A critique of an article entitled “The Science of Right and Wrong” in the January 2011 edition of Scientific American.

The science of right and wrong

Scientific American has recently published an article on the science of moral issues, written by the atheist publisher and author, Michael Shermer. The purpose of the article—which quotes favorably from Sam Harris’s book, The Moral Landscape—is to claim that morality is something which human beings have acquired by a process of evolution.  As one would expect in an article by an atheist, Shermer’s writings contain a number of presuppositions and logical fallacies.

For example, Shermer begins his article by declaring: “Ever since the rise of modern science, an almost impregnable wall separating it from religion, morality and human values has been raised to the heights.” In fact, the majority of scientists of the modern era were men who believed the Bible to be true—men such as Newton, Lister, Hooke, Boyle, Kelvin, Faraday, etc. All of these subscribed to a morality based not on naturalistic principles, but on God’s law.

The foundations for Shermer’s ideas of morality are deeply flawed. On the origins of morality, he states:

As a species of social primates, we have evolved a deep sense of right and wrong to accentuate and reward reciprocity and cooperation and to attenuate and punish excessive selfishness and free riding.

The first thing we should notice is that the statement relies on evolution, but assumes evolution to be true. This is the circular argument fallacy—or “begging the question.” The sentence does not seem to explain how this “sense of right and wrong” evolved, or why. If we assume that the first subordinate clause is the explanation, then it is not clear why being a species of social primates should cause a sense of right and wrong to develop.

No moral yard stick

This point becomes clearer when Shermer reports on some of his own moral convictions:

These examples are the low-hanging fruit on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, so it is easy for both science and religion to pluck the ripe ones and declare with confidence that such acts as, say, lying, adultery and stealing are wrong because they destroy trust in human relationships that depend on truth telling, fidelity and respect for property.

Leaving aside the clear allusion to Genesis, we see that Shermer has catalogued some behaviors that he considers to be wrong. But on what basis can they be declared wrong? Why is adultery wrong, for example? In evolutionary terms, surely multiple partners would spread genetic information more widely than monogamy.² If there is no external yardstick of morality, then there is no logical reason why any behavior should be considered wrong.

If human beings really were “a species of social primates,” then you would expect similar “morality” among supposedly related species. According to evolutionists, our closest relatives are chimpanzees—and especially the rarer, smaller chimpanzee known as the bonobo. Bonobos are noted for behavior that would, if it were found among humans, be described as promiscuity.³ So it makes little sense for an advocate of evolutionary theory to claim that adultery is wrong, when it has served bonobos pretty well in the wild.

Made in the image of God

A more objective analysis of the origin of right and wrong is found in the Bible, specifically in Genesis. Humans have not evolved from a common ancestor with bonobos, so the behavior of bonobos is not to be classed on the same moral grounds as human beings. Unlike bonobos, humans were made in the image of God, and the very first humans were given a law from God to obey, which they were capable of obeying or disobeying—not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Genesis 3 is a clear and objective account of the origin of sin. If we start with the presupposition of Genesis being true, it is much easier to understand why we live in a society comprised of people capable of noble acts (because of common grace), but frequent purveyors of dreadful sin (because of original sin). The moral yardstick is God’s law, as presented to us in His word. The failure of writers such as Shermer and Harris to take such a viewpoint into account shows that their view of morality is not only flawed, it is empirically erroneous. The obviousness of our sin, and its cause—the cause being disobedience of God’s law—points up the reason why we need a Saviour, and why the only possible Saviour is the “seed of the woman” promised in Genesis 3:15.

Men such as Brian McLaren are not followers of Christ, they are liars and humanists. Anyone who thinks that Christianity needs to be overhauled, let alone think that men descended from apes does not know God at all!

from “christianity” Today:

Christians are in “deep denial” over the continuous evolution of the Christian faith which allows the work of Charles Darwin to be celebrated and not feared, emerging church leader Brian McLaren has said.

