Tuesday, February 16, 2010

The Myth of Overpopulation

Here are two videos on the over populations myth. They are brief and to the point. Enjoy.





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5 comments:

NathanColquhoun said...

While overpopulation has never really been a concern for me, these videos seemed ignorant, especially the first one.

For the first video, the only real reason he gave that we should keep reproducing is that elderly start outnumbering the younger people. That's only because we have a society where there is such thing as retirement and the younger generations are responsible to make sure they get pay checks every week, as opposed to taking care of them and being in relationship with them.

The other thing these videos do is make it seem like a bad and horrible thing if our society gets smaller, or becomes extinct. I'm not convinced it's something we should fear.

While I don't think that overpopulation is the real plague (i think unbalance of wealth is), these videos probably belong in an elementary school classroom.

February 16, 2010 at 10:58 PM
NathanColquhoun said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
February 16, 2010 at 10:58 PM
Craig Carter said...

Um . . . Nathan, before you go around using nasty words like "ignorant," maybe you should be aware that your own ignorance is showing on this point.

If elderly people start outnumbering younger people, as is happening, the eventual result will be economic collapse as taxes are raised higher and higher on the fewer and fewer productively employed people to pay for the entitlement programs for the elderly (medicare, pensions, etc.) Now you seem quite open to taking away the Old Age Pension from seniors, but are you also willing to strip away their health care too? What is your plan: involuntary euthanasia?

Before you make any more pronouncements about these issues, I'd suggest that you read a good book by a demographer such as Philip Longman ("The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It" NY: Basic Books, 2004)

Using UN statistics he shows that the current world population is projected to level off and begin falling at 9 billion around 2050. Japan and Russia are already in decline and most of the world will follow in their wake. We may already be past the point of being able to achieve a stable population, which should be our goal.

It actually is a bad and horrible thing if our population gets smaller. And as for the human race going extinct, well Satan has been trying to accomplish that goal since the war began in Gen. 3. But it isn't going to happen, as all of us know who have read to the end of the book.

The culture of death is pervasive, but it loses in the end because it is, after all, a culture of . . . you know - death. And God is a God of life.

February 17, 2010 at 10:08 AM
NathanColquhoun said...

I apologize, I didn't mean to come across as knowing what I'm talking about. I don't. I do however feel like I have some critical reasoning ability and I was just trying to understand better their argument, which seems poor.

With our current economic system, I can see the collapse coming if elderly start out numbering the young. However, my point in the first comment didn't come through so well, are we really suggesting that the only solution to that problem is to just keep producing more and more? Isn't this simply buying into the lie of the west that we have an infinite amount of resources so keep going and go strong?

I am not trying to promote a culture of death. I am trying to figure out who is determining what a good amount of people would be. The supporters of overpopulation seem to have a number in mind. The supporters of the opposite seem to think there is no limit. I'm having a hard time buying either argument.

February 17, 2010 at 11:19 AM
Craig Carter said...

Nathan,
I don't mean to be hard on you and I appreciate your humility. You certainly do have good critical thinking skills and deployment of same is exactly what is needed. Never be afraid to question. Let's see if we can reach some clarity here, but there are a bunch of assumptions you are making that I don't happen to think are true, although I used to believe some of them myself and have changed my mind.

You ask: "are we really suggesting that the only solution to that problem is to just keep producing more and more? Isn't this simply buying into the lie of the west that we have an infinite amount of resources so keep going and go strong?"

Well, first of all, producing more and more is a process that has been going on since the hunter gatherers became farmers and it is difficult to see why it needs to stop. Production of goods and services is not simply taking natural resources and using them up: that is much too simplistic an(well, actually a dead wrong) understanding of economic activity. Creativity, technology and entrepreneurship allow us to make a lot out of something that to previous generations was useless - and creativity, technology and entrepreneurship never get used up. In fact they expand as culture expands and I see no reason to think that contemporary culture has expanded to the limits of human potential.

Now as for the phrase "the lie of the west." The West doesn't do anything inherently different than any human society in producing goods and services (i.e. wealth); it just has done so more effectively than other parts of the world in recent centuries. The West is a culture created by Greek philosophy and Biblical theology and it has embodied a great deal of good from classical music to an extended life spans for ordinary people to political freedom. To speak dismissively of it or to imply that it is the incarnation of evil is just grossly irresponsible and untrue.

The culture of death says that humans are a blight on the earth. Well, that is their religion, but Genesis teaches that humans are the crowning glory of creation. We are nature become conscious and our responsibility is to manage and care for creation AND to bring forth its potential (i.e. through culture making). This requires economic development as one of its components and to despise economic development is, therefore, to be disobedient to the cultural mandate (Gen. 1).

I believe that a modest population growth can go on for centuries and centuries with no harm to the planet. I also believe that Environmentalist religion with its Global Warming Alarmism (like previous scare tactics from the proponents of the culture of death) is just a manifestation of fallen human rebellion against the Creator. It justifies abortion, contraception, euthanasia, coercive population control by government and many other evils.

This is getting too long so I'll close here. But I welcome more dialogue.

February 17, 2010 at 12:49 PM

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