The right to procreate? If they had not done it, you or we would be now here to ask that question. It is not a right, it is a given that we procreate. Even the Bible encourages it, "Be fruitful and multiply." I cannot imagine any argument having an issue with procreation. How could it be otherwise?
The Bible says rape victims should be stoned to death (Deuteronomy 22:23-24), that fathers can sell their daughters as sex slaves with an option to buy them back if they don't "please" their new masters (Exodus 21:7-11), and other such horrors. The Bible is not a book of wisdom and anything it says about procreation was the opinion of primitive goatherds pretending to speak for "god" in order to get free meat in the form of barbaric animal sacrifices. In other words, a giant scam.
My own favorite bible quote is "Do not have sons and daughters in this place." (Jeremiah)
Did you read the quote from Ecclesiastes presented up near the top of this page? If not, here it is:
"So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter. Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive. Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun." — King James Bible, Ecclesiastes 4:1-3, attributed to King Solomon
In Letters of Zapata and The Sermon of The Fifty, Voltaire closely examines the bible, and finds much there that is pretty strange if it's to be supposed some omniscient god authored or dictated that collection of stories.
People cull from it what they like and ignore what they don't. It's probably equally true that most Christians merely assume it was authored by an all-knowing being. But abundant evidence exists that that's a very shaky assumption indeed.
People will be fruitful and multiply regardless of the harm it will do to those most enviable ones "which hath not yet been." Children have reason to contemn their parents, whose gift to them is torture and execution--whose gift to them is a forced march through a deadly minefield, which will maim and kill all of them.
I find it wonderfully ironic that the wisest man who ever lived, or ever will live, according to the Bible, completely refuted Christian theology by saying:
(1) It is better never to be born than to live.
(2) Man has no preeminence over animals, since they both end up underground, sans consciousness.
(3) There is no afterlife and no reward for believers after death.
(4) God does not intercede in human affairs, making prayer what we call a "no-op" in the software industry.
(5) There is no comforter, even though Christians call the "holy ghost" the Comforter.
Too bad the West has its own madrassas, most of them in the US I would guess. It would be better were it mandated that religion could not be taught until college, when the young have acquired more life experience and are in a better position to weigh its claims. Offer it as a sociology or political science course. Many thinkers have argued against religious indoctrination of the young, because children's minds are so vulnerable to the implantation of creeds and sectarian biases. Religion is mythology, but a number of them still command belief and allegiance as if they were truth and not fiction. Religious (equally with ideologic) indoctrination is a form of mind control. It is better to discover truth, or what is real, for oneself. In fact truth and reality can only be discovered independently, by observation of one's surrounds, and then forming judgments based on those observations. Good character--the hallmark of which is thoughtfulness--should be most honored. But that is something one is born with not taught.
Schopenhauer, in one of his many pellucid essays, correctly observed that one way academic philosophers--who will always tell you whatever you want to hear he notes--attempt to discredit thinkers like himself who never write to accommodate audience biases, but only to set down the quite unbeautiful facts, is by ignoring them, by pretending they don't exist. By confining them to the oubliette. So I am hardly surprised to be the first to post a comment here. The crowd-pleasing professors he was referring to share everything in common with the generality, in self-servingly sticking to preferred, approved, and indeed expected opinion. Khayyam, Buddha, Sophocles, Aristotle, etc., when they say what they say in the quotes above are not crowd-pleasers, but rare refreshment in this desert of universal illusion, where lovely mirages alone are well-received. Schopenhauer's contempt for them was condign. Nonetheless he advanced the principle that I am you and you are me, and thus while he couldn't help hating people sometimes--as he honestly confesses--his fundamental ethics always took precedence. His philosophy's supreme concern is ethics. I have wondered sometimes if that is why he was Einstein's most favored philosopher, who ranked him above even Plato and Aristotle.
Interesting points, thanks for sharing them. It's not a crowd-pleasing subject, I'm sure, but with the planet overheating and overcrowded with human beings, eliminating or greatly reducing procreation seems like an idea whose time has come.
