Signs of a Dying or Suicidal Culture (and Church)
- A dying culture is more concerned with death than with life, and life is just a thing to be thrown away at will, like garbage.
- Nothing is sacred, not the body, not the soul, not a place, not an object, not a name, not a human person, not history, not songs, not God.
- The willingness to die is neither brave nor generous.
- Those who seek euthanasia generally run towards death because they are afraid of suffering, which in a dying culture has lost its meaning.
- In a dying culture, those who do not commit suicide see no great beauty in human life.
- A recent article described a photograph of an eighteen-week-old baby in the womb as 'a photograph from the last century', but the author was quick to assure her readers that it would be a mistake to use this photograph as an argument against abortion.
- In a dying culture, the human body is just an instrument of hedonism, or a poor attempt at self-expression in a world where there will be nothing important to express.
- In dying cultures there is a hatred or fear of one's own fertility, which leads to voluntary sterilisation.
- Dying cultures reject marriage, or have lost interest in it completely, but continue with a false 'marriage', including throwing the seed of life into a sewer.
- The people of this dying culture are eager to bind children to their corruption and senseless hedonism.
- A hideous transvestite instructs young boys how to fold their testicles inside their bodies and tie them there: death boasting about death.
- People from a dying culture do not produce art worthy of the name.
- Those who lose the divine also lose the human.
- Christ says that those who seek the kingdom of God will be given all the goods of the earth, but the reverse is also true: those who seek only earthly goods will be deprived of even what little they have.
- Artists and architects turn to the horrible, the brutal and the inhuman.
- The people of a dying culture not only drown their future in the womb, they murder their ancestors and look enviously at the great men of their past.
- Utopian towers are built on hatred of what is.
- The humour of the dying culture is grey.
- Triviality is its characteristic note, the laughter of the bored, the over-educated, the banal and the tiresome.
- Children do not fill the streets with their happy games and laughter.
- The churches are empty.
- The basic institutions of society are weak, especially the family.
- Social trust has disappeared.
- Tradition, which is a form of social trust, the bond between generations, is reviled or forgotten.
- The dying culture may use the word 'hope', but no one believes in it anymore, as its appalling failure to replace itself with children horribly demonstrates.
- Smiling optimism is taking the place of hope, which preaches change for change's sake, like the change sought by a sick man in his bed, tossing and turning, trying to find relief that he does not find.
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