The Chruch Contraceptive

Liebling

Liebling

Doesn't Need to be Spoonfed.
Valued Senior Member
Since most religions outlaw contraception and/or abortion to it's followers, can we pass the burden of children on welfare, defaulting child support and other tax-funded social programs on to the Church themself to pay for it?

It seems illogical to me as an atheist and someone who believes in ZPG theory, that I have to pay for someone else's over-breeding because of their religious beliefs. I am paying out of my pocket for their religious freedoms that take advantage of a broken system that is wholly unsustainable. As our population grows and costs more to maintain, the boom will eventually bust our financial system.

The Vatican has billions of wasted dollars maintaining all the pomp and circumstance they have amassed over hundreds of years, wouldn't that be better spent supporting their flock in the endevors that they encourage so highly? Why is it my responsibilty to support people who's religion challenges the economic and ecologic sustainability of our country?
 
The reality is that most women do use contraception. This is mostly an election issue, since the economy seems to be improving and the cons need to beat the dead horse of gays guns and god.
 
The church position works under the assumption of willpower and responsibility. This policy may not work well with ferrel humans. It is not the church that is increasing the social costs but the ferrel human policies of liberalism.

The ferrel human policies can be disguised as normal, if there is a mop to clean up. Birth control allows us to mop up. The church says we don't support such mops but expect fewer spills. The fear of liberals is if there is no mop, the spill of muddy water will now seep into other areas of the economy. Or, the same ferrel humans who lack responsibility will leave children for others to care for so the spill gets even larger. This will come to back to bite the liberals without a mop.

Among Catholics, each Catholic does what they think they need to do including birth control. But don't expect the Vatican to give you a mop if you act ferrel. They will need to be responsible after the fact; semi-ferrel is a little better.
 
wellwisher, you are so un-spongeworthy. And the word is feral, not ferrel. The church can start being sanctimonious again when they stop fucking children.
 
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spidergoat said:
The reality is that most women do use contraception. This is mostly an election issue, since the economy seems to be improving and the cons need to beat the dead horse of gays guns and god.
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This.

98% of Catholic women use or have used contraception. It's not a real issue. The Church just doesn't want to offer it as part of their benefit package.
 
JDawg said:
This.

98% of Catholic women use or have used contraception. It's not a real issue. The Church just doesn't want to offer it as part of their benefit package.
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It's not just the Catholics, but all religions who promote having as many children as you are physically able. I suppose I made a poor choice in choosing the Catholic church since they are so polarizing. Religious beliefs seem to be the reason why most people who have more than three children have more than three children.
 
Liebling said:
It's not just the Catholics, but all religions who promote having as many children as you are physically able. I suppose I made a poor choice in choosing the Catholic church since they are so polarizing. Religious beliefs seem to be the reason why most people who have more than three children have more than three children.
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I don't really know if that's true.
 
JDawg said:
I don't really know if that's true.
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http://www.overpopulation.org/religion.html said:
Bruce Sandquist said:
January 2006 Bruce Sandquist
The Muslim world has the world's highest population growth rate (3.5%/year)
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NPR said:
In Pakistan, Birth Control and Religion Clash
August 10, 2011 NPR
Nearly 4 million babies are born in Pakistan every year, and most are born into poverty. The World Bank says 60% of Pakistanis live on less than $2 a day, according to a new government survey,

Yet clerics in religiously conservative Pakistan tell the Muslim majority that the Quran instructs women to keep bearing as many babies as possible and say that modern family planning is a Western convention that offends Islam.
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http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/faith-equals-fertility said:
Consider the Mormons, who grew from six people in a log-cabin in upstate New York in 1830 to 13.1m adherents around the world in 2007. At the beginning of the 20th century, Mormons were a fringe sect in America, with decidedly unusual beliefs. (They officially hold that God once had a body; that people exist as spirits before they are physically conceived; and that Jesus will one day commute between somewhere in Israel and somewhere in the United States.) Today Mormons are about to overtake Jews in America; in fact, they may already have done so. And they almost had their own presidential candidate, in the person of Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts. The rapid rise of Mormons in America, growing by an average of 40% every decade in the 20th century, is mainly due to their large families. The American state with the highest birth rate is Utah, which is around 70% Mormon. In America, on average, Mormon women have nearly three times more children than Jewish women.
/snip

Like other demographers, Eric Kaufmann expects western Europe to become markedly more religious in the course of the 21st century, as a result of the relatively low fertility of unbelievers and immigration from more pious places. Not only do denominations with traditionalist values tend to have higher birth rates than their more liberal co-religionists, but countries that are relatively secularised usually reproduce more slowly than countries that are more religious. According to the World Bank, the nations with the largest proportions of unbelievers had an average annual population growth rate of just 0.7% in the period 1975-97, while the populations of the most religious countries grew three times as fast.
/snip
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Pretty sure you are wrong.

The highest birth rates occur where there is the highest population of religious peoples. Look at the global statistics for religion and overlay the global statistics for birth rate and I think you'll find that it is too strong a correlation to ignore.

Hispanic Catholics are the fastest growing population in the United States. It's part cultural but it's a lot religious.
 
Liebling said:
Since most religions outlaw contraception and/or abortion to it's followers, can we pass the burden of children on welfare, defaulting child support and other tax-funded social programs on to the Church themself to pay for it?

