In the absence of faith....................................

Educated Europeans look with distain on the boorishness and bumptiousness of the United States, which continues to maintain a military that actually can fight wars.  The prevalence of religious faith in America fills Europeans with revulsion, especially the enthusiastic devotion of the evangelicals, who constitute almost 30 percent of America's population.  Faith in a personal God is prima facie proof of mental defect to most educated Europeans, and so America is by definition a giant madhouse.  Yet the countries that have abandoned nationalism, religion, and ideology in favor of the milquetoast administration of daily affairs - for example, the Europeans - suffer from the most dreadful psychic symptom of all.  They fail to have children.  The triumph of secularism in Europe recalls the proverbial operation that was a success except for the death of the patient.

     There is one problem with the enlightened view:  In the absence of faith, human beings show little interest in living.  Humankind cannot bear the burden of mortality without the promise of immortality.  We know of countries destroyed by war or plague but of not a single nation that simply willed itself out of existence.  Today the majority of the industrial nations are heading toward a demographic death, and some have passed the point of no return...Rather than pave the way for universal peace, loss of faith has turned important parts of the world into a nursing home, an then a cemetery.

-Spengler, channeled by David P. Goldman, It's Not the End of the World, It's Just the End of You:  The Great Extinctions Of The Nations