The point has nothing to do with climate change. The climate has always been lethal and incontrovertibly cruel. The time came aeons ago. But with evolutionary advances it is very much closer to being within reach to eliminate all further cruelty to every living thing, trees and grass and microbes no less than animals, such as man. I am a champion of the unborn, in every species of life. "We The Living" cannot be saved from whatever lies in store. The never-born can be.
I might add that what Schopenhauer actually said is that the "Original Sin" is "Procreaton." Al Ma'arri, Khayyam's and Rumi's foremost predecessor In Islamic philosophy, said exactly the same thing minus the Christian terminolgy, and no doubt his better-known successors either were influenced by his thought, or else glad to discover it after independently reaching their own conclusions. Al Ma'arri was extraordinarily singular and acute and in fact in a class by himself; his devotion to truth, honesty, and the starkest realism, is absolutely topshelf in those 3 categories, possibly even unrivaled in the history of thought.
Do I have your permission to quote you beneath the Al Ma'arri verses? Also, do I have your permission to publish three of your antinatalist poems here? I have in mind "In God We Trust," "A Brief Alarm" and "Epitaph" but you are welcome to choose others if you so prefer.
My way of thinking differs from the antinatalist crowds'. I had never heard that word until long after reaching my own conclusions. I looked into their ideas a bit. Benatar, a philosophy prof in South Africa, seems to be the leading living proponent of that movement. But his approach to the subject is Benthamite, which mine could never be. I am merely a champion of the unborn. To force life into existence is a theft of peace, than which nothing is more precious. If I ever bring to mind any "movement," it's quite by accident, since I have always thought independently.
It depends on one's goals. If you just want to be more correct, philosophically, you can go with a single idea. But if you care about what happens in the real world, you will need more than one argument. Not everyone is going to agree that life is pointless to the point of requiring the elimination of the human race. If the best that can be hoped for is to reduce the number of human births, more than one argument will be needed because your argument is not going to achieve 100% compliance. Some people might respond to the idea of reducing the birth rate to help save the planet. Some might agree to adopt rather than give birth. The best that can be hoped for is to reduce the birth rate now, and hopefully more in the future. I think a critical question is whether you want to achieve what is possible, which will require a multi-pronged approach. A military commander can't say, "All we have to do is hold the high philosophical ground." If he wants to win the battle, he needs real-world strategies.
I will let you know when the poems have been published.
Thinkers are a distinct and very rare breed. Some are handed down through the ages as odd artifacts. Nice that Sophocles is still around, et al. You can safely believe in miracles if the generality ever starts resisting Nature based on any thinker's apt characterization of it. I've pointed that out many times in many places, i.e. "no lost cause seems more worthy to plead," for a concise ex. Voltaire thought people could be enlightened, but only within the domain of everyday practice. Thus every word he wrote was aimed at overturning religious tyranny. He did what he could given the circumstances and audience, what he had to work with. He limited his battles to ones he thought could be won. He may well have thought life was unjustifiable, but if so, he kept that to himself, and went after a target more vulnerable to attack. He hated the RCC, and all the Bible baloney, and pounded away at it with volley after volley. He did his small part in crippling its power. No wonder O'Reilly gets upset when he thinks of Voltaire.
This is what I propose, changed slightly because Schopenhauer has not yet been introduced. Feel free to revise:
Schopenhauer said the "Original Sin" is "Procreation." Al Ma'arri, Khayyam's and Rumi's foremost predecessor in Islamic philosophy, said exactly the same thing minus the Christian terminology, and no doubt his better-known successors either were influenced by his thought, or else were glad to discover it after independently reaching their own conclusions. Al Ma'arri was extraordinarily singular and acute and in fact in a class by himself; his devotion to truth, honesty, and the starkest realism, is absolutely topshelf in those three categories, possibly even unrivaled in the history of thought.
The right to procreate? If they had not done it, you or we would be now here to ask that question. It is not a right, it is a given that we procreate. Even the Bible encourages it, "Be fruitful and multiply." I cannot imagine any argument having an issue with procreation. How could it be otherwise?