McLaren, who argued for an overhaul of the Christian faith in his 2010 book A New Kind of Christianity, joined a recent panel discussion that addressed the evolution of the church and the Christian identity in postmodern or “post-postmodern” times.

The telecast discussion is part of “The Advent of Evolutionary Christianity,” a project that seeks to bring together a diverse panel of “evolution-celebrating” Christians who don’t believe one has to settle on either Jesus or Darwin. Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution, is host and moderator of the series.

“Evolutionary Christianity is a fact of history about which a lot of Christians are in deep denial,” said McLaren during a session entitled “Evolving Church.” “The fact is the church has constantly been evolving. So many Roman Catholics are shocked to learn that priestly celibacy wasn’t required for quite a while. It was several centuries ago that it became a universal requirement.”

“I think of lot of Protestants assume that when the Apostle Paul was establishing house churches they had Sunday School, bulletins and hymnals,” he continued. “So many of things, even doctrines that are very precious to a lot of people, particularly doctrines of atonement, for example, have evolved greatly over history.”

The emergent church pastor, who views the Bible more as an “inspired library” rather than a legal constitution, also praised “Evolutionary Christianity” as a faith perspective that allows for the discussion of Darwin and evolutionary theory as opposed to orthodox views that raise arguments to the theory.

“[I]t enables us to do theological reflection on the theory of evolution and on evolution as a beautiful ark of history and ark of creation,” explained McLaren. “Personally, that has freed me in so many ways. It’s raised my vision of who and what God would be. It has certainly raised my excitement on what it means to be a Christian.”

Though McLaren was recognized as one of Time magazine’s “25 Most Influential Evangelicals” in 2005, many conservative evangelicals are happy to distance themselves from him, calling him “unbiblical” for rejecting the Bible’s narrative of Eden, the fall, condemnation, salvation, and heaven or hell/damnation. Most conservative evangelicals also don’t believe in Darwinian evolution but instead believe that God created Adam as a man.

And the feeling is mutual. Despite having grown up in a conservative evangelical home, McLaren constantly raises issues with evangelicalism, from the inerrancy of Scripture to orthodox ecclesiology. He often criticizes evangelicals for holding onto what he perceives as obsolete doctrines instead of making faith relevant to the 21st century. . . .

read the full article here.

The philosophy of Scientific Materialism precludes there being any possiblity of a non-physical spiritual reality, non-physical spiritual beings or phenomena.

from Technofascism:

Since the technocracy needs to reduce everyone to a controllable, predictable material entity, it obviously favors a worldview that considers human beings to be nothing but trousered apes.  To be properly denigrated, humans must be reduced to nothing more intrinsically important than a temporary, biological cog in the giant mega-machine’s creeking march toward greater progress and control over nature.

Unfortunately, to the dismay of the apostles of technocratic nihilism, this summer two findings, largely ignored by the mainstram media, were published that dealt devastating blows to the materialist philosophies that justify the technocracy’s agenda:  1) the conclusive evidence that Carbon-14 and other radiometric dating methods are invalid; and 2) strong evidence that the once universal and finely-tuned physical constants now actually vary throughout the universe.

The implications of one of these findings alone is enough to rewrite history and our place in the universe.  But taken together, they seem to be almost a beacon from a lighthouse outside of time and space cautioning us not to venture further into the rocky crags of materialist philosophy.

Some readers who think that evidence for varying isotope decay and physical non-constants might not be a big deal would do well to remember that ALL scientific knowledge we have about the origin of the universe and life on earth is based on the assumption that radioactive decay is constant and that the physical laws are not different in different places in the universe.  When these assumptions are shattered, we should be very skeptical about the versions of history that are currently being taught in schools as though they were the final truths of reality. . . .

read the full article here.

IN Britain, the benefits of diversity are apparently boundless. Now that the Pagan Police Association has received government recognition, police officers can take a string of pagan festivals as official holidays.

