50. Instead of resolving the problems of the poor and thinking of how the world can be different, some can only propose a reduction in the birth rate. At times, developing countries face forms of international pressure which make economic assistance contingent on certain policies of “reproductive health”. Yet “while it is true that an unequal distribution of the population and of available resources creates obstacles to development and a sustainable use of the environment, it must nonetheless be recognized that demographic growth is fully compatible with an integral and shared development”. To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues.
The pope does not say that the poor must stay poor to show their gratitude to the almighty or for the sake of the environment. Rather, he ducks the question of what will happen as the ever-expanding populations of poor countries grow richer. Demand the promotion of birth control – not abortion or eugenics, just contraception – and you are “refusing to face” the world’s unequal distribution of wealth, he writes. End “the extreme and selective consumerism” of the rich world and – eureka! –“demographic growth is fully compatible with an integral and shared development”.
Everything about his argument is slippery. Even if rich countries are prepared to redistribute wealth to poor countries, I have never met a secular campaigner against poverty who does not believe that educating women and giving them control of their fertility is the best way to reduce poverty.
But the solution to climate change is not to moralize from on high and implore people—particularly the poor people who he claims to sympathize with—to learn to be abstemious for the common good and do without central heating, electric lights, and efficient transport. Billions of people aren’t going to do that. Not even the Pope—especially not the Pope—is going to do that. The solution is economic and technological: a global carbon tax, and investment in the development of new energy technologies. The Pope shows no signs of acknowledging this, because it leaves him and his church no special role.
In recent weeks, we have learned that Pope Francis enticed Cuban President Raúl Castro to consider a return to Catholicism, and has ended a dispute involving US nuns that will allow them to return to serving the poor free from the suspicion of heresy.
Perhaps most surprisingly, at least to this Protestant ecologist embedded for 30 years in a Roman Catholic university, the Pope has suggested that humans should not breed “like rabbits”, despite his church’s continued prohibition of birth control.
Pope Francis, after a visit to the largest Catholic nation in Asia, says Catholics may have a moral responsibility to limit the number of their children and need not reproduce “like rabbits.”
But the pope also reaffirmed the church’s ban on artificial means of birth control and said Catholics should practice “responsible parenting.”
That’s all Lodge has to say about population control, and he makes no attempt to relate it to global warming, the main topic of his piece. Instead, he repeatedly praises Frances for trying to bring together science and faith:
Pope Francis is clearly a man on a mission to shake things up. Could the world’s leading Catholic help to bridge the divide between science and the Protestant views that dominate the religious ‘anti-science’ movement? I think that he could.
. . . By framing protection of the environment as protecting human welfare, the Pope has linked the interests of groups that are often at odds. He offers some middle ground on which both sides of this polarized debate can meet and work towards a mutually desirable future.
Except, of course, for the pesky issues of overpopulation, carbon taxes, and alternative technologies.
Well, so be it. I suppose the Pope’s acknowledgment of anthropogenic global warming is a good thing, but of course the vast majority of climate scientists recognized that long ago. The Pope is simply admitting what we all know, and so any praise for him should be directed not at his prescience, but at the dubious assumption that people will actually pay attention to him because he’s the Pope.
In the end, though, Lodge’s article falls down for two reasons. First, he equates religiously based denial of global warming with “extreme environmentalism”, whatever that is. My emphasis in Lodge’s words below:
Such a compromise between the extremes of the religious and environmentalist positions could also help to defuse other sources of tension between faith and science. To many people, the two cannot be reconciled — so much so that when I tell people I am a biologist, believe in evolution and work on environmental issues, I am often told that I cannot be a Christian.
What, exactly, is the “environmentalist position” that should be compromised? That global warming is caused by humans and needs to be curbed? Is that “extreme”? Lodge doesn’t explain. This ridiculous equation is reflected in the article’s subtitle, “Pope Francis has found a meeting place for those with extreme religious and environmentalist stances, says David M. Lodge.”