The Bible says rape victims should be stoned to death (Deuteronomy 22:23-24), that fathers can sell their daughters as sex slaves with an option to buy them back if they don't "please" their new masters (Exodus 21:7-11), and other such horrors. The Bible is not a book of wisdom and anything it says about procreation was the opinion of primitive goatherds pretending to speak for "god" in order to get free meat in the form of barbaric animal sacrifices. In other words, a giant scam.
My own favorite bible quote is "Do not have sons and daughters in this place." (Jeremiah)
Did you read the quote from Ecclesiastes presented up near the top of this page? If not, here it is:
"So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter. Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive. Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun." — King James Bible, Ecclesiastes 4:1-3, attributed to King Solomon
In Letters of Zapata and The Sermon of The Fifty, Voltaire closely examines the bible, and finds much there that is pretty strange if it's to be supposed some omniscient god authored or dictated that collection of stories.
People cull from it what they like and ignore what they don't. It's probably equally true that most Christians merely assume it was authored by an all-knowing being. But abundant evidence exists that that's a very shaky assumption indeed.
People will be fruitful and multiply regardless of the harm it will do to those most enviable ones "which hath not yet been." Children have reason to contemn their parents, whose gift to them is torture and execution--whose gift to them is a forced march through a deadly minefield, which will maim and kill all of them.
I find it wonderfully ironic that the wisest man who ever lived, or ever will live, according to the Bible, completely refuted Christian theology by saying:
(1) It is better never to be born than to live.
(2) Man has no preeminence over animals, since they both end up underground, sans consciousness.
(3) There is no afterlife and no reward for believers after death.
(4) God does not intercede in human affairs, making prayer what we call a "no-op" in the software industry.
(5) There is no comforter, even though Christians call the "holy ghost" the Comforter.
Too bad the West has its own madrassas, most of them in the US I would guess. It would be better were it mandated that religion could not be taught until college, when the young have acquired more life experience and are in a better position to weigh its claims. Offer it as a sociology or political science course. Many thinkers have argued against religious indoctrination of the young, because children's minds are so vulnerable to the implantation of creeds and sectarian biases. Religion is mythology, but a number of them still command belief and allegiance as if they were truth and not fiction. Religious (equally with ideologic) indoctrination is a form of mind control. It is better to discover truth, or what is real, for oneself. In fact truth and reality can only be discovered independently, by observation of one's surrounds, and then forming judgments based on those observations. Good character--the hallmark of which is thoughtfulness--should be most honored. But that is something one is born with not taught.
I agree that there needs to be some sort of protection of children until they are old enough to make mature decisions.
Schopenhauer, in one of his many pellucid essays, correctly observed that one way academic philosophers--who will always tell you whatever you want to hear he notes--attempt to discredit thinkers like himself who never write to accommodate audience biases, but only to set down the quite unbeautiful facts, is by ignoring them, by pretending they don't exist. By confining them to the oubliette. So I am hardly surprised to be the first to post a comment here. The crowd-pleasing professors he was referring to share everything in common with the generality, in self-servingly sticking to preferred, approved, and indeed expected opinion. Khayyam, Buddha, Sophocles, Aristotle, etc., when they say what they say in the quotes above are not crowd-pleasers, but rare refreshment in this desert of universal illusion, where lovely mirages alone are well-received. Schopenhauer's contempt for them was condign. Nonetheless he advanced the principle that I am you and you are me, and thus while he couldn't help hating people sometimes--as he honestly confesses--his fundamental ethics always took precedence. His philosophy's supreme concern is ethics. I have wondered sometimes if that is why he was Einstein's most favored philosopher, who ranked him above even Plato and Aristotle.
Interesting points, thanks for sharing them. It's not a crowd-pleasing subject, I'm sure, but with the planet overheating and overcrowded with human beings, eliminating or greatly reducing procreation seems like an idea whose time has come.
The point has nothing to do with climate change. The climate has always been lethal and incontrovertibly cruel. The time came aeons ago. But with evolutionary advances it is very much closer to being within reach to eliminate all further cruelty to every living thing, trees and grass and microbes no less than animals, such as man. I am a champion of the unborn, in every species of life. "We The Living" cannot be saved from whatever lies in store. The never-born can be.
