Do People Need Religion To Make Babies?

Why has Europe stopped making babies, asks Frederick Turner?

Is it hardly due to pestilence or environmental degradation. It seems to be more a matter of active choice.

The reason people stop replacing themselves is, I would argue, cultural.



What, basically, persuades people not to have babies even when they have the political, social and economic stability to do so? Among the eras and nations where this phenomenon occurs or occurred one basic characteristic stands out: the loss of a transcendent future.

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One hypothesis about demographic collapse that might be worth checking out is that it happens when a nation loses its religion.

Suppose that when you adopt a materialist worldview, thinking about humans just as special animals, you lose the idea of special meaning, a story about the beginning and the beyond, a promise of transcendental hope? That is what our modern elites are doing with their down-to-earth secular humanism and their existentialism—that every one should seek their own, authentic, path to truth, and avoid the “bad faith” of unquestioningly accepting other peoples’ opinions and ideas.

Suppose that if you hold such beliefs then you tend not to have children and people like you just fade away and disappear.

In that case, you would expect the world to be full of people with

some kind of elaborate, weird belief system involving spiritual beings, a big story or narrative about the world before they were born and the world after they die, and a code of behavior.

That code of behavior would govern everything from practical morals to the duty to the dead.

Frederick Turner has a new book coming out: Natural Religion. No doubt it explores these ideas in detail.

More Studies Say That Professors are Lefties

This isn’t news. But Critical Review has just published a couple of scholarly papers that find university professors to be overwhelmingly Democrat in political orientation.

In Faculty Partisan Affiliations in All Disciplines Christopher F. Cardiff and Daniel B. Klein demonstrate that, yes, university faculty are overwhelmingly liberal and Democrat in partisan affiliation.

But the affiliation is not uniform. Liberal arts and humanities faculties are overwhelmingly left-wing. Business faculties are almost balanced in orientation. Democrat to Republican weighting ranges “from sociology (44:1) to management (1.5:1).”

It would be interesting to know how much the affiliation correlates with government grants. Sociology, for instance, is a discipline almost completely oriented towards government organization of society. Management is almost completely oriented towards business organization. You would expect sociologists to be oriented towards government spending, and business faculty less so.

In Professors and Their Politics Daniel B. Klein and Charlotta Stern takes a look not at the party affiliation but the policy views of professors. They find that professors, both Democrat and Republican, “favor government action more than the ideal types might suggest.”

Ideological diversity (as judged not only by voting behavior, but by policy views) is by far the greatest within economics. Social scientists who deviate from left-wing views are as likely to be libertarian as conservative.

Our environmental friends have something to say about this uniformity. It is dangerous for the planet. Diversity is essential for sustainability and indeed for simple survival. So when we see uniformity and monoculture our warning flags should be posted.

The question is whether the response to this unhealthy uniformity should be a frontal attack, as advocated by David Horowitz and Students for Academic Freedom, or whether an indirect approach would be better.

We know from analysis of the business world that inward-looking institutions become, over time, extremely brittle and vulnerable to change. Their members start to extract more resources from the institution than is compatible with sustainable growth. Eventually, like the Soviet Union, they collapse without warning.

Of course universities (and indeed all the education system) operates not on a profitability model but a political support model. They attract resources not by offering a superior product and low prices but by a combination of cultural and political power. People are taught to revere educational institutions and to defer to the opinions of professors. And if you cross a college professor in the public square you find that he has ways of making life difficult for you.

The problem for the education establishment is that they are spending about seven percent of GDP, and most likely wasting about 3-4 percent. Eventually that is going to cause a problem. After all, we could use that money for something useful.

Suppose you are an earnest reformer, anxious to find money to fund your vision of a better world. As you cast your eyes around for funding, wouldn’t your gaze sooner or later come to rest upon the great special interest herds of cattle grazing in tax supported pastures and not yielding very much in the way of milk or of beef?

And wouldn’t you notice that the biggest herd of all, with the most meager yield, was the education herd?

Your Teen Daughter is On Her Way to Meet a Kid She Met Online...

Are you a mother worried about your daughter’s online chat activities? According to Mary Wakefield

Around 70 per cent of all British and American early teens have regular access to the web, says the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, and of that 70 per cent, nearly 10 per cent admit to having happily trotted off, alone, to meet up with an unknown internet buddy.

Good luck to them. But suppose your daughter’s agreeable online buddy is a pedophile? How do you stop her from exploitation? One mother figured out how to knock some sense into her daughter.

The mother found out from snooping on her daughter’s email that her she was planning a forbidden rendezvous with a boy in another town. If he was a boy. So she got up a fake profile for herself on MySpace and introduced herself to her daughter. Pretty soon they were chatting about how dreadful her mother was. And pretty soon they had set up a meeting.

The reaction, when the daughter found her mother waiting for her, wasn't pretty. She was horrified, wouldn't speak for a week — but she cancelled her assignation with the boy.

Hey, it’s just a day in the life of a modern net-savvy mom.

The Moderate Muslims Meet in Denmark

Whatever happened to the moderate Muslims? That has been the refrain ever since 9/11. When President Bush spoke of Islam as a religion of peace it was presumably to encourage the moderate Muslims to come forward and declare themselves for democracy and capitalism.

Don’t look now, but the moderates have arrived. “Islam’s Moderates are On The March,” writes Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble With Islam Today.

There is reform in Pakistan. For 30 years Pakistan has jailed women for adultery under the so-called Hudood laws.

Thanks to a vocal, but religiously respectful, campaign by civil society groups, the influential Council for Islamic Ideology recently recommended reform. That move allowed President Musharraf to begin releasing some of the 1,300 women who were in jail awaiting trial.

