Sunday, November 21, 2010
"The Population Bomb"
This, from Front Porch Republic:
. . .Small is beautiful not because it purposefully stunts its growth, sterilizes itself, or controls itself with an obsessive and dominating rigor that would impose a little circle of stasis on nature and in defiance of it. The small community is desirable, not because it gives the fleece-vested among us an opportunity to savor a mochachino before heading up to Mount Rainier for the afternoon. The small household is beautiful, not because of its unpeopled quiet, but because the crush of kids playing and squabbling, raising and getting along together is the earliest and the latest fulfillment of our political natures. With and as children, we learn to be human; with and as the parents of children, we learn to be adults. Those who truly see the essential value of home production, the bonds of community, the propinquity of growing and eating, of making and using in a settled place, see also that these exquisite attributes of the small and local are made possible by big families and that big families are a large part of what makes them valuable in the first place. . . .
With the caveat that no snark ought to be directed at those who know the value of good outerwear on Mt. Rainier . . . read the whole thing.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/11/the-population-bomb.html
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Since my mother's family was a very large Catholic one of eleven kids, I can sympathize with your views to an extent on large families. But since your consistent strategy being developed here is to call others, who do not routinely explicate the the breadth of Catholic thought on sexual issues, anti -Catholic even when they are making passing journalistic criticisms, something seems missing from your own approach. There are plenty of things that are also not good about large families: I saw them up close. To deny this merely on the basis of your belief is to rob others of their principled dislike of a simple matters, like poverty and damaging familial dysfunction. Is the dislike of such matters to be made by people of your ilk per se anti-Catholic?? Your logic seems gratuitous. Especially in light of the continued pronouncements on display in this blog of the belief in religious liberty, and worse faux cool-guy dalliance with "atheistic" views as a conceptual antinomy. I think you ought to bring in Ockham's Razor more to these discussions and get down to it. But if your line of defense is similar to that of your other post, you will have trouble: " So, to disagree is not to demean; to debate is not to insult; to contradict with objective reasoning is not to marginalize or unjustly discriminate." This little bit of wishful thinking on your part ought to be separated from your right to hold your own religious views.
As a conceptual matter the Roman Catholic Church has had to frame its beliefs in terms of political realities differently in every different age. Can anyone deny, just for instance, that Febronianism in Austria in the 18th Century would not have called for a completely distinct approach for your Church than it has today in relation to the State. So asking Catholics to reasonably adjust themselves to political realities is not per se anti-Catholic, which seems to be the rather puerile over-arching theme of this whole blog. What is offensive, and stupidly marginalizing (to yourselves ironically not to others) and also discriminatory is not your belief per se, but your blowzy tactic of asserting that such belief trounces the rights of others to expect fair treatment. This is without even getting into the sad actual realties of the families and marriages your are so abstractly defending. Personally in this regard, having seen many up close, I consider your views really detached from reality. But that is my personal observation. The larger issue is that your intellectual strategy is so ill-considered in the context of our societal necessities, even though I can appreciate they make a certain sense in terms of the Catholic Church's desiderata at this moment in time.