The gods are becoming angrier

When we define the Islamic threat as a clash of civilizations we are eliding the distinction between mainstream religions, which are all about rules regulating the encounter with the divine, about the mutual respect between Man and God, versus the pagan religions, which are about the supremacy of the divine over the mundane, about the separation of the divine from the mundane except for when the divine to mete out punishment and reward, and are about the indifference of the divine to the mundane matters of man's relations with man. 

So long as a society's powers-that-be teach away from that encounter, either by the mainstream religions' suppressing the power of Man relative to the power of God (the Christians do it by policy, the Jews do it by abject fact), or by overwhelming the power of God with the hubris of secular Man, the dominant culture will be susceptible to the virulence of paganism. It will be difficult for people to differentiate the demands of paganism from the demands of the mainstream cultures. 

We are living today in what resembles a pre-historic, Jurassic world where the issues of idol worship are paramount, where the fury of the gods are manifest in the daily lives of the people of the planet, where the divine has begun to wreak vengeance on the mundane. The gods are becoming angrier. 

We need a clear-sighted spiritual vision to navigate in these waters. For starters we need to be able to tell the difference between a healthy organism and a virus. Those who subscribe to the narrative of the clash of civilizations are showing how they are ignorant of the ways of the one, just God.