speak of get their wish vis a vis Middle Eastern War, you and me can have a good laugh afterwards about how the end times didn't end up coming after the battle after all.

Well put, Joe Salemi.

What I could never understand about the element of the Republican Party who actually thought Bush's love affair with Ariel Sharon was a reason to support him (Hagee who propped up the neocon McCain being one example, and Robertson who tried propping up the neocon Guilani being another), is why they think the good lord needs their help to set off WWIII?

Now if someone I cared about needed help, I'd try to help them myself, as opposed to taking the quietistic and cowardly view that it should just be left in the hands of the lord.

But on the other hand, if someone happened to believe in the theological need for WWIII, why not just leave it in the hands of the lord?

That way you'll avoid accidentaly making WWIII happen, destroying the human race in the process, and then it turns out god didn't want you to do it anyway.

The answer, of course, is the need some of the weakest leaders in this country feel to kowtow to Jewish Power.

Huckabee, to his credit I think, didn't let a nest of Jewish Vipers infest his campaign.

He ended up losing anyway thanks to the mass media's pro-McCain agenda, but if he had won the nomination his wise decision to discriminate against the neocons would have aided him greatly in the general.

Even so, Christianity is at the heart of the West and without it the West dies, and it's no coincidence that the war on Christianity is also a war on the West's cultural heritage including - and especially - the Classical heritage.

Islam destroys all civilisations it touches and leaves behind a husk of the former culture. So too do modern Liberalism and cultural Marxism. The West cannot remain the West if either of these two evil cults win out, any more than it could do if the ridiculous and socially subversive Jehovie cult became the dominant cult. Imagine how ridiculous the West would be under the rule of Jehovies. Eventually, it would become as bad as Islam.

The false Messiahnism of the Obama cult - in - embryo is scary, and brings to my mind something more akin to the scarier aspects of ancient middle eastern pagan idol worship than the paganism of Greece or Rome. It may also turn out to have murderous aspects to it, or if not, something may well succeed it which will turn out to be murderous. It's as if the whole country is about to self - destruct in a frenzy of insanity and stupidity.

Since most contributors and readers of this magazine seem to be Christian, I think there should be some serious rethinking of just what is the most significant spiritual aspect of our culture: our Westernism, or our Christianity? I think the preference for Westernism arises from a reluctance to allow important doctrinal differences to divide our 'common front'.

Firstly, the idea of a spiritually cohesive West papers over the significant differences between Catholics and Protestants (and also between Lutherans and Calvinists). Secondly, it thereby makes it hard to justify the exclusion of the Eastern Orthodox from our group: the exclusion implies, interestingly enough, that the Great Schism was somehow much more significant than the Reformation. This may be trueThirdly, it leaves the place of the Jews unaccounted for: are they Western, and if so, does that mean it is possible to be Western without being Christian? What is Westernism then other than secularism, a cultural identity completely devoid of spiritual identity?

Since I am a Roman Catholic I don't think any man knows the hour of his own death let alone the death or end of all time. So I have no interest in such speculations except in so far as St. Paul says the judgement is closer today than yesterday. When St. John the Baptist had his disciples to ask Jesus if he was the Christ or if they should look for another, Christ answered by instructing them to tell the Baptist simply what HE was doing. In a tired age such as own it is perhaps helpful to just state the facts --- they kill their own children out of the fear of raising them, they load men down with oppressive burdens, they are scared to speak of their religious beliefs or defend their family customs in public, they receive their daily news from strangers believing all they are told by them, they take most of their meals on the move often eating with their bare hands and they prefer to consume much more than they produce. Their idea of reading is about the lives of contemporary actors,gladiators and corrupt politicians. Any man from Mars could see that such a community is living in its end times which is not the same as the end of time.

Every time a crackpot Evangelical opens his mouth about "the end times" or "the coming Apocalypse," the Israelis are emboldened to build another illegal settlement on the West Bank, or ignore another UN resolution, or just kill Palestinian civilians.

There's even a lunatic fringe in Israel that wants to tear down the Dome of the Rock in order to rebuild the Temple of Solomon. And our Evangelical nuts are right behind them, cheering on the bulldozers. After all, the rebuilding of the Temple is an "end of time" event, and the Evangelicals are champing at the bit for it.

You want a fast track to World War III? Let this insane symbiotic relationship continue.

I would agree with Mr. Davis that we are in an anti-Christian/counter-Christian era; in fact, we are in an anti-culture. Culture is the law(not edicts of dictators, oligarchies or majorities), traditions and institutions restraining our compulsions. Anti-culture is the deconstruction of the law, traditions and institutions which restrain our compulsions with the unpurpose of "freeing" the self paradoxically aided and abetted by the edicts of dictators, oligarchies or majorities with the assistance of such fantacies as equality, brotherhood and liberty. Ironically, the "emancipated" selfs which emerge in this anti-culture are not at all Promethean but rather more like Gollum in the Lord of the Rings. The words of the Lord of the Universe, the Christ, mock and judge the "selfs" produced in anti-culture as He says, "Whoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whoever shall lose his life shall preserve it." We lose ourselves in Christ as parts of the cosmic order and moral universe which He has wrought, in relationships to Him, to His institution of family, to His Body and Bride -the Church, and to those commonwealths in which we live out our duties and obligations. Alienated individuals vainly seeking the illusive because-it-does-not-exist autonoumous individual cannot produce the good and the beautiful. Even the anti-culture's concept of "the common good" is a counterfeit. It does not originate with a cosmic order beyong the individual and the group; it is merely the shadowy aggregate of the quest for compulsions of Gollumesque individuals and the desire of the controlling elites among the individuals to placate the idolatry of self among the masses in their quest for power.

Catholic end times speculation tends to be less scripted and much more reliant on individual imagination and private revelations, many of the latter lacking even the limited approval the Church gives to some such revelations. I find it rather embarrassing that writers like Mr. Davis and Mr. O'Brien are speculating that Obama might be the anti-Christ. I know they are not positively identifying him as such, but such speculation may lead some unhinged person to take a shot at him. Successful or not, an assassination attempt could lead to some pretty gruesome consequences.

Finally, I would say that speculating on the end of the US global empire or even on the end of the US as a unified country is a bit different than speculating on the end of the world. But for some people, American pride and the indoctrination that the US is unique in all human history, leads to the conflating of imperial decline with the end times.

I hope this is useful to you, Chesterbelloc, and that others will also comment.