Free Republic

I first learned of the Church of Euthanasia in high school, when a friend of mine gave me one of their bumper stickers. It was years later, when the Internet became a part of our lives, that I finally looked them up. I’m telling you about them today because this pro-death cult is the logical end result of our death-obsessed culture. The “church’s” origin story is both ridiculous and disturbing: The Church of Euthanasia was inspired by a dream, in which Rev. Chris Korda confronted an alien intelligence known as The Being who speaks for the inhabitants of Earth in...

Or are you one of their mindless bots who believes you are somehow special? At Liberty's Torch, Weetabix asked me a question whose answer is too long to put into a small comment. Pascal - I must admit up front that a surfeit of current projects has undermined my normal willingness to research - have you any links to further explain the "Malthusian Sustainability nuts?"  The answer is even too long for a single post, but I need try at least this once. For my recent thoughts, the Sustainability label at my blog will provide you many examples of news...

Peter Singer's June 6th essay for the New York Times about whether or not we should be the "last generation" to humans to live, suffer, and mess up the planet elicited much response (here is my post about it), and Singer has now responded to some of the responders. If nothing else, it confirms what his first essay demonstrated fairly well, despite its relative brevity: Singer's arguments are generally pedestrian and hollow, as well as sometimes incoherent. For example: The claims made by some readers that my essay reveals philosophers to be gloomy, depressed people are therefore wide of the...

... Most thoughtful people are extremely concerned about climate change. Some stop eating meat, or flying abroad on vacation, in order to reduce their carbon footprint. But the people who will be most severely harmed by climate change have not yet been conceived. If there were to be no future generations, there would be much less for us to feel to guilty about. So why don’t we make ourselves the Last Generation on Earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required — we could party our way into extinction! Of course, it...

Director Mike Judge’s new animated television series “The Goode Family” is a send-up of a clan of environmentalists who live by the words “What would Al Gore do?” Gerald and Helen Goode want nothing more than to minimize their carbon footprint. They feed their dog, Che, only veggies (much to the pet’s dismay) and Mr. Goode dutifully separates sheets of toilet paper when his wife accidentally buys two-ply. And, of course, the family drives a hybrid. On Wednesday at 9 p.m., “The Goode Family” will have its premiere on ABC and become the first animated series on the network’s prime-time...

According to Kathryn Joyce, sneer-and-smear artist for The Nation, those who are concerned about the worldwide decline in birthrates are -- to put it mildly -- racist, neo-Nazis, who have a hidden agenda and (under the guise of demographic winter) are engaged in our age-old quest to control women's bodies. The Nation is this nation's oldest and largest-circulation left-wing journal (outside of The New York Times, of course). Joyce's screed, "Missing: The 'Right' Babies," will appear in the March 3 print edition, but is currently available online. Joyce believes -- with the faith of one immune to facts and logic...

The Global Warming movement has been compared to a religion -- albeit one without God, but with a vision of sin and repentance, damnation and salvation. Not quite. Real religion is about improving the human condition by encouraging moral conduct in obedience to the will of God. The proponents of Global Warming are creating a suicide cult, which -- if followed to its logical conclusion -- will lead to human extinction. Forget the Kyoto Treaty. Forget the Luddite Lieberman-Warner bill to cut so-called greenhouse gas emissions by 70% by 2050, which would cost the U.S. an estimated $1 trillion and...

This is the time of year, as Hillary Clinton once put it, when Christians celebrate “the birth of a homeless child” — or, in Al Gore’s words, “a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child.” Just for the record, Jesus wasn’t “homeless.” He had a perfectly nice home back in Nazareth. But he happened to be born in Bethlehem. It was census time and Joseph was obliged to schlep halfway across the country to register in the town of his birth. Which is such an absurdly bureaucratic over-regulatory cockamamie Big Government nightmare it’s surely only a matter of time...

As I say, the above demographic audit has become something of an annual tradition in this space. But here's something new that took hold in the year 2007: A radical antihumanism, long present just below the surface, bobbed up and became explicit and respectable. In Britain, the Optimum Population Trust said that "the biggest cause of climate change is climate changers – in other words, human beings," and professor John Guillebaud called on Britons to voluntarily reduce the number of children they have. "Every person who is born," says Toni Vernelli, "produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases and...

Mark Steyn, a Canadian journalist and columnist widely read in the United States and Great Britain, whose current book, "America Alone," is an alarming portrait of a rapidly rising Islamic Europe, has served his cause better than he could have hoped. Not only does his book convincingly demonstrate the catastrophic demographic consequence of Europe's descending birth rate and ascending Muslim population, it did one thing more. The only review of it that I could find in Canada's largely liberal print media showed unmistakably that the liberal Western world has no solution to the problem. It is utterly baffled. It doesn't...

A funny thing happened to me the other day when my wife and I had, thank God, another baby (a boy). Many of my friends didn’t seem all that happy for me. Sure, they went through the motions of smiles and congratulations. But it was evident that many thought me insane. Why would a young man and his wife ruin their lives with eight children? Who could afford the day-school bills? Didn’t we want to live life a little, and not just be burdened with kids? It got downright surreal when a European film company pressed me, while my wife...

A seven-month pregnant woman - her belly vast - was at a supper with a friend. He, being of the family type, told her she was very lucky to be expecting a baby. He was the first person who had said such a thing, she told him. [snip] How is it that in cultures all over the world pregnancies prompt congratulations rather than anxious questions about childcare? How is it that in a culture equipped, materially and medically, to ease child-rearing, we are so reluctant to enjoy new life? [snip] The answer, I would argue, is that a bias against...