Europe is “dying” because its citizens are too selfish to have children, the chief rabbi has said, blaming a dwindling birthrate on a culture of “consumerism and instant gratification”.
Sir Jonathan Sacks accused people of caring more about shopping than spirituality and tied the secularisation of Europe to population decline.
The chief rabbi, who entered the House of Lords last week as Lord Sacks of Aldgate, made his comments in a lecture called Religion in the 21st century hosted in London by Theos, a Christian thinktank, on Wednesday night. While Sacks aired concerns shared by other clerics – about religion contributing positively to public life and the dangers of a secular society – he also went further and accused non-believers of lacking family values.
“Europe today is the most secular region in the world. Europe is the only region in the world experiencing population decline. Wherever you turn today the more religious the community, the larger on average are their families.
“Parenthood involves massive sacrifice: money, attention, time and emotional energy. Where today, in European culture with its consumerism and its instant gratification because you’re worth it.”
There was no room for sacrifice for “the sake of generations not yet born” in such a culture.
“Europe is dying,” he concluded and compared the situation in the continent today to ancient Greece with its “sceptics, epicureans and cynics”.
He said: “That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it.”
Religion was the safeguard of morality and the decline of religion would lead to fragile families and communities in atrophy.
Sacks, who is the head of the largest body of Jews in the UK, has written and spoken frequently about the importance of religion in contemporary life and the impact on society when faith is absent.
In his lecture he said: “God is back and Europe as a whole still doesn’t get it. It is our biggest single collective cultural and intellectual blind spot.”
His most recent experience of this “blind spot” came last month in the supreme court, when he heard judges wonder why a man would be regarded as Jewish by “almost everybody” except the modern orthodox community, which is led by Sacks.
The case involves a 12-year-boy’s fight to gain a place at Britain’s most successful Jewish school. M, a Jew who regularly attends a progressive synagogue, was told he could not be admitted to the JFS school because his mother had converted to Judaism in a procedure not recognised by the chief rabbi.
Overturning a previous judgment in favour of the school, the court of appeal said last June that a policy determining eligibility based on a person’s descent, rather than religious practice, amounted to racial discrimination. The ruling prompted the chief rabbi to launch an attack on the judicial system and declare his unease that a secular court was involved in religious affairs and conferring Jewish identity.
Writing in the Jewish Chronicle he said: “An English court has declared this rule racist, and since this is an essential element of Jewish law, it is in effect declaring Judaism racist. To be told now that Judaism is racist is distressing. To confuse religion and race is a mistake.”
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Eventually the Jews will rule over the mud races in Europe and the USA with a totalitarian and plutocratic iron-fist just as they do in nations like Brazil.
I think there are other problems unrelated to religion causing population decline in the West.
The rise of anti-male laws created by extreme feminists is one problem. The Andrea Dworkin inspired extreme feminists mistake was to go for dominance rather than equality with men.If a male is seen in a public place in the West he will be accused of being a “voyeur”,”stalker” or “potential rapist”, much like women are accused of being “whore” if seen in public under the Taliban.
If a man divorces, he loses his home and is in financial bondage to the woman for life,regardless of blame. Cast as either a molester or a milch-cow, European men have become frightened of both women and the breeding of children, so instead exist in an extended childhood as irresponsible single men playing with video games,cars and other toys.
Also the outsourcing (by the over-class)of all productive, well paying jobs to third world slave states mean that only over-class males can support a family, and welfare is being withdrawn from the shattered underclass and middle class who will all have to live in sky prisons (tower blocks) when the countryside is covered in concrete to accommodate third world immigration.
Tower blocks are of course unsuitable for families,leading to spacial deprivation and no responsible man would want to bring children into such a degraded artificial environment. This will not worry the over-class, who will have moved abroad,leaving a failed state similar to Somalia.
Low reproduction rates would actually be a good thing if Third World immigrants were kept out. Everyone in England would be living in large “American Dream” style suburban bungalows, and we would still have a countryside.