Australia's Population is not big enough for Angela Shanahan

Angela Shanahan is one of those people who is always right. She is raking in the dollars for just shooting her mouth off. She doesn't have to think about how people really have to live.
There is no benefit to having a large family. Even if you have the money, you don't have the time to give to each child. Unless maybe you have maids to do the housework or maybe just don't do it. It is better to have two kids and look after them, not lots of children left to run loose.

The problem is that our opponents are so irrational. I have been asked to deal out logic to them and not abuse. But what I am left with? Sheets of data that I am suppose to flap around with like a Fabian.

(Anyhow, Ed, nature does concern itself with the individual at the level of genes, although I would not go as far as Richard Dawkins in my descriptions of the process as grislies like Lamarckism and eugenics would then have a tendency to pop up and frighten poor unsuspecting folk. All the same, your point is well taken.)

If Angela Shanahan thinks that she is a bunny, she is right. As she now has no right to go on about selfless saints and all the rest of the crap that the Church espouses. As the song goes: Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin' into the future.

You didn't have to practically rewrite her article Editor. You have made it damned hard to read which is yours and which is hers though we can sort it out. Hers is the really crazy stuff.
I don't think Angela gives the third world a moment's thought. She probably spends her holidays with the brood in a big hotel in Bali and that is the full extent of her knowledge.

"....anti-populationists' ideological armour of righteous environmentalism leaves them blind...."
No serious newspaper would print the writings of a journalist who uses this sort of language to try to make her case but then we don't have any serious newspapers in this country anyway and there are plenty far worse then The Australian.
One of her points is that since there is a population bulge in the older group resulting from the post war baby boom we need kids to look after them and to "fuel the economy". She sees them purely as economic units. They don't really matter for their own sake.
We would do better to manufacture robots to do the work. That's what the Japanese are doing. It makes more sense.

There is not much religion in Singapore and Japan and China though there is a mob of Christians over there trying.
They are the ones that have got their populations under control. That's why Angela doesn't like them. What is wrong with a stable population? Does she think any country has too big a population or are they all not breeding enough according to her?

Oh dear the one dimensional Humanist brains are at it again.

Regardless of the tiny population occupying such a huge land mass what do you think will be the result if Western cultured Australian population is not bolstered within the next few years, a population that is not even replacing itself?

Before the loop heads spruke off about how our population is increasing you’d best look at the recent census statistics and you will see that the biggest increase has come from our Muslim communities which have doubled over the last ten years. If something is not done soon then Australia will suffer the same fate as Kosovo and in case you do not know that story here it is.

Kosovo was a fully Serbian province, but at the end of World War 1 and the defeat of the Ottoman Turks - the Serbs, out of the kindness of their heart – allowed fifty thousand Albanian Muslims to settle in Kosovo. Well you don’t really need me to tell you the ending do you, but the Albanian Muslims out bred the Serbs until they were able to take over the province and as you know they have now demanded and made Kosovo an independent Islamic controlled country, in which the Serbs now have no say in how it is run.

Now I am aware that Humanist/Atheists like to lump all religions into the same mould which means they wouldn’t mind if Islam replaced Christianity as the main religion running Australia, but there are millions who do care. However even Atheists must surely recognize the difference between a religion that at least over time is open to modification and a religious ideology that has been set in concrete for the last fourteen hundred years and intends to stay that way for ever more.

And before the loonies start baying about how we must respect the rights of everyone and allow the above to happen, I would ask; what ever happened to the logic of ‘Which is more important the survival of my culture or the survival of those of an alien culture who would oppress my children and the generations of children to come?'
The choice is ours.

Mona, it amazes me how Christians can talk the most racist talk, go to church on Sundays and face Jesus with love.

Islam is NOT a race you pin head

Neither is your disguise a disguise, Mona.

The Editor skates a very thin line over the issue of Islam. Mona has stepped over it into racism.

What is the Western-cultured Australian population suppose to be?

Who are 'my people' as she refers?

And why is she so quick to deride rights on the issue?

