The liberal progressives do not have a sustainable method of maintaining the species. In three or four generations, they will be gone forever, just like the Protestant Shaker movement in the United States that denied the procreative aspect of sex.

Yes, the Shakers had celibacy for everyone, not just the clergy.
You think they would have understood the long run ramifications of this policy, but this is what they did.

I don't know. This is a tricky one and we need to keep things separate and be clear what we are talking about. Many people with terminal cancer die when they can't eat anymore. In fact, that is the natural way to die. And yes, many people with terminal cancer require pain meds to alleviate that suffering.

I watched someone die of pancreatic cancer once. He stopped eating and drinking naturally as it made him extremely sick to do either. He was not routinely starved and dehydrated, or forced . It was a natural process and there was no point in forcefully shoving liquids down his throat with a tube at that point, in fact, that would have been cruel and unnatural. Then he went into a coma, as one will, and died peacefully at home. There were pain medications administered of course, PC is an extremely painful disease from the get-go.

I also saw someone die of colon cancer. The final cause of death was the cancer in the lungs causing fluid to build up, basically suffocating him. Drugs were given to relieve that excruciating suffering. Did they eventually contribute to his respiratory depression? Possibly. Let's remember the principle of double-effect too.

How depressing! But I guess there are none so blind as those who WILL NOT see. I've been to Amsterdam once and had no desire to ever go back.

I realize that this may be off topic, currently combat troops from the Netherlands are fighting very effectively in Afghanistan, according to many reports. There must be some vitality left in the Dutch people to produce these warriors. There must be some hope left among the rot. The comparison between the Dutch and the soft German troops is striking to those who have seen and described them.

I think they understood the long run ramifications, but I think their basic theology didn't understand the long run nature of the world.

If I remember right, they were pre-millenial rapturists- in other words, they spent their days living for Christ and their nights hoping that they'd be called up to Heaven. Long term thinking is not within those who expect the world to end tomorrow.

Which beggars the question- what is the excuse of the liberal progressives to adopt this euthanasia of the species? The shakers, sure, expected the 2nd coming of Jesus Christ and therefore the obsolescence of procreation. What is similar in left-wing liberal thinking to that, which makes the future so helpless that you would not subject a child to it?

Menstrual extraction is so painful that I can't imagine it being common practice.

This works for Holland as well as America, for any society that has abandoned the concept of community joined together by the Church (or for that matter, I guess, any religion as a civilizing force).

Once we start to tolerate other value systems than our own, do we as fallen human beings, automatically start becoming morally relativistic? Is not the very act of admitting that perhaps somebody else might have "the fullness of truth", create the idea that maybe the Church's way isn't the only way to live?

And once that happens, isn't all the rest, right down to the rot, predictable?

Yeah, I can't imagine then what some abortions are like then... At least with birth you have some awe and joy at helping bring a life into the world.

Well, with the ageing population in the west, the topic of Euthenasia is only going to get bigger and bigger. Many elderly who have been brought up without the faith and do not understand the redemptive nature of suffering will start to ask for Euthenasia and the state will be only too happy to oblige because that will reduce its health care costs, free up some hospital beds etc. This problem is certainly not restricted to the Netherlands

Once again, I'm not one who even likes freedom of religion, let alone worships it, and it's one of the *big* reasons I haven't gone fourth degree in Knights of Columbus yet, because I have some serious belief issues with the Constitution, and the fourth degree is patriotism.

Having said that, why isn't Euthanasia a first amendment issue? We demand free exercise of our religion- if those "elderly who have been brought up without the faith and do not understand the redemptive nature of suffering" choose to ask for Euthanasia (or actually, much more common in Oregon since the Death With Dignity act came into being, the popular choice seems to be "don't poison me with barbituates, but don't take me to the hospital either, let me die at home under care of a Hospice nurse"), isn't that free exercise of their religion?

It has occurred to me, and I've mentioned it in other threads, that the easy way to win the culture war is simply to surrender and wait- because the other side is fast committing suicide, and once they are gone, they will not be replaced.

