Posted on 01/12/2006 8:09:20 AM PST by dukeman
What happens when an entire society stops having children?
Europe will soon find out.
In countries across the continent, fertility rates are lower than they've ever been. So low, in fact, that each generation numbers fewer and fewer people. European civilization may be the first in history to collapse due to willful refusal to reproduce.
How will this extinction play out?
The welfare systems that define the European social model will collapse first.
As it stands, young working people fund early retirement, generous pensions and heavily subsidized healthcare for their elders. Imagine six siblings sharing the cost of their parents' retirement and convalescence. Now imagine that all six siblings marry but just three of the couples bear a child. Forty years later there will be 12 senior citizens and only three children to care for them. The numbers vary from country to country, but my example sums up the demographic challenge Western Europeans face. In short, their whole social model faces imminent collapse.
Or it would if not for immigrants.
Without them Europe would be an empty continent next century. With them France, Denmark and the Netherlands can expect populated cities and functioning economies for centuries to come. So what's the problem?
It's just that if demographic trends continue - and there's no reason to think they won't - there won't be any French, Danish or Dutch people around - they'll be gradually replaced Algerians, Pakistanis and Somalis. I've had the pleasure of meeting immigrants from each group during my travels in Europe. A moment's personal contact with them is enough to dispel the hateful, xenophobic rhetoric spewed forth that continent's far right-wing, where neo-Nazis hate Muslims and Jews alike. Europe's Muslim immigrants, stereotyped as terrorists and radicals, are mostly peace-loving and moderate. They want good jobs, healthy families and opportunities for their children. But moderate Muslims also tend to support corporal punishment and the death penalty, while opposing gay marriage, sex education in schools and no-fault divorce.
In other words, their preferred society and the society Europeans have built clash in significant ways.
I prefer America's social model to that of Europe and the Muslim world. Both models have flaws that dwarf ours. If they merge within continental Europe, it is unclear which elements of each will survive.
My own preference is based on an equation that factors in the treatment of women, the ability to provide materially for one's people and propensity for military hostility toward the United States. (If French Muslims wind up as hostile to America as the Middle Eastern variety when they're the French majority, that nation's nuclear arsenal will prove particularly problematic.)
Anyone who imagines a peaceful, ordered transition from secular Europe to whatever majority Muslim society follows it has more optimism than I. How I pray that I'm wrong. Yet I foresee a clash of civilizations that seems at once hard to imagine and hard to avert.
Rather than speculate wildly about its course, allow me to recount one small example. In recent decades homosexuals have attained unprecedented legal rights and societal acceptance in Northern Europe. In Amsterdam, a city that embraces gays like San Francisco does, same-sex couples can wed, take hand-in-hand honeymoon strolls along the canals without turning heads and apply to adopt babies before settling down into marital bliss. When their children attend school, the textbooks will include gay families as a matter of course.
A majority of Dutch people support these rights and attitudes. If current immigration patterns, birth rates and social attitudes continue as they are today, a majority of Dutch people will oppose all those rights and attitudes two decades from today. Already the number of street attacks on gays has risen along with the number of Muslim immigrants hostile to homosexuality. Is it racist or xenophobic for a gay Dutchmen today to favor a moratorium on immigration if only to protect his or her lifestyle?
Now imagine all the segments of Dutch society who will feel similarly threatened as demographic shifts cause traditional Dutch culture to wane while immigrant culture waxes. Imagine the feminists who demand state-funded contraception, the Christians who want Christmas to be a state-sanctioned holiday, the social liberals who want sex education taught in schools and the social conservatives who hope to safeguard the Dutch language.
If Muslim immigrants become a majority in the Netherlands, will they liberalize their views and maintain Dutch culture? Or will Dutch law move closer to the laws in the countries of origin of these immigrants? If it's the latter, how will the Dutch react? And the Danes? And the French? And the Germans? And the Spanish? And the Italians?
That's what happens when establishing families are no longer important and sex is only for momentray kicks. Decline of these basic values = an inevitable decline of the society.
It is also what happens when ones government so burdens its people with taxes that it cannot afford to reproduce.
Do you think the catholic Church can stave off this inevitability. For all it's shortcomings, the church is the only institution that is standing between a viable Christian Europe, vibrant an alive or a vile pseudo smorgasbord of secular/islamic metastasis that may very well destry the entire western world.
A double whammy, indeed!
more on your excellent point here---
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1554797/posts
There is no such thing as a Christian Europe. Europe is completely spiritually dead. It is in the new Dark Ages.
I think it far more likely that they brush off their only a few decades old propensity for industrial level extermination, and/or mass population transfer.
Switch to a more right-wingish society might even change their demographic trends. But there would be a big schism, where a pendulum could swing a bit too far to the right...
They get what they are getting...a country full of angry, out of control, murdering, muslum lunitic terrorists.
RIP native Europe.
feminism + abortion = genocide
Anyone taking bets on when the Muslims burn down the Louvre?
Question:
What occurs when pornography, homosexuality,and self-gratification infect the belief systems of societies?
Answer:
The DEATH of NATIONS.....
"It is in the new Dark Ages."
Hey, that is unfair to the "dark ages". I prefer "the dawn of Christian Civilization" for the period 0-500AD that used to be known as the dark ages
Unfortunately, I don't see the Catholic Church being able to reevangalize Europe for a number of different reasons. Much of the European church is very liberal, a la the Ted Kennedy mode of Catholicism. I expect before I die to see the Vatican become a mosque -- and I say this with great sadness as I am a Catholic. The devout, serious Catholics are in Africa, South America and the Phillipines. Pope Benedict understands the danger, he and a number of German bishops met with German imams for one of the "interfaith" dialogs a number of years ago, and were startled when the imams openly and bluntly said they had no intention of peacefully coexisting, they intended to convert Europe and impose Sharia law. That's one of the reasons Benedict "gets it" -- but too many other remain in denial. I'd enjoy those with more knowledge of the situation commenting, me personally I have written Europe off.
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There are more than two reasons that couples have sex.
If 1% of your population is Islamist they will sit quietly. If 10% is Islamist they will rise up and already begin their game as in France and elsewhere, when they're 20% or more they will try to REDEFINE who you are. Europe is in for a rude awakening within the next 20 years.
Red6
Poland.
My church supports missionaries who travel to Europe to evangelize. At a conference last year I met a young guy who runs hockey clinics in Germany to reach the youth and young adults. He told me the situation is so bad in Germany that about 80% of the population has never been to church (of any type), although they do go into church buildings for concerts and other events because the acoustics are so good. And of the people who do attend church regularly, around 75% are women aged 65 or older.
This will be very, very tough but I believe we need to keep trying.
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