And why is she so quick to deride us on the issue as if we cannot see 'the real issue'?

Does she see us as traitors?

Does she expect us to relieve her discomfort?

How crazy does she think we are, as if we cannot see the dangers of fundamentalism?

Why should I have mercy on any of 'them'?

Two problems Mona.
1. Your story about Kosovo is less than one tenth of the truth. The Serbs and the Kosovo Albanians were fighting each other even before the 1389 Battle of Kosovo which the Muslims won. From there on there was ongoing strife and bloodshed right up to the present day. A quick read of the history tells us the trouble had plenty to do with religion and plenty to do with the power politics of Russia and Germany and not much to do with population growth.
Humanists and Atheists are opposed to religious dogma precisely because it can lead to problems like that conflict.
2. You talk about Muslims outbreeding Christians. Do you want a breeding war between the two religions?
Humanists don't. We want the population under control; less Muslim kids, less Christian kids and a nicer country to live in.
That's what we "loop heads" and "loonies" want. It is a shame you are not as intelligent as us. Why don't you work on it?

Her religion prevents her from 'work on it', siliboi9, we are all suppose to be as children in order to enter heaven, Jesus tells us so. He also tells me that he loves me which is bullshit. Then, the whole Crucifixion is bullshit. How can he ask God to forgive the heathens their sin after he has basically trashed us all over?

How some humanists can and will lie and make up any history that suits them.
Germany did not become a nation until 1871 so how could they be involved in conflicts about Kosovo in the 13th century.
Such shallow childish people are not worth arguing with and I will not from now on.
You are pathetic and disgusting.

You're so unpleasant, Mona. How can you expect anyone to take you seriously when you constantly spit such vitriol?

As usual you haven't really read what was written and have leapt to a convenient conclusion. Nowhere does siliboi9 link Germany and the 13th century.

We can do without your mean-spirited contributions and will be glad to see the back of you.

Bye, Mona.

You have shown your true colors siliboi the same colors as the rest of your smug self satisfied gang that imagine you are intellectuals. Look at this, "Humanists don't. We want the population under control; less Muslim kids, less Christian kids and a nicer country to live in.
It wouldn't be a nice country. It would be full of Muslims and the rest of us would have to put up with persecution like in Kosovo.
You can ignore and make fun of Mona who is warning you but you are too stupid to see the reality.
The Muslims won't stop having kids and if the Christians do where will we go. We will be the boat people ourselves with nowhere at all to go.
There aren't any countries around so stupid as to take us in as we have been with the Muslims.

Mona, I don't make up history, I try to learn what has already been recorded by reputable sources and I take the trouble to cross check. I suggest you try it yourself. Maybe then you will have a less distorted view of events. It is unfortunate that the Balkans area has been involved in so much conflict. If we think of houses and villages burned and people raped and murdered first on one side then the other it is a story of terrible, unnecessary suffering. Here's a website you can use as a starting point and there are plenty of others against which to check. That would be better than just repeating hate slogans.

http://lamar.colostate.edu/~grjan/kosovohistory.html

As for you Mary, I don't know what to offer. Just calm down.

Mary can't calm down, siliboi9, the Muslim menace is on the march.

Poor carusmm, your life must be so empty that the only interest in it is for you to continually mouth off to every word that's uttered on this site.
Get a life man, or get a life little boy.

Don't call me boy, mother.

Peter, Mary and Mona, why are you surprised that your insults are met with hostility? Don't you know how absurd it is for you to come here and try to belittle our views, especially when you make no real attempt to engage in debate?

For goodness sake, this is a forum for Humanists and Atheists to discuss issues which we feel are important. What kind of reception do you think I would receive if I kept visiting a Christian website and calling everyone stupid and ignorant? I expect I would be howled down and derided as the lowest form of life ever to crawl from under my immoral, arrogant, materialistic stone.

So what on earth do you hope to gain by coming here? Are you trying to convert us? If so, if I might be so bold, you must be the worst missionaries in history. I can't think of a single reason why anyone would want to be anything like you, if the snide, derogatory, disrespectful nature of your posts is any reflection of your personalities.

