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[Strikes and inserts show changes made by The
Des Moines Register for publication as Recreating the Garden of Eden,
Saturday, March 7, 1998.]
by Ruth Weaver
If mankind is smart enough to organize people to kill one another, why isn't mankind smart enough to limit its members in the first place through birth control?
Life's most precious joy is having a child. But, sadly, many large families
have always been the seeds of war, genocide, plague, famine, mass migration,
ecological destruction from the galloping consumption of economic
growth, and male dominance.
Any system whichthat encourages large families
is guilty of contributing to the foregoing evils. If large families
had not been produced in the first place, they would not have been there
to suffer/wreak havoc. Life is indeed cheaper by the dozen.
Large -family intrinsic dynamics of competition
and dominant-/recessive behaviors telescope out
into our very social fabric and national policies. How many news stories
depicting violence and human misery have their roots in overpopulation?
Research and technology feverishly work to keep up by developing,
e.g., medicine and ever higher
-yielding crops, which only temporarily stave
off pestilence and hunger. Research and technology, of course,
also directly supply instruments for socially sanctioned murder, i.e., war
when inevitable flash points occur brought on by shrinking space and limited
resources relative to population growth. People are reduced to so many excess
blobs of consuming protoplasm. [para] To cite just a few
well known examples of crude population control: the Semites have
been at each other's throats for millennia. Hitler trumpeted
Lebensraum. Proliferating Americans of European origin decimated native American
populations -- "a good Injun is a dead
Injun." Hiroshima. Iraqi Kurds. And then there
is abortion.
The antidote is universal voluntary birth control achieved through education.
Admittedly, birth control is not the paneacea
for all humanity's ills. But it does provide the stabilizing environment
for lasting peace, equality, nurture, and creative
fulfillment...—the Garden of Eden God intended
this world to be. It's all we've got. "And they shall beat their
swords into plowshares...neither shall they learn war any more." Isaiah
2:4.
Who knows? Given mankind's insatiable curiosity and inventive prowess, if it weren't for our energies being diverted to feeding hungry mouths and fashioning instruments of destruction, then astronaut footprints could have been on the moon a thousand years ago. And where would we have been today?
Copyright 1998 Ruth Weaver