And Lodge also—completely gratuitously—blames this polarization on the New Atheists, of course dragging the much-maligned Dawkins into the fray:
The same polarization [between faith and science] is urged by many prominent popularizers of science and the ‘New Atheists’ — with Richard Dawkins as their figurehead. Is it so surprising, then, that in the United States especially, atheism is over-represented among scientists, and that science–faith polarization is increasingly reflected in political and cultural discourse?
The Pope and his utterings should be completely irrelevant in 2015.
…let us pray.
…For Should Be…
nd refusal to sanction effective birth control simply maintains poor women as chattel: breeder stock that can never rise above their stations as baby machines.
Two women that I am talking to now, one a Catholic, the other a self-proclaimed leftist, libertarian, pro-life feminist, are both arguing that hormonal contraception, for *any* reason, including practicality (imagine a female astronaut having to worry about carrying tampax into space) is a misogynist plot to turn women into ‘semen receptacles’
Apparently, being used as a mere breeding machine is actually feminist, and any woman who objects to this has merely been hoodwinked by Teh Patriachy:
Yep. According to the brilliant folks at Secular Pro Life Perspectives, patriarchy is letting women engage in family planning and self-determination.
Amazing.
If they think contraception is a bad idea, wonderful; they don’t have to use contraception.
But for them to take the next step and think they have the right to force their views on everybody else….
Well, fine. They want to play with rhetorical fire, I’ll be happy to dance with them.
Obstructing access to birth control is a form of rape.
A man forcing himself upon a woman in a way that’s likely to get her pregnant is rape, no? And the Pope is a man, right? And forcing his views upon women in ways pretty much guaranteed to get lots of them pregnant against their wishes, right? Seems rather clear-cut that the Pope is therefore a mass rapist.
(Yes, of course. Over-the-top hyperbolic shameless rhetoric. But not quite as bad as the Pope’s own “abortion is murder” rhetoric….)
b&
But for them to take the next step and think they have the right to force their views on everybody else….
Well, those are their moral views, the whole point of which is that either everyone follows them or no one does. If it helps to understand that mindset, imagine if someone said to you, “Sure, fine, I respect your view that murdering minorities is evil, but stop bothering me just because I do it! You don’t have the right to force me to follow your rules!”
Yes. In a democracy religious views are just as legal as views based on any other perspective. The religious can advocate for a theocracy if they want. The arguments against them should not be based just on the idea that they are sectarian, religious views, but that they are unjust and harmful.
Certainly, pointing our that religious views are often based on the whim of a non-existent God is valid and useful. Rational people will be receptive to that line of argument. But, the religious argument is still legal and should be dealt with on merits.
It just goes to show that if you want to believe something enough, you can find a way to convince yourself of it. It reminds me of those who say wearing a niqab, or even a full burqa, is actually a sign of liberation.
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That’s pretty disturbing. If the availability of BC is a patriarchal plot, I hate to think what they think about ACA coverage of it. Or maybe I’d like to know, kinda the way I might watch Nascar.
I think we can be overwhelmingly confident in identifying overpopulation as the only significant factor in all forms of global-scale pollution, especially including global warming. Were there not 7,000,000,000 humans but 700,000,000, pollution would be limited to regional scales; if 7,000,000 total, only local-scale pollution would be practically possible.
I am at an utter loss as to think of a single reason why Earth is a better place with billions or even tens of billions of humans than one with mere millions. Getting from our current state to a more sustainable one is likely an insurmountable problem; however, if one considers what the world would be like today had effective birth control been globally commonplace and universally embraced by the time of the Roman Empire, there’s simply no comparison.
b&
That the pope made his remarks in the wake of his trip to Indonesia is, to me, particularly revolting. The Indonesian government has recognized that over-population is their major challenge moving forward, and has developed several programmes to try and ameliorate the problem, including free contraception and sterilization, and health workers going into communities to talk directly to families. There is a huge Catholic population there, and official Catholic opposition to the programme is one of the biggest barriers they face.
At the same time the Archbishop sits there in his magnificent palace, tipped for future even higher office, very good at public relations, and failing almost completely to address issues of corruption and sexual abuse within his ranks.
