In article , Sarah Vaughan says...

Beliavsky wrote:
On Nov 16, 6:18 am, Sarah Vaughan wrote:
When I've
seen figures (and the ones I saw were some years out of date, so this
may have changed), that seemed far more likely to be a risk in Western
countries, where population growth rates were consistently at or below
replacement levels (almost always below, on the figures I saw).

Yes, especially in continental Europe -- there are statistics at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...rtility_rat e
. European whites are largely secular and socially liberal, two
qualities negatively correlated with fertility. One can debate the
intellectual merits of socially liberal atheism, but demographically
it is a failure. Europe will become Muslim and more socially
conservative because Muslims have higher birth rates.

Why Muslim? I would have thought there was more chance of it becoming
Catholic. (I can't find a source that gives overall numbers in Europe
adhering to each religion, but certainly most of the countries seem to
be predominantly Catholic.)

That *has been * the oft-cited thing when there was a lot of anti-Catholic
("Papist") feeling, fmor in the past than now (Kennedy and all that). This
demographic take-over boogie man is rather old. And common across the world.


BTW, I'm not convinced it'll become either, because there's too much
variability in whether or not children grow up to follow the religion of
their parents (especially in the matter of having lots of children
because the religion expects it). But I would have thought that, if
you're going to use the 'outbreeding' argument, Catholicism was a rather
more likely contender at this point.


Yep.

Banty