Some of my favorite talk show hosts correctly worry about the decline of civilization. Around twenty years ago it was called "coarsening," because the signal for this was an increasing lack of day to day civility and an increase in coarse and vulgar behavior. I agreed that these were warning signs. Now these talk show hosts tend to use the primitive and fundamentalist, anti-social and anti-intellectual beliefs of terrorists as the example of what they fear "falling back to." While I condemn terrorism and encourage theological correction of terrorists I disagree they are the examples of "fall backs" and decline of civilization. There is no "going backwards" because Pandora's box has been opened and it would be a blessing, rather than a concern, if we could go back to even the most difficult and severe society (such as the Taliban are used as an example). Why do talk show hosts not need to worry that we will "fall back" to a primitive and erroneous model such as the Taliban? Because Pandora's box has opened the reality of a society that has groomed and endorsed people capable of raping their own newborn infants, as they cry and bleed, often to death, and film the assaults to share over the Internet and for private pervert viewing. The most primitive society with even the most horrendous behaviors had not the total collapse in morals OR the technology/material temptations to even support the idea of looking at a baby, their own baby, and seeing a f*** hole. Now it is impossible to do a news search on any given day and not read about a parent or family acquaintance who has beaten, tortured or raped a baby to death or permanent scarring. And there are dozens of examples of an entire caste of pedophiles who crave newborns, infants, toddlers, boys, girls, animals, you name it. They not only rape and murder but they film and share like it's some sort of book club.
Everyone has been contaminated. Just ask a law enforcement official who has to set up sting operations, or view this material for prosecution. You cannot know about these actions and not be changed in a way that society has NEVER seen. So stop wasting time thinking that everyone might "fall back" to "having to cover yourself and worship Allah" if we don't "defeat the terrorists." Terrorism is a crime and an error in theology. It's not a hallmark of what humans can "fall back to." Humans have already fallen far below what they ever were at their lowest. The mere fact I can type a blog posting like this and you can read it and think, "Yeah, I know" means it's too late to "fall back." A "fallen back" human would have grabbed a club or sword and slain on the spot someone who raped a baby as an abomination. Not a criminal, not a mentally disabled, but an abomination. I'm not saying to do vigilante justice. I'm giving you a self-test so you can believe me when I say that humans can never "go back" to where they were, even primitively. They have passed a depravity threshold.
When God appeared to Isaiah he insisted that he was unworthy to be contacted by God because "he had unclean lips among a people of unclean lips." (See Isaiah 6, where the angel remedies his concern by purifying his lips with a burning coal from the altar of God). The point is that this extremely holy prophet of God immediately recognized that simply having to speak and live among speakers of unclean things renders one unworthy of speaking to God, even when God is the one to approach him first. The first Psalm also warns that it is dangerous to live among the sinners and unclean. Well, thanks to the media and hedonistic liberalism everyone is now "infected." No one's brains react toward depravity with the moral outrage that is essential for human survival. Moral outrage is a species survival trait. Moral outrage is like being able to tell poison on one's plate from safe food. It's really too late because the ability to feel moral outrage has been lost in large segments of the population, and those who do still feel it have been rendered helpless. The problem is now damage control so that this new depravity mental wiring does not conquer everyone and seal the fate of everyone of goodness and innocence. So stop worrying about "falling back" to some "primitive theocracy"... trust me, that would have been a better place to restart from than where "humanity" finds itself now. The depravity is brought lower and lower and earlier and earlier to the youngest of children through the media and through "sex education" and other "well meaning" saturations that totally orient even the youngest, and turn the minds of the perverts, toward unclean acts and thoughts that the decent people have to swim within like a broken sewage system. This never existed before in human history. The most hedonistic cities (like Sodom) never dreamed of raping their own babies and creating porn "art" from it to share. No one's brains even conceived of such depravity. A line has been crossed that is a horror that cannot be compared to any past horror during human's history.