So considering we're over 6 billion people and headed toward 9 billion some of this handwringing over failure to propagate is frankly absurd. Unless the concern is that other people (i.e. non-white Christians) are breeding, in which case some of the posters are simply promoting a thinly veiled form of racial and religious bigotry. I don't really see another explanation as there is no scientific model (and certainly no current trend) that suggests world populations are going to decline any time soon.

According to the most recent estimates of unused land and carrying capacity, 9 billion is just a drop in the bucket as far as the Earth's carrying capacity is concerned. Try 30 million if we were just to get to the amount of food available *PER PERSON* that we had in 1900. There's a reason why we're paying farmers not to grow things right now.



World populations no. Europeans as a sub-species are already at ZPG or below; Asians as a sub-species are below ZPG. In fact, seeing as how it is 2009 already, the Club of Rome numbers from the 1970s showing exponential growth in the human species says we should have all been dead from war or pollution already, with a population of 60 billion.

No, the concern is with certain political groups whose avowed purpose is extinction of the human species. They generally fall into two groups that I call the environazis and the greedy. The first group wants the human species gone entirely so that other species can take over. The second wants *MOST* of the human species gone, so that their own consumption of resources can increase.

And they've done a darn good job in North America and Europe of spreading their message.

"It would be a tragedy if the unique people and culture of the Netherlands, for love of license and convenience, decided to cease to exist."

The demographic short on "The New Muslim Conquest" posted on this site on 5/1/09 claims that no society has ever recovered from a birth rate of 1.9. No European nation to my knowledge has a birth rate higher than this, and several leading nations, including Germany, Italy, and Spain, are at or below the 1.3 rate at which the video claims it is statistically impossible to recover. The average rate of the European Union is 1.38, well below that historical 1.9 point of no return and perilously close to the 1.3 impossibility. I think the die has already been cast here. European nations will most likely not preserve their current ethnic identities, even if some of their cultures manage to survive as minority groups.

My understanding was that if current demographic trends continue, the world's population is expected to peak at 7 billion around mid-century, then begin contracting. See the work of the Population Research Institute, for instance, for discussions of the subject:
http://pop.org/basic-concepts



Can you provide a source for this, Ted? I've heard population control advocates argue that the seven billion estimate projected for mid-century is greater than the earth's resources (not physical space, but resources) could support, but I've never been able to counter this claim.

The UN (no big fan of the Catholic Church) uses a world population model with three options using high, medium and low birth rate variants. Over the last thirty years, the low variant rates have been the most historically accurate. According to the low variant projection, the Earth's population will add another billion people or so over the next thirty years, peaking around 8.02 billion people in the year 2040, and then it will begin to decline. Even using the historically inaccurate worst case high variant, the total world population is less than 10.5 billion in 2050.

Check their online database here: http://esa.un.org/unpp/

Ted, the problem with a wait-them-out strategy is that we as Christians should not be employing strategies. We are not fighting a war to save culture, and biding our time to resuscitate it isn't an option because in the meantime, countless souls will be lost forever. "For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places," (Eph 6:12). Our goal isn't to save America - cultures come and go, that much is a given, and it is not a bad thing, this ebb and flow of history, any more than the ebb and flow of the tide. It's just a fact.

Our goal is to save souls. If we passively try to wait out the culture around us, so much will be swept away with it, so much that is worth saving. "The other side," those hapless souls in thrall to the enemy of souls, DO reproduce - not biologically, as you pointed out, but spiritually. They glamorize evil, conceal its true nature, and thereby lead more and more souls into destruction. Our own children will be sucked out with the retreating tide if we do not rush in to save them.

The trick is to fight without being combative, to war without being aggressive, to engage in hostilities without becoming hostile. The key to the trick is simple, but very difficult, and so generally avoided, oftentimes even by those of us on "the right side." Prayer is the solution. In prayer we come to know more intimately our Father's great power and love, and we can be shored up in faith, hope, and charity so much that we become irresistible as role models. Prayer is the solution. Prayer is the solution. Prayer is the solution.

