The shock of the old: Welcome to the elderly age

Of all the people in human history who ever reached the age of 65, half are alive now. Meanwhile, women around the world have half as many children as their mothers.

The longevity revolution affects every country, every community and almost every household. It promises to restructure the economy, reshape the family, redefine politics and even rearrange the geopolitical order over the coming century.

In most of Europe and much of east Asia, fertility is closer to one child per woman than two, way below long-term replacement levels. The notion that the populations of places such as Brazil and India will go on expanding looks misplaced: in fact, they could soon be contracting.

Tina Turner took to the stage in London, dancing in heels and a microskirt in her 70th year.

Millions of the middle-class retired continue working at everything from lucrative consultancies to teaching literacy or finally finishing that PhD. They are often more valuable than the young workers the demographers imagine are supporting them: in fact, the growing number of society's most qualified, most experienced individuals is potentially a huge demographic dividend.

This is sometimes called the Horndal effect, after a Swedish steel mill where productivity rose by 15 per cent as the workforce got older.

all the evidence is that "mass longevity facilitates affluence".

About Sam Harris’ claim that science can answer moral questions

As it turns out, there is much that Harris and I agree on, but I think his main target is actually moral relativism, and that he would get more mileage out of allying himself with philosophy (not to the exclusion of science), rather than taking what appears to be the same misguided scientistic attitude that Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne have come to embody so well. But let us start with a summary of Harris’ arguments, with extensive quotations from the lecture, proceeding then to my commentary.

A Cyborg Space Race

Transhumanists believe that the development of such technology will lead one day to “Human version 2.0” – an upgrade of the human body that not only eliminates many of the problems that plague us, but improves upon the basic human design. For instance, some transhumanists envision a day when the human brain will be re-wired with computer chips, allowing us to think, learn and communicate with unprecedented speed and accuracy. 

Human beings developed from earlier species of animals?

US National Science Board tries to suppress knowledge of Americans’ scientific illiteracy

The deleted section notes that the 45% of Americans who answered “true” to the statement: “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals” is similar to the percentage in previous years and much lower than in Japan (78%), Europe (70%), China (69%), and South Korea (64%). A similar gap exists for the response to the statement: “The universe began with a big explosion,” with which only 33% of Americans agreed.

95% of victims of sexual exploitation by clergy are adult women

 One American report states that 'although clergy of any denomination can sexually exploit children, teens, men or women, over 95% of victims of sexual exploitation by clergy are adult women'. Another study found that 3.1% of regular women congregants (women in the congregation) had suffered sexual abuse.

In 2001 the European parliament passed an unprecedented motion, blaming the Vatican for the rapes of African nuns in the 1990s.

we tried godlessness on a grand scale and the effects were devastating: Nazism, Stalinism

The new Catholic Bishop of Parramatta, in Sydney's west, Anthony Fisher, drew broader comparisons.
"Last century we tried godlessness on a grand scale and the effects were devastating: Nazism, Stalinism, Pol Pot-ery, mass murder, abortion and broken relationships - all promoted by state-imposed atheism," he said.

Green movement is a modern secular religious movement

This paper argues that environmentalism has become a new secular Western religion, which threatens world disorder as well as the prospects of alleviating poverty in the Third World. It critically examines the Green agenda in terms of a number of prospective international environmental treaties: the Kyoto protocol, the Basel convention, the POPs treaty, and the Biodiversity convention, and shows how these pose serious threats to the prospects of alleviating poverty in India.

The Green movement is a modern secular religious movement engaged in a world wide crusade to impose its 'habits of the heart' on the world. Its primary target is to prevent the economic development which alone offers the world's poor any chance of escaping their age old poverty. This modern day secular Christian crusade has exchanged the saving of souls for saving Spaceship Earth. (p. 20)