A writer at Asia Times Online has fired a nice salvo at secularist ideas and practice as seen through the prism of babies. Link. Excerpts:
Humankind cannot abide the terror of mortality without the promise of immortality, I have argue in the past. In the absence of religion human society sinks into depressive torpor. Secular society therefore is an oxymoron, for the death of religion leads quickly enough to the death of society itself. . .
Having found no academic research that specifically measures the impact of religious belief on fertility controlling for these factors, I have done some calculations of my own using a cross section of data for 174 countries. My analysis, preliminary as it is, supports the conclusion that religious belief strongly influences fertility after controlling for wealth and education. There are lies, damned lies, and statistics, of course, and results of this kind should be viewed with caution. Still, this analysis passes the first cut of tests for rigor. . .
All the countries with high population growth rates (vertical scale) have an extremely low percentage of non-religious people (horizontal scale), while all the countries with extremely low population growth rates have a high percentage of non-religious people. There are of course some countries (e.g., France and the UK) with population growth rates above zero despite a very large proportion of non-religious. Very high fertility of immigrant populations, though, helps explain why the French and British numbers deviate from the trend. Although a sample of 83 countries permits a great deal of differentiation, the overlap of cultures due to immigration necessarily will lead to some anomalies. . .
By far the strongest predictor of population growth rates is adult literacy. That is not surprising, as illiterate people are likely to let nature take its course without any consideration for the implications of family size. Nonetheless, religious belief (measured by the log of the percentage of non-religious in the population) remains a strong predictor even when adult literacy is introduced as a control variable (at the nearly 100% confidence level). Wealth, that is, per capita GDP, shows no significance in the equation. . .
Underlying the demographic crisis of the industrial world, I believe, is a spiritual crisis. If the above analysis has any merit, the issue is not wealth, but rather the desire of men to continue to inhabit this planet. Secular ideologies - socialism, positivism, and so forth - promised a world free of bigotry and hatred, and an unending vista of peace and prosperity. Humankind, however, has vomited up these ideologies. Secular Europe and radical Islam in that sense represent two sides of the same coin: both have rejected the secular order, the latter through open battle, and the former through fatal resignation.
