Macron says Africa’s main problem is ‘7-8 children per woman,’

That's 100% false. Merkel made a deal to import 250,000 Syrian refugees a year, but 12,000,000 immigrants overall. The reason she gives is NOT humanitarian, but to provide replacement bottom level workers since indigenous Germans apparently mostly are sterile now.

 

They are coming for the welfare money and jobs. It has little to do with wars. What is most pitiful when you see pictures of the "refugees," is they are nearly all men who have abandoned their wives and children. Real scum of the earth types.

 

The population bomb of African is off the charts if you look at the stats. Modern medicine has produced a course of inevitable mass starvation and civil wars.

 

The idea that the Europeans can develop Africa to such an extent that Africans won't want to immigrate to Europe is nonsensical from the get-go.

Stopping the flow means plugging the leak. That means significant European involvement in North Africa.

 

I am not sure they adopted anything, or at least not for very long, in place of religious belief.

China has become rather materialistic in the sense of gaining meaning in life through gaining material possessions.

One of the most remarkable things I ever saw was when I went to a Cultural Revolution themed restaurant with a Chinese family. The young waiters and waitresses were all dressed like Red Guards and at one point they all started singing some songs from the era.

An older man at the table jumped up and started singing and dancing along with them, with tears in his eyes. He was reliving a time of great suffering but also of great meaning, a time where there was something larger than his own life. But a time whose promise was broken, was a lie.

It is probable that they will follow the path of other Western nations that adopted this philosophy into decline and oblivion.

 

Ah, but meditation is not necessarily religion, or emblematic of a belief system. In fact Buddhism is not a religion. It is a collection of learned means, meditation being one of the primary ones, to accomplish exactly what you suggest. Quiet what they refer to as "monkey mind", and bring us to the present moment.

 

Many experts declared long ago that European and American "humanitarian efforts" in Africa were the worst possible thing to do. There is no avoiding this evolving to "what's in it for us" and to try to manipulate all to our purposes.

Social development and evolution can necessitate civil wars, revolutions, turmoil and chaos. All we do is compound the problem. Just enough medicine and food to keep their birth rates and population growth going off the charts. Its like feeding a herd of deer in the winter - next winter there will be 3 times as many starving, then 10 times, 50 times, 100 times.

Africa has to work this out themselves. We should completely state out of it. Let nature take and human nature take its course there, however it plays out. They more we try to save them, the more we cripple them.

 

While it certainly would be a funny looking Europe without it's great cathedrals, that doesn't mean it was the only way to accomplish cohesion from the dawn of agriculture onward. It is the one we, Europeans and Euro-Americans, are most familiar with, but is it the only way for humans to share experiences, wants, and needs, as a unit?

 

Individual Chinese in the West seem rather eclectic in their beliefs, though, often having some sympathy for more than one religion. Maybe mainland Chinese will eventually be the same.

 

IMO faith is just a faster way to get to the same result. IMO many people have missed the mark as to what "religion: really is, or, at least, was intended to be by the founder/s. So much quibble over a word that IMO is no longer properly understood.....

 

He should suggest all couples involve men with women 25 years older.
It worked for him not fathering children.

 

The Kremlin is interested in the rise of ultra-nationalism, racism and xenophobia in Europe. Those might even lead to the dissolution of the EU. Foreign policy in Putin's Russia is based on the old "divide and conquer" strategy.

There are some posters here who seem to push Kremlin's line in their posts. Peddling the God given morality is one way to accomplish the above. Sowing fear of the "other" - mostly Muslims - is another. Individual rights and human dignity, the basic values of secularism and atheism, are the ghosts that plague every totalitarian leader's wet dreams, hence the holy crusade against them.

 

What--now it's pushing the Kremlin line to support Western civilization and the beliefs that rest at its core?

Baloney.

 

How can religious fundamentalism - this is what we discuss here - protect core beliefs of Western civilizations? No, there must be other ways.

I'm not arguing against religions, or belief in God. I'm arguing against religious fundamentalism and the revival of crusades.

 

I'm not completely confident I know where Pisa is coming from having read only a few posts, but on first blush he/she has a point. Crude nationalism plays into Putins hand.

 

Chinese Christians are unusual in China. It is often said that 10% of Chinese are Christian although I don't think there is a solid basis for this number.

Christianity is suppressed in China but you will occasionally see a Church or run across a believer. Islam is more openly practiced in the western province of Xinjiang but sometimes the authorities will crack down on Muslims, too. Muslims will sometimes riot or stage terrorist attacks.

Buddhism has been totally co-opted, and Buddhist temples are common.

But the average citizen has no religion.

 

Offhand, the only basis for non-religious unity and motivation I can think of is racism.

Being a member of a superior race is both a basis for the dignity of an individual and a motivation to sacrifice to perpetuate the race.

Couples would be willing to give up their vacations in the Seychelles and women to interrupt their careers so that the superior race might fulfill its destiny.

What do you have in mind?

 

France has certainly had a glorious history but of course those on this side of the Atlantic tend to think more of WWII France, the Paris and the France we knew from the movies even if we had never visited there.

The influx of of Muslims is destroying France. I lived with a friend for a while on Rue De La Huchette many years ago and when returning with family there was nothing the same. It was all Arab. My son played pro rugby for a few years in the south of France and that's changing rapidly as well.

Macron is a fool if he thinks France has no culture and the same thing has been said of the Canadian PM who said much the same thing. The same has also been said about Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, England, Sweden and, of course, the United States. I just took a little time to Google those countries but there are probably many more, and all in the western democracies of course, who have no culture. Therefore, the multiculturalists say, we have to import it.

 

Then you've changed the topic.

 

Perhaps what they really mean is a "true believer" culture that they can exploit.

 

You're beating a dead horse. Hristianity has been defanged by secularism. Give it a rest already.

 

What you call "religious fundamentalism" is one of the core beliefs of Western Civilization.

It seems your approach to not reviving the Crusades is unconditional surrender.

 

The best way to fix the issue of them having too many children is to bring liberalism and technology to their countries.

 

Tried that. Didn't work.

 

Well that's just utterly disturbing that you basically consider atheists and co people who have no concept of morals / norms / concept of justice / the fundamental basics of right and wrong. Where is this based on?