These include celebrating the festival of lactating sheep, and drinking mead and dancing naked to celebrate the harvest. In court, pagan officers will be allowed to pledge to tell the truth not before God but by what “they hold sacred”, including, presumably, the Sun God or Kriss Kringle, the Germanic god of yule.

In Australia, as historian Keith Windschuttle has chronicled in his new book The Stolen Generations – volume three of his tireless evisceration of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History – the allegedly monstrous theft of 100,000 Aboriginal children by Australian officials just because they were Aboriginal never actually happened.

In the US, when a car bomb was planted recently in New York’s Times Square by a man later revealed to be a Muslim trained in bomb-making in Pakistan’s Waziristan region, there was an initial stampede to declare the attempted atrocity was unconnected to Islamic terrorism.

It was said to be most likely the work of a Tea Party member, right-wing militiaman or lone nut. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg even suggested the bomb could have been placed by “somebody with a political agenda who doesn’t like the healthcare bill or something”.

What has Britain come to when its police officers are given leave to dance about naked? How can generations of Australians have been taught the egregious falsehood of the Stolen Generations as fact? And how many times have Tea Party members or people opposed to a piece of legislation tried to commit mass murder against their fellow Americans, compared with the number of recent attempts by Muslim terrorists?

Such intellectual perversity can be understood only in the context of a far wider and profound retreat from reason throughout the West.

Across a broad range of issues, the progressive intelligentsia appears to have junked the rules of evidence, objectivity and rationality in favour of fantasy, irrationality and upside-down thinking.

Take man-made global warming, for example.

The belief that the planet is on course for carbon Armageddon is now embedded in Western politics. Yet the evidence that the climate is warming to an unprecedented and catastrophic degree just isn’t there. The seas are not rising, the ice is not shrinking, the polar bears are not vanishing, and there has been no significant climate warming since 1995.

Or take the Middle East. Israel is the victim of six decades of exterminatory aggression from the Arab and Muslim world. Yet it is Israel that is expected to make concessions to its attackers, who are said by the West to deserve a state of their own. Meanwhile, the US extends its hand of friendship to Iran, which is building a nuclear bomb to commit another Jewish genocide.

Closer to home, “minority rights” mean activities previously marginalised or considered transgressive are now privileged through “family lifestyle choice” or multiculturalism.

Dissenters from these creeds are socially and professionally ostracised. Academics are hounded as racists for upholding the true historic origins of Western civilisation. Scientists sceptical of man-made global warming find funding is withheld. And those sounding the alarm about the true scope of the Islamic jihad are demonised as warmongering neo-cons or part of a Jewish conspiracy.

Such irrationality, intolerance and, indeed, bigotry run counter to the cardinal tenets of a free society based on reason and the toleration of dissent.

This is because these dominant ideas are all rooted in ideologies: environmentalism, anti-racism, anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, egalitarianism or scientism, the belief that scientific materialism alone explains everything.

Rather than going where the evidence leads, ideology wrenches the evidence to fit a prior idea. Not only is ideology inimical to reason, it sacrifices truth to power as it attacks those who try to uphold reality in the face of dogma.

This is because the progressive mindset believes it is synonymous with virtue itself. All opposition is therefore not just wrong but evil. Since progressives also believe anyone who opposes them is a right-winger, it follows that all dissent is right-wing and evil, and so must be shut down.

In other words, these are not propositions to be debated in a rational way but are seen as self-evident truths with the infallibility of religious dogma.

They also smack of the political totalitarianism of communism and fascism, as well as resembling, ironically, the fanatical doctrines of militant Islam. Curiously, they also display religious motifs of sin, guilt and salvation. Odder still, they all exhibit features of millenarianism: the religious belief in the perfectibility of life through the collective redemption of sin. Contemporary secular ideologies identify the sins committed by humanity – oppression of the people of developing nations, despoliation of nature, bigotry, poverty, war – and offer salvation by a return to righteousness.

Thus the greens believe they will save the planet. The leftists believe they will create the brotherhood of man. The anti-Zionists believe they will turn suicide bomb-belts into cucumber frames. The atheists believe they will create the Garden of Reason. And the Islamists believe they

will create the kingdom of God

on earth.