As I've said before, I'm sure any one of us would be happy to engage in a discussion of the topics at hand if you could refrain from the constant perjoratives. But if all you can manage is to continue to foist your antiquated sense of outrage on us, then we're not interested in anything else you have to say.

Come on trulyfree you don't discuss anything among yourselves, what is there to discuss? You either go along with Humanist/Atheist beliefs or you don’t. Case closed.

And leave out the nonsense about “we would love to debate with you etc”. You don’t want to debate anything your only (childish) response to everything is ridicule with talk of believing in fairies etc.

I’ve watched your debates; you are like a gang of schoolchildren cheering the bullies on to new heights of insults. Apart from that you have closed minds that consider nothing outside of what suits you, while carusmm’s condescending talk about love, as if he understands the slightest meaning of the word, is an insult to everything decent in itself.

So just be what you are a silly person who has found a popular bandwagon to make yourself important about.

I think that the killer instinct in all human beings comes from love, it is nothing special to humanists.

As for humanists following a certain line, humanists are free thinkers if anything.

As for humanists cheering on the vicious to new lows, I get pulled up for my viciousness quite often by concerned humanists.

As for our concern, our concern is mainly for reason.

Perhaps that's because every topic is hijacked by one of you, Carlos. Your post is typical of those responses: no attempt at reason, just more insults. Accusing us of being closed-minded is so hypocritical it's laughable.

I repeat - why come here if we're so childish and abhorrent? You contribute absolutely nothing useful or original. It's really tedious.

I agree, trulyfree, we could do without 'them'.

Tell us Carlos, do you think Angela Shanahan is right and do you agree with Mona's comment about Australia having a huge land mass with a tiny population implying that we could greatly increase out population.
I think Angela Shanahan holds extreme views. She doesn't see any end point to population growth. I doubt that Mona has any idea what most of our huge land mass is like. Most of our area only has enough rainfall to support a scattered population of termites, lizards and a few flocks of birds. The best users of it were the traditional Aborigines using hunter gathering. It won't and has never supported a European style population. Angela, Mona and anyone else who has never been out there should go and spend a few days trying to live off that land. They wouldn't even have a chance to starve because they would be dead of thirst within 1-2 days.

mmmmm The endless preaching of the converted to the converted.

mmmmmm Jeff. Is that an attempt at looking wise? If you want to be supercilious about "the converted" you will need to let us know what wisdom you have to offer that entitles you to such superiority.
Do you have some clever new theological or demographic proposition that will leave us gasping at your brilliance and lead us to understand the error of our ways?
I certainly haven't noticed anything of that kind in your previous comments. They all consist of cheap, easy, sniping from the sidelines. Any fool can do that and only fools are satisfied to do it.
Show us what you have got to offer. Convince me that you are more than a mental featherweight.
Carlos, wisernow has challenged you in the same way and I do too. The case isn't closed at all. What can you tell us that will show that you have a capacity to reason instead of just sniping?
I can hardly wait to see the carefully reasoned arguments that will tell me I'm on the wrong track and turn me towards the light. Over to you both.

In the late sixties many people had a dream that one day Australia would be the United States of the South a growing industrial and economic giant. And under Menzies it had all the promise of being so.

We had a growing industrial base, producing everything from electronics to heavy farm and earthmoving equipment. We had growing clothing and textile industries and even had a budding aircraft producing industry.

Of course the world has changed with the emergence of the Asian tiger economies and especially now the influence of a growing China, but the world can, and no-doubt will, change again. When that happens we, with our tiny 20 million population, spread out over a land mass the size of the USA, will be in no position to take up the challenges as they arise.

When we hear from Humanists words like “if we have a reduced population it will be a nicer country” you have to wonder if such people understand what they mean by "a nicer country", or if they understand how such a mentality poses a real threat to our culture and way of life. Just what is nice about being forever a tourist destination where opportunities for our young people are almost zilch? But methinks the people making such remarks are old fogies dreaming of sitting on the porch while leaving the real problems to everyone else.

