Sunday, 17 February 2008
Demographic winter
Have a look at this interesting project in progress: Demographic Winter. The trailer is worth looking at but you may need to pause it and leave it to load while you read a few blogs. Unfortunately the snazzy effects don't allow for cut & paste so I can only suggest looking at the tab "The Film" which gives a synopsis.
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12 comments:
Very interesting! Well at least I've done my bit!lol
Fr Tim, if you need to copy and paste Flash content in future, it's probably just easiest to hit the Print Screen button on your keyboard, then paste the clipboard contents directly into your favourite graphics manipulation program.
Fr. Tim,
It just goes to show, doesn't it:
Once upon a time…a Pope had the foresight to warn that artificial birth control methods being promoted by secularist governments and greedy pharmaceutical companies would do serious harm to society. Experts fearful of a “population explosion” were horrified. 99% of ordinary people jeered at the Pope and carried on popping pills at an increasing rate.
But the far-sighted Pope was right. The contraceptive mentality took hold. Family sizes shrank. Respect for women collapsed. Fornication, illegitimacy, homosexuality, adultery and divorce became social norms, and sexually transmitted diseases spread rapidly. Previously, babies had been the natural outcome of sex. But contraception made the relationship between sex and pregnancy resemble the relationship between smoking and lung cancer – an unfortunate side-effect of an otherwise pleasurable activity.
Despite the hopes of the statisticians, contraception did not lead to an orderly levelling-off of the population: instead, there was a population implosion. Governments, fearful that there might not be enough taxpayers to support a population rapidly ageing for want of children, welcomed immigrant workers and their families from abroad. But, because secularist politicians had lost all contact with the spiritual and civilizational roots of their own societies, they were indifferent as to the religious and cultural background of the immigrants – even though many were adherents of a religion which at root was hostile to Christendom.
These new arrivals were filled with contempt for the decadent, contraceptivized Western societies which now hosted them. For some, this contempt boiled over in acts of terrorism. The secular governments panicked, fearing that their brave new world of libertinism was under threat. The only solution: abolish all religion, especially Catholicism!
I wonder how this story will end.
Wow... scary stuff. I wonder if anyone actually says that "hey, the Catholic Church had the right idea all along!" ??
I was struck by one of the Q&A answers - that this rapid decline (losing 50% of the population in each generation) is actually more serious in terms of chaos and societal disorder than global warming. How often do you hear things like that from selfdescribed 'policy makers'?
The small comfort is that people like Mrs. Parkes and myself are adding faithful Catholics to the population who will carry on while the sterile progressives go grey and their ideologies die with them. I live very close to Steuvenville OH (where Franciscan University is located) and we know many families with more than 6 children and as many as 15. Still, we large families are in a horrid minority worldwide.
The social chaos of so few young supporting so many elderly is very frightening. And sadly, this progressive segment that has been preaching this kind of sterility and hedonism has been setting up their own few children to be prepared to euthanize the 'unnecessary' and 'unwanted'.
They may well regret having to reap the whirlwind they have sown.
The Catholic Church needs change, now more than ever, the humanity has gone from its arms.
Seem that the Church lives 200 years before today.
Thinks like go for all babes that you can get. It’s absurd.
Really do you think that anti-conceptive are sin?
Retoweb - you are in favour of contraception and yet you say that humanity has gone from us! The Church lives 2000 years before today and continues until the end of time. Secularism and the culture of death do not bring about the human values that you cherish but destroy them. Look around you - in Mexico or in Europe. May God bless you in your search for the truth.
Fr Tim Finigan, Really my intention isn’t say that the Catholic Church no lives forever, in fact the most probably is that Church live more time that we can imagine. I’m in favor for anti-conception, and this is different that abort and death and all about. I’m in favor to free decision that God gives us, to know the moment to have sex for pleasure with our love or sex for conception, or both. If the people in Europe or America have decide no Childs or less Childs for any reason, is not a reason of sin, on deeply feelings I do believe that people doing it for better live. Expect to let you clarify my thinks. am I right? what do you think?
Horrid article in yesterday's Telegraph about there being too many people on the planet and calls to limit families to 2 children. Scary implications.
Also in the Standard there is another row errupting over the catholic hospital in St John's Wood. It appears that the NHS Drs are giving abortion referrals and contraceptives.
I thought this was all sorted out along with high profile resignations.
Presumably the saga is ongoing.
Dominie
Retoweb - the problem is, as is universally found in Europe, that contraception does not prevent abortion, contraception leads to abortion because if people have sex purely for pleasure and excluding the possibility of children, they will be tempted to terminate any pregnancy that occurs - not all will succumb to the temptation but many will.
People who work with women in crisis pregnancies report that around 60% are using one or more forms of contraception.
I would suggest that the best speaker on this subject is Janet Smith. If you could listen to her talk on "Why Humanae Vitae is right", you would probably find that she raises some questions you may not have considered.
I have just published on Google Docs the notes from a talk which I gave called "The Destruction of Life and Love" which I hope gives an introduction to the Catholic Church's teaching on this subject.
Fr. Tim,
the subject is certainly of the highest importance. Still, I think that the disastrous sexual mores of the West might not be the problem, but just a symptom.
That is what Saint Paul might be suggesting in Romans 1:18-32. This might be the end of a road our civilization began travelling long ago (during the 18th century, or maybe before).
I'll quote just a paragraph from Saint Paul's letter:
24Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
26Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. 27In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.
Regards,
Javier from Argentina
Javier - that is a perceptive comment. I was looking at Romans 1 with the Carthusians the other day. It is significant that St Paul asserts not that people can know the existence of God but that they do know, and that immorality is a consequence of their rejection of him. His words certainly do seem to apply today.
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