Now all that responsibility couldn’t be heaped on little Paris or Nikki, could it?

I must get to reproducing!

BTW, congratulations on a smashing new look!

Further refinement to your point – another influence creating lower birth rates is the provision of old age pensions – no longer in western civilisations does one have to multiply and farm the kids in order to survive to old age.

This imho is a *good* thing.

It would be a worry, except industry requires lots of drones to keep its wheels spinning.

Admittedly, with more technologisation, industry needs less drones than in the past. So we should try to educate more folks. I don’t think education however is a determinant of IQ – uneducated people have innate intelligence – education hones their potential.

Additionally, the up side is that people who have less children have more time to contribute toward the advancement of civilisation – the arts and sciences. This of course explains why women have featured less prominently throughout history in such pursuits. Things have changed for the better

Cheers and by the way, thanks for an excellent site.

The contrast with Islam could not be greater.

I like the computing analogy. By the way, I remember once from Usenet that the rabidly Islamophobic author SM Stirling (who’s an atheist) once wrote that Islam was more dangerous than Christianity because it was more internally coherent.

As people become more educated, they are less willing to be enslaved solely to the reproductive yoke – the doors of the mind have been opened and they know there’s more to life than breeding and child-rearing – though of course this may still be sufficient fulfillment for some.

Interesting ideas, Fringe. However, if the educated people free themselves from enslavement to the ‘reproductive yoke’, then that means that only the uneducated will breed. Assuming education is, at least, a partial marker of intelligence and knowing that IQ trends towards the mean, this would suggest that successive generations will become increasingly stupid.

A more educated populace is able to resist the intellectually hollow dictates of those who hold power over others by faith – hence increased secularisation.

Conversely, uneducated masses are easy prey for political elites, whether they be secular or theological.

Is there really a direct correlation between religiousness and procreation or does the decline of religion sit, alongside the declining birthrate, as a consequence of all these things? Or is secularisation and the decline of religion really not related to this issue at all?