Dissenters are dismissed because they deny the unchallengeable truths of anti-imperialism, environmentalism and scientific materialism. The explanation for the frustration of Utopia must therefore lie in conspiracies by the neo-cons or the Jews, Big Oil or the creationists.

The result is not merely that the West has become irrational. By turning truth and lies, victim and aggressor, justice and injustice upside down, it cannot even recognise, let alone deal with, the threats being mounted to its own values and civilisation.

With ideology eroding the principles of rationality and freedom, truth and justice on which it rests, the West is failing to understand what it is that it cannot understand, and so cannot grasp the mortal danger in which it stands.

Last January, Scientific American declared 2009 as “the year of Darwin” in celebration of the 200^th anniversary of the birth of the revolutionary evolutionist who turned man into a monkey.

The celebration is understandable.

No thinker has accomplished more to create a cleft between science and religion.

No writer has done more to undermine the claim of scripture that man was made in the image and likeness of God.

No scholar has forged greater support for moral relativity and modern materialism.

His theories are treated as laws; his notions as knowledge; his speculation as science.

But a recent finding in Kenya has sent evolutionists into a tail-spin.

And freshly unearthed discoveries of Darwin’s life have caused the academic community to reconsider his greatness and his contribution to advancement of modern science.

The first debunking of Darwin came with the discovery this year of a 1.5 million-year-old footprint in northern Kenya – – the oldest relic of primitive man since Mary Leaky discovered 3.75 million-year-old tracks in the volcanic ash of northern Tanzania.

Darwinist scientists who discovered the footprint in Kenya reluctantly came to the conclusion that it was made by Homo Erectus who had no business appearing in the lower Paleolithic period of world history.

By scanning the footprints with lasers and measuring sediment compression, the scientists determined that the individual who left this print had a modern foot and stride: a mid-foot arch, straight big toe and heel-to-toe weight transfer. 

David Braun, a professor at the South Africa Cape Town University and one of the scientists who came upon the fossil, states the following in Science magazine:

“It was kind of creepy excavating these things to see all of a sudden something that looks so dramatically like something that you yourself could have made 20 minutes earlier in some kind of wet sediment just next to the site. These could quite easily have been made on the beach today.”

“The prints match a men’s shoe size of about 9, which gives you a height of about 5 feet 9 inches,” says Brian Richmond of George Washington University, who was part of the excavation team. “Here, we have really compelling evidence that they were walking with a long stride, they had an arch in the foot the way we have, and the arch puts a spring in our step, which makes walking more efficient,” he says.

Compounding the problem was the discovery in the same area of a second set of human footprints that had been left about 1,000 years after the first set.

“It’s incredible. I’ve never excavated anything like this before,” says team director John Harris of Rutgers University.

The discoveries are not only incredible but devastating for Darwinists who have held that Homo Erectus did not appear on the scene until 200,000 years ago. This assumption is contained in almost every world history and social studies text in the United States.

Since Christians are compelled by the U.S. Department of Education to present Creationism as a fanciful theory, the same ruling should now be applied to the questionable theories of Darwin and his contemporaries.

To be sure, previous problems with the theory of evolution have been found. To support natural selection, Darwin argued that giraffes gradually grew long necks in order to reach into high trees for the leaves, which the Great Scientist believed, were their sole source of sustenance. He remained blissfully unaware that giraffes eat grass and bushes, and he failed to account for the fact that female giraffes are two or three feet shorter than the males.

In their efforts to materialize empirical proof for evolution, Darwin’s followers turned to scientific hoaxes, such as “Nebraska Man” — an anthropoid ape ancestor to man, whose tooth turned out to belong to a wild pig, and Piltdown Man, who was reported to represent the missing link between monkey and man.

Discovered in England in 1912, Piltdown Man created a sensation until the artifact was exposed in the 1950s as the skull of a Medieval Englishman which had been attached by jaded scientists to the jaw of an Asian ape, whose teeth had been filed down to look human and whose bones had been stained by shellac to look old.