I was making my own point.
I might add that what Schopenhauer actually said is that the "Original Sin" is "Procreaton." Al Ma'arri, Khayyam's and Rumi's foremost predecessor In Islamic philosophy, said exactly the same thing minus the Christian terminolgy, and no doubt his better-known successors either were influenced by his thought, or else glad to discover it after independently reaching their own conclusions. Al Ma'arri was extraordinarily singular and acute and in fact in a class by himself; his devotion to truth, honesty, and the starkest realism, is absolutely topshelf in those 3 categories, possibly even unrivaled in the history of thought.
Do I have your permission to quote you beneath the Al Ma'arri verses? Also, do I have your permission to publish three of your antinatalist poems here? I have in mind "In God We Trust," "A Brief Alarm" and "Epitaph" but you are welcome to choose others if you so prefer.
My way of thinking differs from the antinatalist crowds'. I had never heard that word until long after reaching my own conclusions. I looked into their ideas a bit. Benatar, a philosophy prof in South Africa, seems to be the leading living proponent of that movement. But his approach to the subject is Benthamite, which mine could never be. I am merely a champion of the unborn. To force life into existence is a theft of peace, than which nothing is more precious. If I ever bring to mind any "movement," it's quite by accident, since I have always thought independently.
"
As to the poems, sure.
I have added the quotation and the three poems. You are in very good company at the top of the page with Al, Sophocles, et al.
Quite agreeable company too.
Yes, and I think they'd be glad to have you.
Al might get annoyed, however, if he caught me sipping whisky.
He may have just been keeping up appearances, to keep his head.
It depends on one's goals. If you just want to be more correct, philosophically, you can go with a single idea. But if you care about what happens in the real world, you will need more than one argument. Not everyone is going to agree that life is pointless to the point of requiring the elimination of the human race. If the best that can be hoped for is to reduce the number of human births, more than one argument will be needed because your argument is not going to achieve 100% compliance. Some people might respond to the idea of reducing the birth rate to help save the planet. Some might agree to adopt rather than give birth. The best that can be hoped for is to reduce the birth rate now, and hopefully more in the future. I think a critical question is whether you want to achieve what is possible, which will require a multi-pronged approach. A military commander can't say, "All we have to do is hold the high philosophical ground." If he wants to win the battle, he needs real-world strategies.
I will let you know when the poems have been published.
Thinkers are a distinct and very rare breed. Some are handed down through the ages as odd artifacts. Nice that Sophocles is still around, et al. You can safely believe in miracles if the generality ever starts resisting Nature based on any thinker's apt characterization of it. I've pointed that out many times in many places, i.e. "no lost cause seems more worthy to plead," for a concise ex. Voltaire thought people could be enlightened, but only within the domain of everyday practice. Thus every word he wrote was aimed at overturning religious tyranny. He did what he could given the circumstances and audience, what he had to work with. He limited his battles to ones he thought could be won. He may well have thought life was unjustifiable, but if so, he kept that to himself, and went after a target more vulnerable to attack. He hated the RCC, and all the Bible baloney, and pounded away at it with volley after volley. He did his small part in crippling its power. No wonder O'Reilly gets upset when he thinks of Voltaire.
I side with Voltaire in trying to do what is possible. Yes, I think Voltaire must be like a burr up O'Reilly's butt.
Run by me first the words you wish to quote. Just so I know which you're referring to. But otherwise, sure.
This is what I propose, changed slightly because Schopenhauer has not yet been introduced. Feel free to revise:
Schopenhauer said the "Original Sin" is "Procreation." Al Ma'arri, Khayyam's and Rumi's foremost predecessor in Islamic philosophy, said exactly the same thing minus the Christian terminology, and no doubt his better-known successors either were influenced by his thought, or else were glad to discover it after independently reaching their own conclusions. Al Ma'arri was extraordinarily singular and acute and in fact in a class by himself; his devotion to truth, honesty, and the starkest realism, is absolutely topshelf in those three categories, possibly even unrivaled in the history of thought.
Oh, forgot to answer the other part. You do, but give me a little time to decide which.
I will wait for your decision, thanks.