Cradle of Civilization

http://tinyurl.com/yt2zz9

Mark Steyn's piece on population and the nativity. Fascinating, as always. This is the sort of piece that makes Mark Steyn my favorite columnist.

What's most interesting about it to me is the obviously self-destructive nature of a people that doesn't breed. This is the reason that Catholics consider birth control immoral, by the way: you've got to produce those babies for Jesus. Perhaps that's not the reasoning given out, but whether by design or by accident it really helps to create a movement that's going to be around in a few centuries.

This is the real problem with the dechristianization of Europe. They replaced a religion, a forward-looking ideology that lays out a reason to preserve the world, with a secular guilt trip. That only works for so long... sooner or later your people cease caring. When they're getting on in years they're going to care more about living out the last of their days in comfort than they are about sacrificing anything for the good of future generations; it's the foolhardy young that risk life and limb to discover new wonders and search for adventure and wealth. Compound this by rapidly aging a population because all of the reasons and means for having children have evaporated and you've got Europe as it is now and as it is increasingly becoming: old, soft, concerned more with who gets the government butter than whether or not you've got enough guns to stave off the enemy.

Europe is doomed to becoming an expansion of the Islamic trans-national identity at this point... it's only a matter of time. The real question before us is: will they be Wahhabist crazies intent that the US has no willpower to resist them? Or at the very least will they be Islamic nations that we can work with? I suppose that's up to who wins our elections and our wars.