Comments on: The Family: Fundamentalists Preaching A Gospel Of American Empire

By: SJD

SJD — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 06:50:41 +0000

Very nice observation on overpopulation. (It makes me wonder if any scholar has published an investigation along your same thoughts, here).

I can say this, though; biologist E. O. Wilson documents, in “The Future of Life”, that the levels of birth rates in Western industrial societies, while they reached a critical climax around 1964, has been steadily declining for various, benign cultural reasons since. Thus, Wilson argues, the population problem, with slight coaxing from governments, will likely correct itself.

And I agree entirely with your emphasis on education as part of a potential solution. I’d add to that, that Western society needs to get over its designation of discussing psychoanalysis as taboo. Overcoming that could launch almost unimaginable progress.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 04:35:26 +0000

One of the many, many problems, I think, is overpopulation. I think it has many adverse effects that we may not see so easily. Like creating a power struggle that balloons as the population balloons. The more people there are, the more people there are on ALL sides…..each one (side) vying for it’s “rightful place” in the natural order of things. And, as with any power struggle, it just leaves a mess that we try to fix by exerting our own proper power back into it, and making it worse. Of course this is IRrelevant, because there is no way to stop population increase save for a drastic and dramatically immoral decision like removing health care or hoping for the next disaster…..or waiting for people to stop procreating so much…..equally as UNlikely…, and so I admit that I’ve had one pint too many, and am in a sober mood. And the paradox is making me irritable. So my final comment, as will be my answer to every issue until it really starts happening, is education reform. How we educate, what we teach, how we measure success (do we ever really know anything, or are we learning always, so no one is above another in the educational sense.(young can teach old, naive can teach “learned”…that sort of thing.)) sorry…first blog, long one. thanks for listening if you did

By: SJD

SJD — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 17:49:25 +0000

This seems equally relevant, as well: psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan reversed novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s quip, “If God is dead, everything is permitted.”…

Lacan states, “If God exists, everything is permitted”–everything from the Bush’s Iraq War to Bin Laden’s 9/11.

Fundamentalists validate their violence and ignorant beliefs, by irresponsibly passing them off, onto their infantile conception of “God”.

Theologians, like Paul Tillich–who defines “God” as the “ontological ground of existence”, desperately need to be injected into our culture again, in order to save religion from itself (and to save us from fundamentalist religions).

By: SJD

SJD — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 00:04:23 +0000

This signals what historian Will Durant meant, when he said great societies destroy themselves from within before they are destroyed from without….