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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction
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To: Sully- who wrote (71362)4/22/2009 9:46:16 PM
From: Sully-  Read Replies (1) of 90947
 
A Society Without Religion Is Like a Day Without Sunshine

Mark Krikorian
The Corner

All this voluntary extinction business, along with the very real manifestation of that impulse in collapsing fertility in most of the developed world, raises an important question, one that maybe the Secular Right folks would also grapple with: Can humanity survive over the long term without religion?

I don't mean whether some non-religious individuals will decide to have children; many obviously will. But can an entire society persist in the absence of widespread belief in some sort of supernatural principle that humanity somehow fits into, even if only a feeble "moralistic therapeutic deism"?

Secularism was an elite phenomenon until a generation or two ago, so we're only now seeing the results of what amounts to a mass social experiment in irreligion; but the experiment is compromised where it's furthest developed, in Europe, by the onslaught of Islam. Europe's suicide in the face of Islam suggests that the religious will displace the irreligious, but we may have to wait for an Islamized Europe to itself become secular (as will happen eventually) to see whether a secular society is viable over the long term, or just a prelude to extinction.

corner.nationalreview.com
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