It seems illogical to me as an atheist and someone who believes in ZPG theory, that I have to pay for someone else's over-breeding because of their religious beliefs. I am paying out of my pocket for their religious freedoms that take advantage of a broken system that is wholly unsustainable. As our population grows and costs more to maintain, the boom will eventually bust our financial system.

The Vatican has billions of wasted dollars maintaining all the pomp and circumstance they have amassed over hundreds of years, wouldn't that be better spent supporting their flock in the endevors that they encourage so highly? Why is it my responsibilty to support people who's religion challenges the economic and ecologic sustainability of our country?
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Seems like you are suggesting some radical new take on economic contributions to society (like one is only obliged to support and be supported by the demographs one represents - so for instance if you, as an atheist, gets mugged, the police aren't obliged to assist you if they are theists)

Hopefully you can see how plainly ridiculous your suggestions are ....
 
Liebling said:
Pretty sure you are wrong.

The highest birth rates occur where there is the highest population of religious peoples. Look at the global statistics for religion and overlay the global statistics for birth rate and I think you'll find that it is too strong a correlation to ignore.

Hispanic Catholics are the fastest growing population in the United States. It's part cultural but it's a lot religious.
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Pretty sure I'm right.

For the past seven decades, high fertility and poverty have been strongly correlated, and the world’s poorest countries also have the highest fertility and population growth rates. To some extent, this is due to the fact that poverty and its determinants (subsistence agriculture, low levels of education, subordinate position of women) also tend to perpetuate high fertility.
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http://www.unfpa.org/public/home/factsheets/pid/3856

Of course, religion is a part of this, but poverty is the common denominator. In many cases, the high birth rate is a necessity, as children provide labor and, by extension, income for those families. Obviously, education and family planning would help remedy the situation--and this is where religion actually enters the discussion--but it's often difficult to get funding for programs when the Church (or Mosque, or Temple) has influence on lawmakers. But there's nothing to say that people are having children because their faith is telling them to. That's not plausible.

But what does something in a third-world country have to do with you?
 
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Even if the babies are atheists, their parents are not, and will turn them into theists! At least some of them.
 
lightgigantic said:
Seems like you are suggesting some radical new take on economic contributions to society (like one is only obliged to support and be supported by the demographs one represents - so for instance if you, as an atheist, gets mugged, the police aren't obliged to assist you if they are theists)

Hopefully you can see how plainly ridiculous your suggestions are ....
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That's a complete strawman argument, and not what I am suggesting at all. I think that declared Christians who choose to overbreed and can't afford it/have a greater ecological footprint than is sustainable should get subsidies from the Church instead of handouts from the government. It's really not the same thing at all. I pay taxes which pay the police, therefore, they should protect me regardless of their faith or my lack thereof. Your argument is a complete strawman.

JDawg said:
http://www.unfpa.org/public/home/factsheets/pid/3856

Of course, religion is a part of this, but poverty is the common denominator. In many cases, the high birth rate is a necessity, as children provide labor and, by extension, income for those families. Obviously, education and family planning would help remedy the situation--and this is where religion actually enters the discussion--but it's often difficult to get funding for programs when the Church (or Mosque, or Temple) has influence on lawmakers. But there's nothing to say that people are having children because their faith is telling them to. That's not plausible.

But what does something in a third-world country have to do with you?
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Yes, poverty is a correlating factor, I didn't bring it up for a reason. Religion in the poorest communities, often takes the place of education in third world countries.

And you are right, education and family planning would help remedy it, all of which certain religions completely reject for religious reasons. And a flock follows it's leaders. I know friends who didn't want to have children but after sitting down with their pastor at their Baptist church, decided to do so because it was the right thing to do as a follower of God. When their third child arrived, she and the baby nearly died in childbirth due to heart problems and it took her a year and a half to recover, and the baby was both premature and stuggling with developmental delays. When she recovered, her very religious husband convinced her to have another baby because God took care of them once, they would do it again. She was buried in October, six months pregnant with their fourth child of heart failure. The best the husband could get from the Church was a few casseroles after her passing. He struggles and had to accept public aid this January when he lost his job because he has small children and he's the only provider. Did the Church help him? No. Some community.

Now this is just one story, but it's interesting to have the heads of a church dictate that family planning is against God's will but not support those people when they do so. It takes advantage of a state run system to forward their faith. That's what I object to. If they want to advocate having more than 2 children per couple, they should subsidize families when they can't afford it.

And why does third world over-population effect me? Other than the obvious and willful destruction of ecosystems that overflow the earth's carrying capacity and destroy things for the rest of us responsible people, we have a positive birth rate almost exclusively due to immigration in the U.S. and the more crowded things get, the more crime will rise, the more pollution will rise and all of the other issues with overcrowding will occur.
 
The nature of this proposition was discussed in Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal.
 
I like the idea of penalties for what you believe. In fact, that is the core equation in economics anyway.
 
Not that I'm tooting my own horn, but for a nominal fee I will design the system that asks you questions, and calculates your taxes accordingly.
 
Aqueous Id said:
Not that I'm tooting my own horn, but for a nominal fee I will design the system that asks you questions, and calculates your taxes accordingly.
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I like your way of thinking. You should have read my whole sheet of calculations on how accidental pregnancies could be shared equally by both parties who made said mistake. I'll have to dredge it up for you.

Responsibility for ones actions. Ownership of choices. This is what the world is missing these days, and ultimately it will be our destruction.
 
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