Yet three English scientists were knighted for Piltdown Man.

Other Darwinian claims have been uncovered as asinine assertions. Bird feathers, for example, do not come from the scales of reptiles, human embryos contain no gills.

Thus far, not one fossil has been found to validate Darwin.

“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontologists,” admitted Stephen J. Gould in 1977. But that fossil record now contains even more species that appear fully developed, with no traceable ancestors.

In addition to the discoveries in Kenya, newly uncovered data about Darwin the man present him as an opportunist and charlatan.

Darwin, noted scientist Eugene Winchy demonstrates in his book The End of Darwinism, stole his theory from Alfred Wallace, who had sent him a “completed formal paper on evolution by natural selection.”

“All my originality … will be smashed,” a distraught Darwin cried when he got Wallace’s manuscript.

Darwin also lied in “The Origin of Species” about believing in a Creator. By 1859, he was a confirmed agnostic and so admitted in his posthumous autobiography, which was censored by his family.

In his book, Windchy devotes a chapter to the Scopes trial which formed the basis for Inherit the Wind, a Bible-mocking movie with Spencer Tracy as Clarence Darrow and Frederick March as William Jennings Bryan.

The trial, as it turns out, was a carefully orchestrated scam to garner publicity for Dayton, Tennessee.

Scopes never taught evolution and never took the stand. His students were tutored to commit perjury.

And the devout Christian Bryan more than held his own against the atheist Darrow as evidenced by the actual transcript of the trial.

Now does anyone need ANY further proof that Roman Catholicism is a false belief system? For a so called “christian church” not to believe that God is responsible for the complexities of life is just ludicrous!

If a belief system does not hold that the God of the Bible is the ultimate creator and origin of ALL creation then it cannot claim to be a Biblical belief system!

Genesis 1:1:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

John 1:1-3:

“In the beginning was the Word, [logos] and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; [i.e., before creation] all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”

Colossians 1:15-17

[Jesus] is the image of the invisible God, the first-born [prototokos] of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

One of the key words in the Colossians passage above (“…and in Christ all things hold together”) is the Greek word sunistemi which means “to stand-together,” “to be compacted together,” “to cohere,” “to be constituted with.”

This passage can be applied to the structure of the atom, for example. The nucleus of every atom is held together by what physicists call “weak” and “strong” forces.

Among secular scientists today there are many who acknowledge that God exists. But He is usually considered as only a First Cause-the One who brought the universe into existence and set it into motion. But most of these same scientists assume God was not involved after the initial act of creation.

This is contrary to clear statements in the Bible that God is very much involved in every event that takes place in the ongoing history of the entire universe. Causality links everything together, because God “works (Gr: energizes) all things according to the counsel of His will.” (Ephesians 1:11.)

from The Daily Telegraph:

Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said while the Church had been hostile to Darwin’s theory in the past, the idea of evolution could be traced to St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas.

Father Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, Professor of Theology at the Pontifical Santa Croce University in Rome, added that 4th century theologian St Augustine had “never heard the term evolution, but knew that big fish eat smaller fish” and forms of life had been transformed “slowly over time”. Aquinas made similar observations in the Middle Ages.

Ahead of a papal-backed conference next month marking the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the Vatican is also set to play down the idea of Intelligent Design, which argues a “higher power” must be responsible for the complexities of life.

The conference at the Pontifical Gregorian University will discuss Intelligent Design to an extent, but only as a “cultural phenomenon” rather than a scientific or theological issue.

Monsignor Ravasi said Darwin’s theories had never been formally condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, pointing to comments more than 50 years ago, when Pope Pius XII described evolution as a valid scientific approach to the development of humans.

Marc Leclerc, who teaches natural philosophy at the Gregorian University, said the “time has come for a rigorous and objective valuation” of Darwin by the Church as the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth approaches.

