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Pop Goes, Per Weigel
Posted By Stefan Monsaureus
George Will, in an Op-Ed piece titled “Suicide by Secularism,” paints a bleak picture of Europe’s future, laying its demise at the feet of secular humanism. Based on John Paul II biographer George Weigel’s new book, “The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God,” Will speaks of a shrinking reproduction rate and increasing secularism in Europe as leading, in the very near future, to Europe’s “demographic suicide.”
“What,” Weigel asks, “is happening when an entire continent, wealthier and
healthier than ever before, declines to create the human future in the most
elemental sense, by creating a next generation?” His diagnosis is that Europe’s
deepening anemia is a consequence of living on what he considers the thin gruel
of secular humanism that excludes transcendent reference points for cultural and
political life. Such reference points are, he thinks, prerequisites for freedom
understood as “the capacity to choose wisely and act well as a matter of habit.”
It seems that secularists don’t take seriously enough the biblical admonition to be fruitful and multiply. In a world contending with an ever-increasing population and a finite resource base, this should be a good thing. Will’s concern, though, seems to be that by failing to do their part to over-populate the world Europeans may abdicate control over their futures to hordes of migrating Muslims - in essence, he suggests procreation as the duty of Europeans and, by extension, Christian Americans.
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17 April 2005
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