I appreciate all the detailed and courteous responses.
NFP is the best, no doubt, but very hard to do. New technology shoul help Catholic Couples in NFP.
I had not heard of NFP before and was interested to learn of it, and I appreciated your progressive outlook.
I’ve spent time in Kerala before. It’s not the bastion of poverty that people imagine up when they think of India. They have good health care, excellent education. It really is a beautiful part of the country.
The articles posted are in some ways intended to be inflammatory.
I’m glad to hear Kerala has good conditions, and I’m not a fan of being given the wrong picture by shoddy and/or biased journalism. Thank you for the (name removed by moderator)ut. Thanks, also to manualman.
And that does not matter if it is first person on Earth, or the 400 billionth.
There never will be more people on Earth than God desires there to be.
While I respect your opinion and think I understand the logic behind it, it seems that a logical conclusion of it is that it’s also good to have as many children as possible
even when living in extreme poverty. I hope I’ve mischaracterized it and that you’ll correct me.
If you really think that overpopulation is a problem, than nothing anyone can say will change your mind. It’s not a problem in the least-and there are overwhelming facts that prove it-but you’ll continue to believe it’s a problem. Any “overpopulation” problems are caused by corrupt goverments .
I confess ignorance as to the nature of population vs. available resources at the current time, as well as birth rate trends and projections for the future, so I’ll try to avoid passing judgment in that regard. With that said, population has been increasing worldwide for a long time, and if it were to continue to increase
indefinitely there would inevitably be more famine and death simply because resources will always be limited. But maybe the population will sort of reach some equilibrium sometime with falling birth rates, I just don’t know much about these things and I ought to learn much more.
The article manages to white-wash the most salient fact here, which is that the Church’s response is conditioned by a government attempt to float a bill that will make it illegal for parents to have more than two children.
I’m skeptical of the effectiveness in imposing fines on larger families considering that, of course, they need money even more than smaller families. I’m certainly against any system of forced abortions of sterilizations. Thanks for helping me get a more well-rounded view of the context of current situation.
Allowing more people to enjoy life can sometimes mean that we’ll all have less resources to enjoy in our own lives. It may be a question of trading off our own comforts for the opportunity of another to experience life.
While I disagree with your stance that it’s better to have more people around so that they might experience life, I appreciate that you acknowledge there’s a limit to how far that principle goes. This idea of doing a kindness to a non-existent person by bringing them into existence is fascinating, but I think misguided. Weird and interesting as it is to think of a “state” of non-existence, I am glad to exist but I do nevertheless think that if I’d never existed, there would be no obligation to bring me out of that state since I wouldn’t even be there to mind it. Hmm. That may ultimately be a fundamental difference in our worldviews that can’t be argued too well in a few posts.
Anyhow, I’m glad to get some additional insight into the situation and to finally hear some Catholic points of view on this.