Anyone who has lived in the United States or especially Europe will know that by driving just fifty miles you can be in a different world where the accent is different, the bread is different, the ice-cream is different and the beer is different, the houses are different. Here you can drive for a thousand miles and everything is still the same, simply because there is nowhere that the local population is large enough to encourage local industrial diversion or local initiative.

Much as we like to delude ourselves with nice sounding talk about ‘The lucky country etc’ , in fact we are only lucky because, so far, we have not had to stand on our own against those eager to take over and dislodge us from this land, but that is already under way from within. Soon our luck will be running out.

The country has already diminished from the Menzies era to a situation where industrial potential has reverted back to a land of legalised con men and shysters, producing nothing except what we can dig up and sell. And with the present population that is how it is doomed to remain.

In fact Australia is hardly a nation at all, but just a few very small cities thousands of miles apart.

That's all very well, but the parallels with Europe and the US are inapplicable here. In case you hadn't noticed, vast, almost unimaginable areas of this country are desert. That's fine if you want to live a nomadic, subsistence-level existence but it won't be much good for anything else.

We have a chronic water shortage already and the future prospects are bleak. As much as we might want this to become a more cosmopolitan, densely populated place, it's unsustainable. And I do understand that desire.

I came here from the UK in my mid-teens and I've often missed the cultural density of Europe and the regional variations you mentioned. But this is a very different place. Overpopulation will create a much more pronounced rich-poor divide as basic needs become harder to provide. The idea of breeding to provide future support for the ageing population is almost as offensive as trying to "out-breed the Muslims".

Carlos, didn't you pay attention when you went to school. Didn't you learn any Economics or History or Geography? In the 1950's through to the 1980's Australia had all the industries you mentioned and more. They were heavily tariff protected and terribly inefficient by world standards. The price of a man's shirt was a full day's wages. The price of a Holden car with no heater, no aircon, no seatbelts, no airbags, no electric windows, a very basic suspension, a primitive braking system and hardly any safety engineering was a full year's wages.
Getting rid of tariffs meant that we now pay a tiny amount for a shirt and only about 3 months wages for a car with all the above.
We now produce not only minerals but mining equipment and medical research and equipment, our experts earn big dollars selling expertise to foreign countries and on and on it goes.
Now for a simple geography lesson.
If you "drive for a thousand miles" you will find "everything is still
the same," because you will be in the middle of the bloody desert, mate!
We don't have the climatic advantages the Europeans and Americans have. That's why we can't afford the big populations and why our cities are so far apart. Go out to the desert and spend a few days there. Get someone who understands survival to take you there. It is a very interesting place but not a good real estate prospect.
One more thing. In Australia we now use Kilometers. Only the Americans are still silly enough to use Miles.

So driving from Perth to Broom will find you in the middle of the desert, will it? And I'm so sorry I'll make sure I use kilometres next time, becaue we don't want to be silly like the Americans - you shallow infantile fool.

How desperate you must be. Can't you pick on spelling errors or typos like all the other shallow mined fools on this web site?

Interesting response to that comment Carlos. I tried to improve your dreadfully poor information base and your response is abuse.
"Can't you pick on spelling errors or typos like all the other shallow mined* fools on this web site?"
Well since you have requested, I'll oblige. *It should be 'minded', mined is the past tense of the verb 'to mine'. That means digging holes in search of minerals. 'Past' refers to events that occurred before the present time and 'tense' refers to the condition of the verb. I do hope that helps. Keep visiting this website. You may eventually acquire a basic education.

Ok, if you like, anything to cover up the embarrassment of being exposed for the childish person that you are.

I think that Jack1, Carlos, is like the rest of the humanists on this website: exasperated with the quality of the opposition. Idiot noises do not constitute an argument, Carlos, except an argument against.

Jack1 siliboi9 and trulyfree you are all insufferably patronizing and imagine you are intellectuals. You are really just fools and too silly to know it. "The fool has said in his heart, there is no God" Psalms 14.1

Well, if it says it in Psalms, it must be true! Pack your bags, everybody, we've been scuppered! Mary has found the ultimate truth and it's... wait for it... the Bible!

