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Tony, Actually there isn’t a contradiction. There is just “complexity”. Every point you raised is valid. But all fall under a factual “sine qua non”… namely the one issue which if unresolved, there would be no sense in talking about all others. It isn’t a “catholic-only” issue. I never said it was. Neither is it even a catholic issue because at its core it is a “human” issue. In the Philippines it is a “largely” catholic issue. It deals with what is probably the most powerful instinct that is natural to man, namely the instinct towards the propagation of the species which is at the heart of that most powerful of urges, namely SEX. One of the really difficult complexities is the dynamic interplay between the forces of reason and the forces of sex. There is a saying that God gave man two most important organs, one being the brain and the other the penis. His mistake was giving us only one circulatory system because when blood is flowing to the penis, nothing flows into the brain. There is some seriousness to this joke. It isn’t logically valid to just brush away the sex aspect as one of the controlling entities behind overpopulation. But it’s just one. “Reason” is the other and it is the more powerful of the two. Through reason, most of humankind (Philippines remains an odd exception) has said yes to sex while at the same time saying no to uncontrolled population. There are simple, inexpensive and readily available tools that the Catholic Church continues to insist are “illicit” therefore sinful. Namely the condom, the pill , IUDs etc. Most of the rest of the world has rejected the Church’s insane positions on these tools. Even very catholic countries like Spain, Ireland, Poland, etc. have rejected the CC’s position that Philippine Bishops insist be enforceable on that population despite its runaway population growth You misunderstood what I said about 500 years from now. That was an exercise in “reductio ad absurdum”, a logical construct we learned is a valid argument when we were in college. There is just no way the Philippine population can grow to 1.5 trillion in 500 years (at 2% growth) or even to 24 billion (at 1% annual growth). But the problem exists today in levels of near absurdity. Had the Philippines just grown at the same rate as the rest of the world, it’s population today would’ve been 65 million instead of the 95 million that it is today. If the Philippines doesn’t follow the rest of the civilized world in marginalizing the church’s wrong thinking on this subject, the already severe problem will continue, with population doubling every 35 years. There could 350 million in 70 years and up to 700 million by 2112. These are untenable and unsustainable numbers no matter how rosily one were to look at it. Much of this will be within the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. We owe them a real view of what is likely to happen if they follow the dictates of our church. This isn’t the only time our church would’ve been drastically wrong either. For hundreds of years they were wrong on the earth being the center of the universe. There are many such examples of the church having been in doctrinal error for prolonged periods. But the church is a human institution. Despite its self created claim for infallibility, it was never infallible as no human being or institution is or can be infallible. Love to all, Danding From: Antonio Borao [mailto:
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Subject: RE: {First Principles} Washington Times articles about the Philippines There is a contradiction in Danding's argument. Nobody has a disagreement with exponential growth except that if the % approaches zero then the overpopulation problem tends to simply dissipate. And there is more probability that it will reduce rather than increase. The correct focus on overpopulation as a problem at present is to check population densities. Besides, the upcoming space explorations looking for life in other inhabitable planets are a hope for the overpopulation problem. Communist China, India, Indonesia, the muslim world, the jewish world & the rest of the Buddhist nations do not follow Rome's position on birth control. These account for the majority of the population in this planet. For that matter neither does most of Christian Europe follow Rome's position. It is impossible for me to that all the Filipinos(inc. muslims) follow this position. So what does Rome have to do with this overcopulation problem? To argue today of a catastrophe several hundred yrs. from now is smelly farting. Keep on farting, Antonio Borao _____ From:
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Subject: RE: {First Principles} Washington Times articles about the Philippines Date: Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:08:29 -0600 Manolo and Tony, It can’t be God’s plan because the one thing we can say about God is he (or she) isn’t absurd. If you’ve not looked at the we_b_link__s and the 8 short videos then we have not much else to talk about on this issue because we’re ships in the night unaware of each other’s positions. Let me just bring it to this into a crystal-clear point using reduction ad absurdum. If the current rate of growth were to persist for just 100 or so years into 2112, the Philippine population will stand at over 700 million. You know this is an impossibility. Let’s bring it to the ultimate absurdity. If you saw the _link_ I sent you and understood it as obviously you must have, yet continue defending the status quo when it comes to projections of Philippine population… at just the 2% per year current growth, in less than 500 years, the Philippine population will stand at 1,556,000,000,000. That’s 1.5 trillion people at just 2% per year growth (doubling every 35 years). Let’s halve the population growth to just 1% per year. Assuming no wars or famines or super-volcanoes, the Philippine population 500 years from now will stand at 24,300,000,000. That’s a measly 24 billion people in the Philippines 500 years from now assuming the land and the sea can support them all. If you can’t see the absurdity of this then you haven’t understood the message on exponential growth. Does 1.5 trillion 24 billion Filipinos in 500 years sound like a plan from a sensible God? Is it even feasible? Or is the absurdity of it all peering through the fog of the religious nonsense the church keeps propagating and you defending? It’s simply this. We’re at a point of human development on the earth where there are simply no alternatives to zero population growth. The annual world population growth of 80 million net new human beings a year is unsustainable over time. It will choke the earth into the absurdly impossible levels of trillions of human beings in a few hundred years. Mankind is not so stupid as to allow the species to die by choking itself to death. That is precisely the church’s position you and Tony are defending. It is completely untenable. Some will reach or exceed ZPG sooner than others and this will result in political and economic dislocation and relocation problems that will need to addressed as real political and demographic issues. But the issue of worldwide ZPG is no longer a real issue except in the minds of a few eunuchs who inhabit the halls of church power in the Vatican. It should be noted that outside those opulent palatial halls, these eunuchs have almost no residual power elsewhere on earth, having distanced themselves from the masses precisely because of their lunatic position on population control. Love to all, Danding From: A M Gonzalez [mailto:
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Subject: Re: {First Principles} Washington Times articles about the Philippines Spot on Tony Over population is indeed a problem but is actually a manifestation of other larger problems as have been pointed ( corruption & incompetence of politicians plus the lack of resolve & greed for the rich in society who prefer to keep things as is ). Traditional poor families favor more offspring as it betters an individual family's chance of survival. Condoms might even get used to store water or utilized as chewing gum not because they don't know what they're for but rather because of the sheer lack of basic necessities. Providing opportunities for people to work solve the tendency for the poor & jobless to want to have children. Look at Western societies. In Spain, not too long ago, families had 5 or 6 kids while today, as Tony points out, there is negative population growth. People are just too busy to rear children & they don't have them. This of course brings sustainability problems, where a recently considered overpopulated society, China, now needs lots & lots of new babies. Going back to the Philippines, the church may have actually gotten it right all along. Look at things this way : a. The church considers that there's a great lack of spirituality in the Western world. b. If there aren't enough opportunities in the Phils. people will move, by hook or by crook c. If the church manages a half decent job to train Filipinos in Christianity then there's a fantastic chance for Filipinos to champion Catholicism worldwide in huge numbers in the coming decades ! Now Danding, I'm not asking you to think like a bishop, think only like an ordinary Christian, why can't something like this be God's plan ? Manolo
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