I am not advocating quietism or pietism or withdrawal from the world of action. In prayer, our Father will fill us with the Holy Spirit so that we will intuitively know when and how to act so as to bring about His glorification and the salvation of souls. So many good people have slipped and fallen, fleeing from goodness and the light, because they knew not prayer and had always been trying to please our Father, to earn His love. How many good deeds are robbed of their testimonial power when their crowning achievement is scandal - a good, Christian politician who winds up in bed with his secretary; the beloved priest who defects and breaks his vow of celibacy; the social worker who gradually dries up and becomes a paper pusher. Prayer, anchored firmly in the sacraments and nurtured tenderly by God's Word, is the only thing that can sustain us in this very dangerous spiritual pursuit.

Ted, the problem with a wait-them-out strategy is that we as Christians should not be employing strategies. We are not fighting a war to save culture, and biding our time to resuscitate it isn't an option because in the meantime, countless souls will be lost forever. "For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places," (Eph 6:12). Our goal isn't to save America - cultures come and go, that much is a given, and it is not a bad thing, this ebb and flow of history, any more than the ebb and flow of the tide. It's just a fact.

Our goal is to save souls. If we passively try to wait out the culture around us, so much will be swept away with it, so much that is worth saving. "The other side," those hapless souls in thrall to the enemy of souls, DO reproduce - not biologically, as you pointed out, but spiritually. They glamorize evil, conceal its true nature, and thereby lead more and more souls into destruction. Our own children will be sucked out with the retreating tide if we do not rush in to save them.

The trick is to fight without being combative, to war without being aggressive, to engage in hostilities without becoming hostile. The key to the trick is simple, but very difficult, and so generally avoided, oftentimes even by those of us on "the right side." Prayer is the solution. In prayer we come to know more intimately our Father's great power and love, and we can be shored up in faith, hope, and charity so much that we become irresistible as role models. Prayer is the solution. Prayer is the solution. Prayer is the solution.

I am not advocating quietism or pietism or withdrawal from the world of action. In prayer, our Father will fill us with the Holy Spirit so that we will intuitively know when and how to act so as to bring about His glorification and the salvation of souls. So many good people have slipped and fallen, fleeing from goodness and the light, because they knew not prayer and had always been trying to please our Father, to earn His love. How many good deeds are robbed of their testimonial power when their crowning achievement is scandal - a good, Christian politician who winds up in bed with his secretary; the beloved priest who defects and breaks his vow of celibacy; the social worker who gradually dries up and becomes a paper pusher. Prayer, anchored firmly in the sacraments and nurtured tenderly by God's Word, is the only thing that can sustain us in this very dangerous spiritual pursuit.

This changed pretty recently- It was only last July that the big two reports came out debunking overpopulation as anything other than a political problem. Africa alone, which under current politics can't even feed itself, could feed the world.

Tiny URL Codes (it won't let me post links again, come on guys, get this fixed!): lcvu4o and nfcj5w

These two reports are the final nail in the coffin of Malthus. He was simply WRONG- the combination of new permaculture techniques (which use edible wild plants instead of monoculture agriculture to increase yield with minimal work), modern monoculture techniques, aquaculture, and new understanding in biology, basically has tripled the amount of sustainable arable land in the last 30 years.

Unfortunately, a huge swath of that land is under control of the anti-reason Islamic regimes.

By the principle of invincible ignorance- those souls that would have been Catholic, had they been allowed to be, will be saved, regardless of what we do- we turn them over to the Grace of Christ, just like we do unbaptized infants, and the Mercy of God the Father.

One of the hallmarks of a mature, rational, religion is patience. Patience born out of the sure knowledge that truth is a survival trait, and a lack of truth is not a survival trait.

Evolution- God's ultimate engineering method- takes care of the rest.

I'm not saying we shouldn't pray. I'm not saying we shouldn't work against the Culture of Death. I'm saying that we will win- we can be secure in the knowledge that we WILL win, and thus we need not panic.