Blog to discuss the book "The Apocalypse - Letter by Letter: A Literary Analysis of the Book of Revelation" and current events that point to the events described therein.
Time Magazine: "Want to wreck the environment? Have a baby." - Prince Philip Concurs
LONDON, May 13, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A feature in the current issue of Time Magazine asks a rhetorical question, "What's an an environmentally conscious parent to do?" Time's Pamela Paul gives the response most frequently pushed by radical environmentalists, saying the answer is 'don't have children'. In a television interview this week, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip, concurs, saying the recent increase in global food prices is due to too many children. At the same time, the Italian Prime Minister is seeking ways to turn around his country's disastrously low birth rate that currently stands at well below replacement level.
"Want to wreck the environment?" the Time feature starts, "Have a baby."
"Each bundle of joy gobbles up more of the planet's food, clogs garbage dumps with diapers, churns through plastic toys and winds up a gas-guzzling, resource-consuming grown-up like the rest of us. Still, babies are awfully cute. Given that most people still intend to procreate, what's an environmentally conscious parent to do?"
The Duke of Edinburgh followed the same environmentalist playlist when he said this week that the only way to save the planet is for people to stop having babies. Prince Philip told a television interviewer this week that the solution to the burgeoning global food crisis is simply to have fewer mouths to feed. The prince, who has four children, said, "Food prices are going up. Everyone thinks it's to do with not enough food, but it's really that demand is too great - too many people."
In recent months, food prices have risen dramatically around the world and economists are struggling to identify the reason. Most have said it is the result of rising oil prices which have affected the cost fertilizers, food transport, and industrial agriculture. The prince admitted that implementation of a massive population control movement might be a problem for governments. "Basically, it's a little embarrassing for everybody. No one quite knows how to handle it. Nobody wants their family life to be interfered with by the government."
Indeed, the only governments to try a systematic programme of population control are known to be among the world's most oppressive regimes. The communist government of China has had its One Child policy in place since 1979 when it was put in place ostensibly to alleviate social and environmental problems. The result has been social unrest, arrests of pregnant women and forced abortions and state-sponsored infanticide. It has also caused a massive and likely incurable imbalance in the population's sex ratio in favour of boys and resulted in a dramatic aging of the population. The Chinese government, while maintaining the One Child policy, is now struggling to find answers to the problem of millions of elderly with few children grown to adulthood to care for them.
Ironically, Prince Philip's wish has already come true. Currently the British birth rate stands at approximately 1.66 births per woman, well below the 2.1 level at which a population is sustained naturally.
Meanwhile, the recently elected Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, is casting about for ways to stop the plummeting of the Italian birth rate. He told journalists today that he would try to remove "material reasons" that push women to seek abortions. In his inaugural speech before parliament, Berlusconi promised "new and important expenditures for demographic development". Italy is facing a demographic crisis. The country once noted for its fervent Catholicism and dedication to large families, is aging as the birth rate drops. Italy is now the "greyest" country in the European Union, with the highest "ageing index," according to the Italian National Statistics Institute (Istat). Istat estimates that the birth rate has climbed slightly from 1995 to 2005, from 1.19 births per woman to 1.32, but the government agency said this was almost entirely the result of immigration.
Government interference with family life has long been a major goal of the environmental movement's population control goals through enforced abortion, contraception and sterilization.
It is axiomatic among environmentalists that the human population would outstrip the world's food supply. Last year, Paul Watson, founder and president of the radical Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, denounced the "human virus" said that a "radical and invasive approach" was required. Watson who has called human beings the "AIDS of the Earth" said, "Curing a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore, curing the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach."
In 2007, the UK's leading population control lobbyist group, the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), issued a warning of environmental disaster if British couples do not restrict themselves to a two-child maximum.
Our take: The following articles only confirm what we already sensed - that Europe has lost its faith and that the resulting vacuum is being filled by Islam. What Islam failed to capture by conquest it now takes by procreation and the apathy of the formerly Christian lands it has spread to without resistance. All that remains is for the tipping point to be reached when the remaining faithful are persecuted and put to the sword.
Madrid, Mar. 26, 2008 (CWNews.com) - The Union of Muslim Communities in Spain (UCIDE) claims that 1.13 million Spaniards, or 2.5% of the country's residents, are Muslim, Vatican Radio reports.
Moroccan immigrants, numbering approximately 565,000, constitute the largest Muslim group in Spain. Also, almost 35,000 native Spaniards have converted to Islam.
UCIDE is demanding Islamic religion classes in public schools in the four Spanish regions with the highest concentration of Muslims: Catalonia, with 279,000; Madrid, with 197,000; Andalusia, with 185,000; and Valencia, with 131,000.
British Muslims to outnumber Christians? London, Mar. 26, 2008 (CWNews.com) - Muslims may outnumber practicing Catholics in England and Wales by the year 2020, according to a forthcoming study.
A Christian Research study on estimates that the number of Catholics attending Sunday Mass regularly will fall to 679,000 in the next 12 years. Over the same period, the "Religious Trends" forecast says, the number of Muslims praying at English mosques will rise to 683,000.
Catholics already outnumber Anglicans attending Sunday services in England. The "Religious Trends" survey, which will be published in April, will suggest that by the year 2050, the number of practicing Muslims will exceed the number of Christians attending all Sunday church services in England.
Note: The advent of the "demographic winter" has multiple implications for the Church and points to many events described in teh Apocalypse. For one, priests come from families, most often stable ones with a married mother and father. For another, the scenes in the Apocalypse are described in terms of numbers of people in specific lands - Europe, Asia and Africa - that come into high potential as ratios change. And of course, the time of the second woe, fast approaching, is when the Church is in decline everywhere. That time can't be far off.
