And the liberals in our country are rushing headlong toward the abyss. They think they're soooo very cosmopolitan and sophisticated, don't you know.
Please define what the author means by "civilizational morale"?
Should be retitled "Is Europe Committing Suicide". The answer: most definately YES.
The Bible is ever true and we reject it and its God to our peril. "Be not deceived. God is not mocked. Whatever a man sows, that he will reap" (Gal. 6:7), is an everlasting warning. When a society kicks God out of its consciousness, He will allow the vacuum to be filled with materialism, violence, and evil of every sort. After centuries of human experience, one would think mankind would get the message, but we persist in our stubborn rebellion and prove the innate power of sin in the human heart, just as the Scripture says. God gave us the way to live and the way to die and live again. Don't blame Him for the mess man makes of the world.
That depends on the question.
Noted Christian apologist and scholar Ravi Zacharias once said that Christianity was not dying in Europe. It was already dead there.
When the heart and soul of Europe (its Christian roots) died, the leaves shriveled. What is left is a rotting husk and stump.
"Is Europe Dying?"
YES
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the problem with Europe is that the smart ones came here. Think of it as a sort of rapture. The enterprising and adventurous, along with those unwilling to put up with whatever awful hand Europe dealt them, packed up their wives and kids and caught the first available ship for America. Left behind were the morally corrupt elitist and aristocratic governments that pretended to be democracies and the poor suckers that trusted them.
We may be seeing the Ayn Rand scenerio being played out in Europe. The capitalists abandoned the continent and look what happened: mass slaughters that would make Robespierre and Cromwell puke.
Maybe this is a continuing European cycle.
Remember the Neanderthals also disappeared. Perhaps their loss of civilizational morale resulted in lower birthrates and an eventual extinction.
Socialism = Europe dieing....
Another take on this topic can be found in "Civilization Without Religion?" By Russell Kirk
http://www.townhall.com/hall_of_fame/KIRK/kirk404.html
Excerpt -
"From what source did humankind's many cultures arise? Why, from cults. A cult is a joining together for worship-that is, the attempt of people to commune with a transcendent power. It is from association in the cult, the body of worshippers, that human community grows. This basic truth has been expounded in recent decades by such eminent historians as Christopher Dawson, Eric Voegelin, and Arnold Toynbee.
Once people are joined in a cult, cooperation in many other things becomes possible. Common defense, irrigation, systematic agriculture, architecture, the visual arts, music, the more intricate crafts, economic production and distribution, courts and government -- all these aspects of a culture arise gradually from the cult, the religious de.
Out of little knots of worshippers, in Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, India, or China, there grew up simple cultures; for those joined by religion can dwell together and work together in relative peace. Presently such simple cultures may develop into intricate cultures, and those intricate cultures into great civilizations. American civilization of our era is rooted, strange though the fact may seem to us, in tiny knots of worshippers in Palestine, Greece, and Italy, thousands of years ago. The enormous material achievements of our civilization have resulted, if remotely, from the spiritual insights of prophets and seers.
But suppose that the cult withers, with the elapse of centuries. What then of the culture that is rooted in the cult? What then of the civilization which is the culture's grand manifestation? ...."
Another take on this topic can be found in "Civilization Without Religion?" By Russell Kirk
http://www.townhall.com/hall_of_fame/KIRK/kirk404.html
Excerpt -
"From what source did humankind's many cultures arise? Why, from cults. A cult is a joining together for worship-that is, the attempt of people to commune with a transcendent power. It is from association in the cult, the body of worshippers, that human community grows. This basic truth has been expounded in recent decades by such eminent historians as Christopher Dawson, Eric Voegelin, and Arnold Toynbee.
Once people are joined in a cult, cooperation in many other things becomes possible. Common defense, irrigation, systematic agriculture, architecture, the visual arts, music, the more intricate crafts, economic production and distribution, courts and government -- all these aspects of a culture arise gradually from the cult, the religious de.