Professor Leclerc argues that too many of Darwin’s opponents, primarily Creationists, mistakenly claim his theories are “totally incompatible with a religious vision of reality”.

Earlier this week, prominent scientists and leading religious figures wrote to The Daily Telegraph to call for an end to the fighting over Darwin’s legacy.

They argued that militant atheists are turning people away from evolution by using it to attack religion while they also urge believers in creationism to acknowledge the overwhelming body of evidence that now exists to support Darwin’s theory.

The Church of England is seeking to bring Darwin back into the fold with a page on its website paying tribute to his “forgotten” work in his local parish, showing science and religion need not be at odds.

And to think they would want to create an actual being from this hodge podge of mixed DNA! What kind of beast would emerge?

from The Daily Telegraph:

Neanderthal man has taken a step closer to once again roaming the earth after scientists unlocked the genetic make-up of our closest relative for the first time.

Researchers announced that they had finally managed to reconstruct the entire DNA of the former species in a world breakthrough that follows a similar feat for the mammoth.

Now they believe the milestone could help discover why Neanderthal man, a short hairier version of a human, became extinct 30,000 years ago.

It also raises the possibility – although played down by scientists – that the code could be used to clone a living version of the creature.

Professor Svante Paabo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, sequenced more than one billion DNA fragments extracted from three fossilised Neanderthal bones found in a cave in Croatia.

They believe they have managed to identify the basic structure of the code – more than 60 per cent – and now aim to fill in the gaps using computer models that compare it to human and chimpanzee DNA.

The DNA also provide insights into how the genome of this extinct form differed from that of modern humans and also highlight genetic changes that enabled modern humans to leave Africa and rapidly spread around the world, starting around 100,000 years ago.

Neanderthals were the closest relatives of currently living humans. They lived in Europe and parts of Asia until they became extinct about 30,000 years ago.

For more than a hundred years, palaeontologists and anthropologists have been striving to uncover their evolutionary relationship to modern humans.

Prof Paabo, a pioneer in the field of ancient DNA research, made the first contribution to the understanding of our genetic relationship to Neanderthals when he sequenced their mitochondrial DNA, or the engine room of the cell, in 1997.

He announced the latest milestone at the opening of the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

In order to reliably compare the Neanderthal DNA sequences to those of humans and chimpanzees, the group based in Leipzig has performed detailed studies of where chemical damage tends to occur in the ancient DNA and how it causes errors in the DNA sequences.

The researchers found that such errors occur most frequently towards the ends of molecules and that the vast majority of them are due to a particular modification of one of the bases in the DNA that occurs over time in fossil remains.

They then applied this knowledge to identify which of the DNA fragments from the fossils come from the Neanderthal genome and which from other microorganisms that have contaminated the bones during the thousands of years they lay buried in the caves.

They have also developed novel and more sensitive computer algorithms to put the Neandertal DNA fragments in order and compare them to the human genome.

Inevitably the breakthrough will evoke the idea of cloning a live version of the extinct creature.

Back in November when a team of experts announced they had sequenced the DNA of a mammoth, they brought up the possibility.

However other scientists played down the chances of it becoming reality.

Aside from the moral questions such an act would provoke they pointed out that it would be “like trying to build a car with only 80 per cent of the parts, and knowing that some of them are already broken”.

A bestselling author has called octuplets-mother Nadya Sulamen a ‘murderer’ and warns of overpopulation saying, “we need to lose 4.4 billion people.”

“STOP HAVING CHILDREN.” Steven Kotler has declared that responsible adults should stop having children in order to save the planet.

Those who are having kids, are being selfish and stealing from the future, the rest of humanity, and “every living thing on the earth,” he wrote. Have too many kids and you should go to jail.

This isn’t a joke. Kotler writes a blog called “The Playing Field” on the Psychology Today Web site. He is a best selling author and an advocate of controlling population growth. His latest solution: a five-year moratorium on having kids.

