Re: ein wirrer Beitrag

verfasst von zani, 06.03.2004, 16:41

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>Demographics is destiny.





Never in recorded history have prosperous and peaceful nations chosen to disappear from the face of the earth. Yet that is what the Europeans have chosen to do.


In the next 50 years, Europe's population will relive - in slow motion - that plague demography, losing about a fifth of its population by 2050 and more as the decades roll on."



>In 200 years, French and German will be spoken exclusively in hell.




> What has brought about this collective suicide,




>Little enough has been said about the"how" but almost nothing about the"why" of Europe's demographic suicide.





>Have the Europeans taken to heart existentialism's complaint that man is alone in a chaotic universe in which life has no ultimate meeting, and that man responds to the anxiety about death by embracing death?



>Detest as I might the whole existentialist tribe, there is a grain of truth here, and it bears on a parallel development, that is, the death of European Christianity.


Original sin motivates God's self-sacrifice on the cross to remove this stain from mankind; without it, Jesus was just an itinerant preacher with a knack for anecdotes.



>All religion, Rosenzweig argued, responds to man's anxiety in the face of death (against which philosophy is like a child stuffing his fingers in his ears and shouting,"I can't hear you!").


>The pagans of old faced death with the confidence that their race would continue. But tribes and nations anticipate their own extinction just as individuals anticipate their own death,



>As nations faced extinction, individuals within these nations came face to face with their own mortality. Christianity offered an answer: the Church called individuals out of the nations and offered them salvation in the form of a life beyond the grave. The Gentiles (as the Church called them) embraced original sin, which to them simply meant the sin of having been born Gentile, that is, to a culture doomed to extinction.


>In one respect, Christianity was an enormous success.



>Yet Christianity's weakness, Rosenzweig added, lay in the devil's bargain it made with the old paganism. Christianity's salvation lay beyond the grave, in the wispy ether of heavenly reward.

Humans require something to hang on to this side of the grave. By providing the pagans with a humanized God (and a humanized mother of God and a host of saints), Christianity allowed the pagans to continue to worship their own image. Germans worship a blond Jesus, Spaniards worship a dark-haired Jesus, Mexicans worship the dark Virgin of Guadalupe, and so forth. The result, wrote Rosenzweig, is that Christians"are forever torn between Jesus and [the medieval pagan hero] Siegfried".


>At the political level, Christianity sought to suppress Siegfried in favor of Christ through the device of the universal empire, the suppression of nationality by the aristocracy and Church.


>Christianity's inner pagan ran amok.


>A second Thirty Years War (1914-1944) gave unlimited vent to Europe's pagan impulses and drowned them in blood.

>In 1914 Europe's soldiers still fought under the illusion of a God that favored their nation. Germany fought World War II under the banner of revived paganism.


>For today's Europeans, there is no consolation, neither the old pagan continuity of national culture, nor the Christian continuity into the hereafter.


>The French know that Victor Hugo, Gauloise cigarettes, Chateau Lafitte and Impressionist painters one day will become a matter of antiquarian curiosity.

>The Germans know that no one but bored schoolboys will read Goethe two centuries hence, like Pindar.

>They have no ambition but to die quietly, no concerns except for those amusements which might reduce boredom and anxiety en route to the grave.

> They have no passions except hatred born of envy
They hate America, a new kind of universality that succeeded where the old Christian empire failed.
They hate Israel, which makes the Jewish people appear all the more eternal in stark contrast to Europe's morbid temporality. They will pass out of history unmourned even by themselves.

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gesamter Thread:

• Ein Blick von Asien aus: Ask Spengler - zani, 06.03.2004, 11:11
  • Re: Interessanter Beitrag, - André, 06.03.2004, 12:18
    • Re: Warum Europa die Auslöschung wählte...... ein Beitrag von Spengler - André, 06.03.2004, 13:23
      • Re: ein wirrer Beitrag - zani, 06.03.2004, 16:41