New documentary advocates strong families to avert "demographic winter"
Washington DC, Feb 13, 2008 / 01:25 am (CNA).- Filmmakers announced at a National Press Club press conference on Tuesday a "groundbreaking" documentary that addresses the problems of population decline and predicts a coming "demographic winter" that will result from weakened families.
Population decline is projected to seriously affect the sustainability of present societies by reducing the economic and tax bases of nations. The movie claims that as the number of elderly people swells there will be fewer and fewer young people to help care for them.
The documentary, titled "Demographic Winter: the decline of the human family," was written and directed by Rick Stout to examine developed countries that are below population replacement rates. The film brings together demographers, economists, sociologists, and civic and religious leaders to explore problems present generations will soon face due to shrinking and aging populations.
According to a press release for the film, the global birthrate has declined by 50 percent over the past half-century. Fifty nine nations, containing 44 percent of the world’s population, have birthrates below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman.
The filmmakers report that the European birthrate is 1.3 children per woman. This dearth of children is expected to cause Europe to have a shortfall of 20 million workers by 2030, while Russia could lose one-third of its population by 2050. The chilling effect this decline is projected to have on economics and culture has led some to dub the phenomenon a "demographic winter," a phrase from which the documentary takes its title.
"In nations with declining populations, who will operate the factories and farms? Who will guard the frontiers? With a graying population (a declining birthrate combined with growing longevity), who will support pension systems and otherwise care for the elderly?" asked the filmmakers in a press release.
Speakers at the press conference included Dr. Allan Carlson, the International Secretary of the World Council of Families; Maria Sophia Aguirre, a professor of economics at Catholic University; Patrick Fagan, a Senior Fellow at the Family Research Council; and Phillip Longman, author of "The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity And What To Do About It."
A three-minute trailer for the documentary is available at www.demographicwinter.com.
Note: The book spoke about the decline in membership in the religious orders, especially the missions as a kind of trigger for the Church to act in bringing about the final phase of God's judgment. This report, repeated in many other circles, shows what we in the west already knew, that new vocations to religious life are in steep decline and even with the increase in membership in the third world are barely keeping pace. A tipping point may soon be upon us as retirements and deaths soon overtake the remaining few.
Vatican Sees Decline in Religious Orders
VATICAN CITY (AP) - The number of men and women belonging to Roman Catholic religious orders worldwide has continued to decline but there has been an increase in priests assigned to dioceses, the Vatican said Tuesday.
The Vatican's statistics office said the total number of priests worldwide - those belonging to religious orders and those assigned to dioceses - stood at 405,000, with an increase of 600 diocesan clerics in 2006 over the previous year.
The total number of men and women in Catholic religious orders - mainly priests and nuns who belong to such orders as the Jesuits, Carmelites and the Franciscans - stood at 945,210 in 2006 - 7,230 fewer than the previous year, said a Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Ciro Benedettini. He said an article Monday in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, had overstated the decrease.
The overwhelming majority of people in religious orders, 753,400, are women. The Vatican has long lamented a decrease in the number of priestly vocations in Europe and elsewhere in recent years, while the number of priests has increased in Africa and Asia. The Osservatore Romano report did not give a reason for the recent figures.
Pope Benedict XVI said in a 2005 speech to Italian priests that the West was "a world that is tired of its own culture, a world that has arrived at a time in which there's no more evidence of the need for God, much less Christ, and in which it seems that man alone can make himself." Mentioning Australia, Europe and the United States, the pontiff said in that speech that "one sees that the great churches appear to be dying."
As the western family commits demographic suicide with the assistance of impotent governments and institutions, Islam moves in
The latest news from Spain is that the government is demanding an apology from the country's Catholic leaders for supporting a pro-family rally, reportedly attended by as many as 2 million people. Spain is not unique in its hostility to Catholic values but it does have its own political history with the current socialist government on one side and the Church and opposition parties on the other.
Spain also boasts one of the lowest birthrates in Europe (and the world for that matter). At the current rate, Spain's native population will be reduced by half by the year 2050 by some estimates. As well, the marriage rate is decreasing as the people adopt the prevailing post-Christian cultural trends,anti-Christian and pro-homosexual. The socialist governments of European countries speed towards economic collapse as they continue to hand out lavish welfare payments and support government funded heath care while at the same time encouraging population deflating contraception and abortion policies.
As the populations age, the few younger people will either be forced to support them or flee to more inviting countries like the US. As the governments wake up to the demographic winter they've created, they will look for other sources of labor to back fill where their barrenness has left a huge void. That supply will be Islamic as the Islamic people continue to have higher birthrates.
The military invasions the Europeans defeated in the middle of the last millennium have already been replaced by a more invisible and slow one aided and abetted by morally and economically bankrupt socialist governments.
Throughout the western world, Islamic schools and institutions are popping up with funding from the Saudi government. Even Catholic institutions like Georgetown University have accepted millions of dollars in donations to set up benign sounding "Islamic studies" departments which are actually teaching and spreading Wahbbism, the same lethal strand of Islam practiced by the terrorists of 9-11.
In The Apocalypse - Letter by Letter: A Literary Analysis of the Book of Revelation, author Steven Paul describes how the Antichrist rises in power with the help of the Great Harlot. Harlotry is defined as apostasy from the Church of Jesus Christ. Are we witnessing the birth pangs of that right now? As Europe completely abandons Christianity, commits demographic suicide and partners with Islam, the kingdom of the beast slowly congeals. All it awaits is a head.