Kotler’s reasoning is that the planet is running out of resources. “You think the economy is bad now – wait a few years,” Kotler said. “Wait until we’re almost completely out of oil and food and water and available land … we need to lose 4.4 billion people and we need to lose them fast.”

Those comments came just days after Nadya Sulamen, a single mother of six, gave birth to octuplets, and Kotler had an opinion about her as well. “She’s a criminal,” Kotler declared. “She’s a murderer. She’s not only guaranteeing her kids a very hard life, she’s killing all of us.”

Kotler isn’t the the first person to say humans are destroying the planet. Paul Watson of the radical Sea Shepherd Society, has called for the global population to fall below one billion, because “we are killing our host, the planet Earth,” Watson opined. “I was once severely criticized for describing human beings as being the ‘AIDS of the Earth.’ I make no apologies for that statement,” Watson has said.

Like Watson, Kotler doesn’t think much of humans. In December, writing on “The Playing Field,” he said:

So do I think that a dog’s life is worth more than a humans? I think that no dog has ever, intentionally, for reasons of selfish greed, destroyed their home like we have ours. I think that yes, there are way too many people on the planet, and while I’m not advocating mass euthanasia (though mandatory birth control sounds pretty good to me), I think before we start saying humans are worth more than dogs, we need to examine exactly what we have contributed to the quality of life for all species on this planet, not just our own.

Such ideas are hardly original. Thomas Malthus, an influential 18th century economist and philosopher, was an early proponent of population control. He reduced the human position on earth to a mathematical observation: “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio,” Malthus wrote in 1798. “Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.”

Nearly two centuries later, America scientist Paul Ehrlich took up the Malthusian standard, and added his own shrill urgency. In his hugely successful 1968 book, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich foresaw that, “In the 1970s and 1980s…hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

Ehrlich’s answer was “compulsory birth regulation…(through) the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired family size.”

Of course, Malthus, Ehrlich and other doomsayers have been proven spectacularly wrong. Kolter didn’t address that fact in his piece.

How ironic that those groups in the world who want to destroy western society believe in having very large families!

Those groups do not need to worry about warring with Western Societies, as western societies are doing a pretty good job in actively destroying themselves.

Now the majority of people in Western nations would say they do not agree with the extreme views in the article below.

But the majority of people would agree with the Humanist ideology of “family planning” which comes from the same polluted well as the ideas in the article below.

Romans 1:26:

For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature.

From Feministing:

But what if there were no families? What if we say no to reproduction?

My understanding of reproduction is that it is the basis of the institutions of marriage and family, and those two provide the moorings to the structure of gender and sexual oppression.

Family is the social institution that ensures unpaid reproductive and domestic labour, and is concerned with initiating a new generation into the gendered (as I analyzed here) and classed social set-up. Not only that, families prevent the flow of money from the rich to the poor: wealth accumulates in a few hands to be squandered on and bequeathed to the next generation, and that makes families as economic units selfishly pursue their own interests and become especially prone to consumerism. 

So it makes sense to say that if the world has to change, reproduction has to go. Of course there is an ecological responsibility to reduce the human population, or even end it , and a lot was said about that on the blogosphere recently (here, and here), but an ecological consciousness is not how I came to my decision to remain child-free

Because reproduction is seen as a psychological need, even a biological impulse, that would supposedly override any rational concerns arising out of a sense of responsibility, ecological or otherwise, I would like to propose emotional conditioning to counter such a need or impulse to reproduce. . . . .

Using my own life as a case study, I conclude that I came to a resolve not to reproduce through largely unconscious emotional reactions . I like children, but every time I fantasized of having one, I felt pangs of guilt over how for this ‘impulse’ of mine, someone else would have to put their body on the line. . . . . . .

Thus as I realized how the cultural imperative on starting a family was unfair to women and the poor, I felt an instinctive aversion to it. That is the emotionally conditioned response that could override our responses to needs and instincts that make us want to reproduce. And if we rule out the biological ‘instinct’, which is strictly only to have sex and not to reproduce, my case for saying no to reproduction becomes much stronger. . . . . .