The liberal Muslims have been meeting in Denmark. They even met with “Flemming Rose, the editor of Jyllands-Posten and publisher of the reviled cartoons.”

And here is what a few Muslims said at the conference.

Man from the Netherlands: “We, as Muslims, need to look in the mirror instead of blaming everybody else!”


Woman from Germany: “I don’t have an identity crisis. I’m Western and Muslim and grateful to be both.”

One swallow doesn’t make a summer. But you gotta say, it’s a start.

Another Reason For Israel to Beat Hezbollah

We’re all waiting around for Ehud Olmert to learn the ropes as a war-time Prime Minister of Israel. And vanquish Hezbollah.

But Charles Krauthammer reminds us that Israel has two reasons to nail down a decisive victory.

One is to ensure its own survival. The other concerns its relationship with the United States.

For decades there has been a debate in the United States over Israel's strategic value... whether, in the post-Sept. 11 world, Israel is a net asset or liability.

To put it another way, are we in the Middle East to safeguard oil supplies and defeat global Islamist terror, or are we there to defend Israel.

OK, we are there for all those things, but which is the tail and which is the dog? Hezbollah, continues Krauthammer is a major enemy of the United States, and Israel does us a huge favor by defeating it. But there is only a favor is they actually defeat it so that we can go ahead an rebuild Lebanon free of Hezbollah. But Olmert’s stumbling performance

has jeopardized not just the Lebanon operation but America's confidence in Israel as well. That confidence -- and the relationship it reinforces -- is as important to Israel's survival as its own army. The tremulous Olmert seems not to have a clue.

And that is a problem.

Now We Understand the 1930s

We all love to tut-tut about the appeasers of the 1930s. How could they have been so blind, we ask knowingly? Didn’t Hitler promise in Mein Kampf that he was going to off the Jews? Shouldn’t we have got the message on Kristallnacht when the Nazi thugs went around Germany trashing Jewish businesses? Austria? Czechoslovakia?

“Not any longer,” writes Victor Davis Hanson.

That has never been more evident than in the last three weeks, as the West has proven utterly unable to distinguish between an attacked democracy that seeks to strike back at terrorist combatants, and terrorist aggressors who seek to kill civilians.

Just as in the 1930s the West deals piecemeal with Muslim grievances.

India, after all, is in Kashmir; Russia is in Chechnya; America is in Iraq, Canada is in Afghanistan; Spain was in Iraq (or rather, still is in Al Andalus); or Israel was in Gaza and Lebanon.

So we try to understand the “freedom fighters” and their demand for “liberation.” Or at least, the folks whose meat and drink comes from identifying and appeasing oppressed communities demand that we do.

Perhaps we should view all this from a broader perspective, and realize that we cannot just mobilize the West into an all-out war against Islamism. There is, perhaps, a natural trajectory for a great global movement like Islamism and the response to it, just like it took about 150 years for the virus of socialism to take its course through the world. First it germinated in the intellectual salons of Europe, then metastatized into national politics. Then it became an epidemic as it ravaged whole nations and continents weakened by revolution and civil war.

Maybe the course of Islamism will be like that, a vast global conflict. Or maybe it is a paper tiger that will fizzle out in the sands of the Middle East.

The problem is that we don’t know. So we prefer to put off the hard decision, the moment when we have to get serious.

But that moment will surely come. Or will it?

Speaking Truth To Liberal Power

Talking-head Juan Williams is a reliable liberal voice on Fox News. David Fraser is a Briton who worked for decades as a probation officer. What do these two have in common?

The liberal intelligentsia doesn’t want to hear about their books.

Juan Williams has written Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It, in which he takes up where Bill Cosby left off. He asks the question:

"Why are so many black Americans, people born inside the gates of American opportunity, still living as if they were locked out from all America has to offer?" His answers include the debacle of big-city politics under self-serving black politicians; reparations as "a divisive dead-end idea"; the parlous state of city schools "under the alliance between the civil rights leaders and the teachers' unions"; and the transformation of rap from "its willingness to confront establishment and stereotypes" to "America's late-night masturbatory fantasy."

But according to conservative radio talk-show host Michael Reagan the MSM is ignoring his book.

On my radio show the other night Juan told me how he has been silenced by the very liberals who have always clasped him to their bosoms.

When you write a book criticizing the liberal pieties, you get the silent treatment. Still, Williams’ book is at #156 today on the Amazon bestseller list.

Then there is British writer David Fraser. This probation officer’s book is called A Land Fit for Criminals: An Insider's View of Crime, Punishment and Justice in the UK. You would think that British publishers would be falling all over themselves to publish a book like that, considering that British crime is up over 2,000 percent in the last century. But no.

Sixty publishers rejected Fraser’s book. Then, according to Theodore Dalrymple, he got lucky.

The 61st publisher to whom he sent the book accepted it. I mean no disrespect to her judgment when I say that it was her personal situation that distinguished her from her fellow publishers: for her husband’s son by a previous marriage had not long before been murdered in the street, stabbed by a drug-dealing Jamaican immigrant[.]

In his book, Fraser shows with facts and figures how the British government is utterly failing to control crime and criminals, and openly lying and covering up about it.

The police, Fraser shows, are like a nearly defeated occupying colonial force that, while mayhem reigns everywhere else, has retreated to safe enclaves, there to shuffle paper and produce bogus information to propitiate their political masters.

You wonder. Maybe the welfare state is further along to its collapse that we think, just because the depth of corruption and laxity gets slowly worse and worse with no attempt to correct its follies and its crimes. Governments generally do go this way, of course, until they are turned upside down by genuine reform or by something more radical.