Time Frames and Taboo Data Blog

Back in 1942 the world population was calculated to be two billion.  World War II then brought that number down.  Today, however, a mere sixty-seven years later the world population is hurtling toward a staggering seven billion!

 For some head-in-the-sand reason, world overpopulation has been pretty much treated as a taboo subject for far too long as a media concern.  This avoidance of facing responsibility for human over-breeding is indulged in despite the fact that global poverty and possible ecological catastrophe are directly tied to the explosive increase of human life.

The so-called sacred books of man’s religions alway catered to this preservation tactic, and encouraged in conjunction with that invitation  to sexual abandon the belief that exploiting the planet was humankind’s “divine right.”  In the Bible account of beginning, for example, god supposedly decreed: “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it…” (Genesis 1:28).  Oddly, at this point in the priest-written tale, the untutored, abandoned couple, supposedly made in the image of the creative power, is charged with the obligation to replenish the earth.  The word replenish means to fill or make  complete again: to renew a supply.  Taken literally then, as the fundamentalists like to do, this word “replenish” indicates that the world and the life upon it had some previous embodiment.

The “revealed” instruction as presented by the priest-authors of these tales, unfortunately, rings with an implication that all entities are expected to become nothing more than breeders for god.  Leaders of  most religious sects and  movements eagerly subscribed to this interpretation for the self-serving reason that it assured an increase of their supporters.  This is still the mindset of those seeped in the illogicality of religious storytelling and look upon bearing many children as an expression of god’s abundance.  This irrationality is so pronounced that even today there are some national leaders who actually advocate childbirth bounties to increase their national political power structure.  Breeding was a “duty” expected of German soldiers in the early 1940s to increase Hitler’s subjects,  for example.

The fact remains, however, that the present world population is ecologically unsustainable.  History has shown that in periods when human population increased up to sevenfold there followed disasters of unprecedented food shortages, escalating prices for essentials, mass migrations, followed by rampage and riots—even cannibalism.

 But man’s fundamentalist religions tend to conscientiously ignore history, preferring their own edification of “truth.”  So today we still have religious resistance to contraceptives, sexual instruction, abortion, and they teach—in the name of god, of course—hatred toward any same-sex attraction—which just might be Nature’s way of keeping resources and life forces in balance for a habitable planet.

This entry was posted on September 25, 2009 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Atheism, Atheist, belief, Bible, culture, ecology, environment, faith, freethought, history, humanity, life, nature, random, religion, thoughts with tags abortion, be fruitful and multiply, contraceptives, ecology, same-sex attration, sexual information, world population. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.