Out of little knots of worshippers, in Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, India, or China, there grew up simple cultures; for those joined by religion can dwell together and work together in relative peace. Presently such simple cultures may develop into intricate cultures, and those intricate cultures into great civilizations. American civilization of our era is rooted, strange though the fact may seem to us, in tiny knots of worshippers in Palestine, Greece, and Italy, thousands of years ago. The enormous material achievements of our civilization have resulted, if remotely, from the spiritual insights of prophets and seers.
But suppose that the cult withers, with the elapse of centuries. What then of the culture that is rooted in the cult? What then of the civilization which is the culture's grand manifestation? ...."
This looks like an excrept from Weigil's new book, "The Cube and the Cathedral". I started reading it last night.
Europe's below-replacement-level birthrates have created situations that would have been unimaginable when the 1940s and early 1950s. By the middle of this century, if present fertility patterns continue, 60 percent of the Italian people will have no personal experience of a brother, a sister, an aunt, an uncle, or a cousin;[1] Germany will lose the equivalent of the population of the former East Germany; and Spain's population will decline by almost one-quarter. Europe is depopulating itself at a rate unseen since the Black Death of the fourteenth century.[2] And one result of that is a Europe that is increasingly "senescent" (as British historian Niall Ferguson has put it).[3]This is why religion in public service matters more than bureaucratic skills.[...]
Take, for example, the proposal made by a French Jesuit, Henri de Lubac, during World War II. De Lubac argued that Europe's torments in the 1940s were the "real world" results of defective ideas, which he summarized under the rubric "atheistic humanism"-the deliberate rejection of the God of the Bible in the name of authentic human liberation. This, de Lubac suggested, was something entirely new. Biblical man had perceived his relationship to the God of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus as a liberation[;...] biblical man believed that he was obliged to work toward the humanization of the world. One of European civilization's deepest and most distinctive cultural characteristics is the conviction that life is not just one damn thing after another; Europe learned that from its faith in the God of the Bible.
The proponents of nineteenth-century European atheistic humanism turned this inside out and upside down. Human freedom, they argued, could not coexist with the God of Jews and Christians. Human greatness required rejecting the biblical God, according to such avatars of atheistic humanism as Auguste Comte, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche. And here, Father de Lubac argued, were ideas with consequences-lethal consequences, as it turned out. For when you marry modern technology to the ideas of atheistic humanism, what you get are the great mid-twentieth century tyrannies-communism, fascism, Nazism.
Well, no. That first approach to history has antecedents reaching all the way back to Herodotus. And the second approach subsumes the first (at least in the opinion of the Marxists). The sort of demographic approach to history that the author is alluding to here dates at least back to Gibbon and probably far beyond. Not a promising beginning.
Wow. Printed and read this on my busride to work. I must read it again just to take in everything there.
Populism and Nationalism Versus Globalism
The new constitution is dead. New Europe has been rejected by the people in whose name it is being advanced. Repudiated, as well, were the political elites who campaigned for that constitution. But though Brussels is unloved and Jacques Chirac has lost France, this was no vote of affection for or confidence in Bush’s America.This was a nationalist-populist protest demanding that France be France and Holland be Holland, and to blazes with the world. It was a vote against the free-trade globalism of George Bush and the Reagan-Thatcher economic model the European Left decries as “savage capitalism.”
It was a victory of the Old Right
[...]
But this Right-Left backlash against globalization and integration of Europe cannot save Europe. For the de-Christianized EU does not contain a single nation where the birth rate is sufficient to replace the population. Europe has begun to die.
[...]
In the rout and humiliation of a European establishment that is committed to open borders and free-trade globalism, by a Left-Right coalition, they may be staring at their own future. For that same Left-Right coalition is forming in the United States—against free-trade globalism, CAFTA, open-borders, amnesty for illegal aliens, Social Security reform and American empire.
all the "isms" of the last century spring from this well, and it seems to me the courageous, innovative and creative souls that could have been leading Europe into the 21st and 22nd century were never born because their courageous, innovative and creative grandfathers died when ordered by stupid french (british, german and russian) generals to rise out of the trenches and advance against machine guns in WWI, and the grim reaper had WWII waiting in the wings to make sure it caught those who got away the first time...
Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks
bump
bump for later