RADICAL STERILITY | 2008-07-14
The Carbon Count is the amount of carbon each human leaves in the world. We are being urged to look up our Carbon Count on the internet and try to minimize it. You cannot eliminate it except by committing suicide. Your job is to minimize this evil. The last thing you should do is have children.
No one seems to notice how traditional this train of thought is. Like Marxism, environmentalism claims to be new but it really just a bastard child of the worst part of Judeo-Christianity:
"Where every prospect pleases and only man is vile."
No one but me has a memory, but I saw all this in the 1970s. In the thinking that led to the movie Soylent Green, a 1972 hit, Zero Population Growth (ZPG) was the semi-ideal. The ideal was Bob Barker, one of the better-known names of the 1970s. Barker said his wife had made him Socially Aware, so he had himself sterilized and dedicated his life to taking in stray animals.
Let me add the ritual statement: No, I am not joking. No, I am not exaggerating. This was seen as not only sane, but the Highest Form of Idealism at the time.
Barker went on to the next logical step of dedicating himself to the sterilization of animals.
Our Victorian heritage gives us the impression that chastity had to do only with the morality of young women. This was a complete distortion of the basis of chastity as Gnostic Judeo-Christianity saw it.
Let me repeat that there is not one single word advocating total sexual abstinence in the Old Testament. "Be fruitful and multiply" is as close as it comes. Both the Ten Commandments and Jesus condemned only ADULTERY.
If anyone confuses all sex with adultery, he needs a dictionary or medication.
The Gnostics insisted that all things of THIS WORLD were evil. The first temptation Satan offered Jesus was "all the kingdoms of the world." It never occurred to anybody that Satan did not have them to give.
Origen tried the surgical method of ending human life on this earth, The Bob Barker Method, but the Church rejected him for it. Human sacrifice was out. It was prohibited both by the Roman Empire and by the story of Jacob and Esau.
All that was left was total abstinence from sex, which St. Paul DID say was the ideal. He said it would be better if Christians were totally abstinent, as he was, but "It is better to marry than to burn."
I know people have objected to my saying this, but "It is better to marry than to burn" is NOT a ringing endorsement of marriage.
What is interesting about the radicals, Marxist and environmentalist, is how CONSERVATIVE they are. Marx offered the same inevitable Judgment Day we have been faced with for two thousand years. Bob Barker's ZPG and environmentalism say all human life is vile.
In the new 2008 version, the Carbon Count says all human life is evil.
Three thousand years ago Zoroaster said the God of This World was Evil, the God of the Next World was good. THAT, not the Old Testament, was where ending all life as an ideal came from, and that was a distortion of what even Zoroaster himself went on to say.
I am not at all sure that Zoroaster wasn't repeating something someone said a thousand years before HIM. Bit I AM sure that none of this is new.