I'm not one to panic but Chester the Bear's comment on one of my posts got me thinking...
Said the soft cuddly one: "Personally, I think it's the beginning of the end of the world as we know it, and your kids had better learn Chinese and Arabic if they're going to get anywhere."
It's certainly true that western, white christians are not procreating at the same rate as other religions and races.
This from www.danielpipes.org:
Indigenous Europeans are dying out. Sustaining a population requires each woman on average to bear 2.1 children; in the European Union, the overall rate is one-third short, at 1.5 a woman, and falling. One study finds that, should current population trends continue and immigration cease, today's population of 375 million could decline to 275 million by 2075.To keep its working population even, the E.U. needs 1.6 million immigrants a year; to sustain the present workers-to-retirees ratio requires an astonishing 13.5 million immigrants annually.
AND
Europe is increasingly a post-Christian society, one with a diminishing connection to its tradition and its historic values. The numbers of believing, observant Christians has collapsed in the past two generations to the point that some observers call it the "new dark continent." Already, analysts estimate Britain's mosques host more worshippers each week than does the Church of England.
Some 5% of the E.U., or nearly 20 million persons, presently identify themselves as Muslims; should current trends continue, that number will reach 10% by 2020. If non-Muslims flee the new Islamic order, as seems likely, the continent could be majority-Muslim within decades.
The National Intelligence Council projects that Europe's Muslim population will double by 2025.
I don't know who this guy is (and honestly he is a bit "worst case scenario") but he and Chester have a point. Are we a dying race? And if so, what on earth does that look like for us?
It's not that we could become the minority in and of itself - I'm all for the melting pot theory - but the fact that the projected majority hate us, for the most part, and despise our way of life is pretty damning.
While not all Muslims are this way by any stretches of the imagination, there does seem to be a lack of desire to "melt", so to speak. It's more like oil and water, with only one able to rise to the top.
What do you think?
Is this just part of life's pendulum and eventually it will swing in the other direction before any major, radical world realignment happens? OR are we really staring down a future where all women wear burkas and the call to prayer will be heard on loudspeakers in London?
3 comments:
You know, I don't know what I think. Part of me is concerned, but part of me is like, well, so what? I don't know that the fall of Christianity is a bad thing, and I don't know that the rise of Islam is a bad thing. I literally don't know. I suspect that things will shake out the way they're supposed to, and we'll end up with some good things from the past, some bad, some good things from the future, some bad.
I tend to think this us and them, we're a dying race thing is not really true, we've been a dying race since day one. Or a rising race, or however you want to put it. In other words, I think there's a great deal of alarmism for the fate of the world and of civilization in general. But hasn't there always been? Isn't there always a serious threat to our way of life? Aren't we always in danger of being drowned out by [insert threat here]?
Look at gay marriage, for example. To extreme right-wingers it is the thing that will bring down society as we know it. Family values? Forget about it! Sanity? Law? Done.
This is not to say that extremists aren't awful in every way imaginable, but I don't think they are an indication of how the world will go overall.
And yes, maybe learning Chinese and Arabic is actually a good idea. But I personally don't view that as a threat.
The simple problem is that Western Civilisation has become weak.
We lack the guts to stand up for ourselves, and for what we believe in.
We're all far to pre-occupied with how long Paris spent in prison, or how much David and Posh paid for the LA residence, that we are about the things that really matter.
All we care about is how soon we can have that new iPhone, or a new LCD TV. We've become facile shadows of the great minds that made Western Civilisation great and prosperous.
We cower in the corner of political correctness, and fail dismally to stand up for what we believe. When we do, the bleating, bleeding hearts step up to intervene, makign us appear even weaker.
Finally, we have worthless, corrupt politicians who display a dismal lack of leadership, and who are more interested in winning the next election, or even the next opinion pole, than they are about making decisions for the good of future generations.
In a sense, we deserve our fate, because there are people out there with more passion and will to attack what we have than we have to defend it.
My thought: we don't need Muslim to separate us. For instance, do you go to an Episcopal chuch in the US? We're Anglicans - my husband is Brit, but we don't even agree with the Episcopal Church in the US.
And for generations the overseas Chinese (and Africans) have so ready to adapt the Western culture, but sadly they don't get far, they are still being discriminated against. So if I am of another race, say Middle-esterner, I'd look at the histories of overseas Chinese/ Africans and say, what the heck, I might as well go out dominating with a bang!
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