Posted on 05/13/2003 6:02:52 AM PDT by A. Pole
Like all Christians everywhere before 1930, he knew that artificial birth control is evil and against God's Word and God's law.
Only in a post-Christian age mired in the culture of death have people begun to believe that artificial birth control is morally acceptable.
That is a most weighty and deep insight, yet little remarked. To throw down that long-established concept, the divine right of kings -- a false conceit -- took an amazing degree of fortitude and vision, for each individual and for the nation in its wholes.
My impression is that he does NOT want those things! But he is worried that such systems (or something similar) will replace present system if moderation and wisdom is lacking. The quote:
"If the mighty and all-powerful captains of industry do not heed the call of an abused humanity, then the wheels of history grinding slowly but consistently will produce the antithesis that will annihilate the present system."
God gave man reproductive capacity, but he gave him a brain as well. Birth control amounts to using the brain to prevent turning the planet God gave us into a total slum with only rats, cockroaches, and humans living in it.
Thomas Malthus was a nineteenth-century cleric and sometime professor of political economy whose theories of population growth and economic stability quickly became the basis for national and international social policy throughout the West. According to his scheme, population grows exponentially over time, while production only grows arithmetically. He believed a crisis was therefore inevitable--a kind of ticking population time bomb that he believed threat- ened the very existence of the human race. Poverty, deprivation, and hunger were the evidences of this looming population crisis. He believed that the only responsible social policy would be one that addressed the unnatural problem of population growth-by whatever means necessary. Every social problem was subordinate to this central cause. In fact, Malthus argued, to deal with sickness, crime, privation, and need in any other way simply aggravates the problems further; thus, he actually condemned charity, philanthropy, international relief and development, mis- sionary outreaches, and economic investment around the world as counterproductive.
In his magnum opus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in six editions from 1798 to 1826, Malthus wrote:
"All children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to a desired level, must necessarily perish, unless room be made for them by the deaths of grown persons. . . . Therefore . . . we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague, In the country, we should build our villages near stag- nant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should repro- bate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and restrain those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders."
Does not sound especially Christian to me. In fact the author links this thinking to the wide-spread Eugenics movement in America of the early-mid 20th century. Is this taken out of context?
One hundred years before the American War of Independence the English had their Glorious Revolution.
The situation was this: the rightful possesor of the English throne, by heredity, was King James II. However, King James was a Catholic and his kingdom was mostly Anglican. The Parliament decided that it was in the best interests of the English people to have a monarch which reflected the religion of the majority.
The Parliament deposed the King in favor of George III's ancestor - the closest Anglican relative of King James.
King James declared that Parliament had no right to depose him becuase of his divine right to the throne. The Parliament responded that the will of the governed was what mattered, not the divine right he claimed.
George II's father, George II, fought a civil war against King James' grandson who invaded England attempting to reassert his divine right to rule in 1745.
George III's claim to the colonies was not that he had a divine right of rulership, but that since the colonies were the private property of the English Crown, he had a right to manage his own property according to his own lights, as long as Parliament approved of his stewardship.
Man has a brain, and the purpose of that brain is to employ it with right reason to discern and obey the natural law.
Your remarks presume that economics is a zero-sum game, that human beings are net expenses rather than value-creating individuals, and that we should presume to play God.
Artificial birth control, cloning, abortion, euthanasia, sterilization etc. are all part and parcel of this anti-human attitude, and I reject them along with all the shop-worn, long-exploded arguments in their favor.
Does not sound especially Christian to me.
Of course it is very anti-Christian. But there is a form of degenerate pseudo-Christianity derived from post-Puritan England which worships wealth, power and social proto-Darwinism. This heresy finds its expression in forms of free market muscular "Christianity" among some American Protestants.
He was only concerned that birth control not limit the production of worker drones needed to power the economy.
Therefore he took a very proto-Darwinian view of the human condition.
His attitude is not, in my opinion, consistent with Christian charity and I do not think it is taken out of context.
My point was that to him, interfering with the processes of human reproduction would be almost unthinkable - better to take one's chances with disease than to be prevented from existing.
There is a reason why Spain was the first European economy to surpass ancient Rome in wealth and expansionism: market-based initiatives.
I suspect that some of free market fundamentalists welcome the spread of SARS and hope that any public subsidies of the medical care will be restricted so the "proper" Darwianin culling of human race can take place.
No.
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