Go forth and fill the earth

The famous line in Genesis uttered by god to Adam and Eve revealed to humanity that women are supposed to breed until they drop to ensure that we fulfill god's natural law.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. ²⁸ And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." ²⁹

This quote is taken Genesis, Chapter 1 using http://www.bibleontheweb.com/Bible.asp .

Being brought up as a Catholic I'm quite familiar with this text and recently wondered how it fits with the population crisis we see today. There are three places on this earth that contain the bulk of the 7 billion or so people who exist today. China and India are two of them and South America is the third and the one most affected by the bilious religious nonsense introduced by St Augustine based on this quote.

If your not familiar with Catholicism, there's a doctrine known as "Propagation of the Faith" whereby the primary purpose of sex is to produce children. Contraception is forbidden, the only approved method is known as the "rhythm" method, designed by Dr Billings.

And everyone knows that this method doesn't work.

Where does this live humanity? Hanging on the edge of existence.

Browsing through a Google search using the terms "Go forth and multiply" I found the prescient article by Aaron Hiller. Written in 1984, he cites research of the day showing that the Earth's population would hit 6.9 billion by the year 2000. Not far off the mark and quite scary when you think about how many human children were born in the intervening 24 years.

In this articles there's a reference to the fact that contraceptive practices were well known, with the Babylonian Talmud even providing details of how to prevent unwanted pregnancies from occurring. It shows that 5,000 years ago people were concerned with the effects of too many mouths to feed.

The effect of religion on the state is quite marked and Hiller's article highlights the pernicious nature of letting religious edicts entering the legal structures of a society. There's the pointed reference to the non-fiction section starting at 200.0 in your local library. Western religious history is difficult to absorb when you are presented with atrocities against humanity page after page.

What else is interesting is the delegation of notable intellectuals who, in 1964, attempted to persuade Pope Paul VI that the Roman Catholic position on sex and procreation were creating untold misery for millions and billions of people. They were rejected out of hand as it was not god who had revealed this unpalatable truth.

There is an out for the Roman Catholics in this situation. There's little dispute that we've filled the letter of god's requirements. The two food revolutions in the last 10o years allowed the number of humans on the planet to multiply from 1,000,000 to 7,000,000 and it continues to rise. There are very few places left untouched by human hand.

Saint Augustine appears on Wikipedia, but you need to dig more into what he achieved in his time to fully appreciate the impact his thinking has on our world today.

We have dominion over all creatures and are now contributing in a major way to the destruction of the only home we own. It's time the Roman Catholic church woke up to its responsibilities.