What on Earth were we thinking, using our brains to work things out when all the answers are in an ancient, heavily edited, oft-rewritten, self-contradictory collection of fables and fairy tales?

For what it's worth, Mary, I don't claim to be an intellectual. But I can stake a pretty good claim to being intelligent, educated and thoughtful. And unlike you, I'm not a hypocrite. What could be more patronizing than continually talking down to people for not sharing your religious delusions?

And what could be more patronising than continually talking down to people for not sharing your Atheism?

We come here to talk to each other, not to get into slanging matches with Christianistas. If I went to a religious forum and harangued them for not being Atheists and belittled their views, you could rightly call that patronising. They would then be justified in defending themselves, vigorously and forcefully, and I would be a fool to act surprised or offended by it.

The same principle applies here. This is a Humanist/Atheist forum: anyone who comes here deriding Atheism and Atheists is likely to get shouted down. If they continue to insult us, particularly with weak arguments and fallacious logic, they can expect to be talked down to. Context counts in these situations, Peter.

You can always pull excuses out of the hat to justify your own behaviour can't you, while decrying the same behaviour in others, you are so dishonest and pathetic.

And without people like Mary there'd be nothing for you to talk about amongst yourselves and well you know it.

Go back and read what's been talked about in all the posts?

I don't mind believers turning up to take part in discussion. I think that is the benefit of a website like this but, it would be good if they could rise above the level of sniping without attempt at explanation or justification of their beliefs and when the only thing they have to offer is animal noises they expose themselves to contempt.
Peter and Carlos maybe you are trying as best you can but let me ask, can you present a reasoned case for your beliefs in supernatural beings, miracles, the power of prayer and most of all, the existence of a God?

Of course I can justify my behaviour. Can't you? I still maintain that it's absurd for you to act so shocked that you manage to raise our ire from time to time and I stand by what I said.

wisernow is exactly right. You're welcome here to discuss anything (I keep saying that and I keep getting ridiculed for it) but we seem to have different ideas of what a discussion is. You're the ones who disagree with the tone and content of this site - surely you agree that the onus is on you to present alternative viewpoints for debate. Calling us idiots, however you frame it, is completely non-productive and doesn't prove anything except that you lack any basis for your beliefs.

Unless you can answer wisernow's question, which is reasonable and non-provocative, I'm sure.

Peter, it would be easier to teach the fish swimming off the coast of Fremantle about the function of traffic lights

There you go with the fish again, Carlos. Avoiding the question, are we?

Idiot noises might break down a moron, Carlos, but they won't break us down.

Carlos admits to fish being stupid. (This is a smug comment. I allude to Christian symbology.)

I'll make it more specific for you Carlos and you too, Peter and Mona. My position and that of many others who use this website, is that there is no credible evidence of the existence of a God. There is no such thing as miracles through divine intervention. We don't know how the universe got here, but we find the religious explanation completely unsatisfactory. I could offer more but that should do.
Now can either of you or all of you produce any logical argument or explanation, or evidence that would show me that I am wrong about any of this?
I must say in advance that talk of fish and traffic lights or personal attacks on me or atheists in general won't really fit the bill.
Now show us, what have you got?

A number of us have asked that question a number of ways over the past few weeks and if experience is any guide you'll most likely be met with derisive comments about your insufferable smugness and arrogance, your self-satisfied pretensions to intellectualism and your complete lack of imagination.

I mean, really, wisernow! How dare you ask a perfectly reasonable question? Don't you know that God's light... um, faith requires no proof so... urgh, it's tiring just making up this rubbish.

But I commend you for trying again and I hope you have better luck than I did.

wisernow and trulyfree,

"The duck's legs are short, but if they are lengthened, it will feel grief; the crane's legs are long, but if they are shortened, it will feel grief. Therefore what is by nature long allows no amputation and what is by nature short allows no lengthening." Zhuangzi

The duck's legs have to be short to fit into the microwave oven that is run by the Holy spirit