A reader writes:

Hi, Mark, I’ve enjoyed reading your blog over the past year. Recently I’ve been reading a book called Jesus Rediscovered by Malcolm Muggeridge (who was a late-life convert to Catholicism) and there were two sections that immediately made me think of something you would write, so I thought you and your readers would enjoy them:

[On the myth of overpopulation]: “To me, this is a fantasy. You see, when I was young, people used to say the poor had too many children. Or, at the time of the famine in Ireland, they would say that the Irish had too many children. We were taking the food from Ireland, and the Irish were starving, and we said they were starving because they had too many children. Now, we who are sated, who have to adopt the most extravagant and ridiculous devices to consume what we produce, while watching whole, vast populations getting hungrier and hungrier, overcome our feelings of guilt by persuading ourselves that these others are too numerous, have too many children. They ask for bread and we give them contraceptives! In future history books it will be said, and it will be a very ignoble entry, that just at the moment in our history when we, through our scientific and technical ingenuity, could produce virtually as much food as we wanted to, just when we were opening up and exploring the universe, we set up a great whimpering and wailing, and said there were too many people in the world. It’s pitiful.”

[On materialism] “In a materialist society, pleasure alone is sacred, and its intruments (money, contraceptives, drugs, etc.) are invested with sanctity and regarded with veneration– the modern equivalent of the bones of St. Peter or fragments of the True Cross.”

Anyway, for what it’s worth, keep up the good work!

St. Mugg pray for us. He’s perfectly right, of course. “Overpopulation” has been a tool of Empire every since Malthus. It *always* means “Just enough of me, way too much of you.” And while the Population Planners are busy determining the fate of the poor, they are also busy venerating and adoring Money, Sex, and Power at home. It’s a Trinitarian faith of a sort. And it functions (as all real religious worship does) by means of sacrifice. In Christianity, the sacrifice is made by the God Man who offers himself as both Priest and Victim to the Father on our behalf. In the false religion of the secular West, the sacrifice is of the weakest and poorest to Mammon, Bacchus and the Self (and is received by Satan, the author of the whole disgusting parody). Not too surprising that the hidden narrative of the post-Christian West is implacable hatred of Christ and his Church.