Indonesia? Or the Philippines?
Sorry, Phillipines – not sure why I wrote Indonesia, but it’s definitely wrong!
Wholeheartedly agree with both of you.
This goes with Ben’s statement the other day about the ‘godsend’ of a pathogen making 90% of the species sterile. If only. That could make for a good sci fi tale.
Reminds of a very bad novel ‘Inferno’ by Dan Brown (but I’m repeatimg myself, by including ‘bad novel’ and ‘Dan Brown’ in the same sentence).
I’m sure he writes bad short stories, too!
/@
London during the 1800’s “pea souper” period was about a million – now it’s 8 million. Yet the pollution per capita and overall is much lower now. While population control will certainly help because it reduces demand for resources, technology is IMO a much more important factor in resource use and pollution production. If, for example, you’re worried about people destroying trees for books, its far better to hand everyone an iPad than reduce the population by half. The latter causes a linear reduction in resource demand; the former, exponential. The same is true to a less dramatic extent for electricity, transportation, etc.: improving technology beats reducing the population in terms of resource savings. And its socially easier to boot.
Lastly, population control appears to happen naturally as an outgrowth of education and first world living. We don’t need to force people to have 1.9 kids on average; they do that themselves if they’re given access to education, birth control, white collar jobs, and so on. So why bother with the socially difficult onefer of top-down population management when we can implement the socially easy twofer of technological advancement?
Correct assessment in general, but you have to take into account the rate of population increase in developing countries vs the rate at which technology will reduce their impact on the environment. Unless China and India can manage to dramatically cut the use of carbon energy sources relatively soon, we may reach a tipping point at which the results are catastrophic. This assumes the U.S. Russia and the rest of the first world find the handle on this problem as quickly as they are able.
Even if China and India surpass North America, Europe, and Australasia as yearly producers of atmospheric CO2, the fact still remains that the vast majority of excess CO2 in the atmosphere is the refuse of those countries, who have also been doing it for much longer. China and India could reduce their carbon footprints to zero overnight, and the USA would still be single-handedly capable of bringing about climate change.
If overpopulation is an issue, then it’s specifically an overpopulation of high-polluting consumers, not humans in general. And that occurs through a combination of ignorance over the environmental impacts of strip-mining for products that produce pollution and end with massive amounts of waste, or sheer indifference to the same.
Unfortunately, the richer countries that cause such problems are less concerned with global warming than some of the poorer ones who can only dream of it. Wonder why.
Agreed. I’m sure you were pleased with Obama’s Clean Power Plan, and not surprised by resistance to it. I’m hopeful, now, it will succeed and help to encourage further action and the world wide movement to renewable energy.
Oh, I would like to recommend this documentary:
http://www.cbc.ca/passionateeye/episodes/the-vasectomist
This man travels around the world performing vasectomies, often on poor people – folks with 8+ children – who make little more than a dollar a day.
I was particularly disgusted when he went to the Philippines, and got into an argument with an NFP promoting Catholic. He made a comment about how it isn’t good for kids to forage for food in the dump, and the woman replied that the children may be poor, but at least they have love!
Indeed. Love will also pay those medical bills when they come down with botulism and other ills, right?
And love will pay for an education so that they can climb out of poverty, right?
My wife and I volunteer at a food bank, and it’s quite common to see a mother who is pregnant with multiple kids. WTF? These people can’t feed their family, and they’re still pumping out kids. My wife told me a couple weeks ago that a women with 3 kids was showing off the ultrasound of her unborn child. Her and the father should be ashamed, not gloating. The lack of self-awareness of some people is appalling.
This is how far (and how fast) Christianity has fallen: 20-30 years ago, care for animals and the environment was one of those “of course” positions, uncontroversial because it was so unanimously accepted in the faith. Christian doctrine contained the notion that humans were supposed to be responsible stewards of the world. Now, evangelical protestants explicitly reject it as some sort of Marxist plot and even the Catholic church has to parse the notion in terms of What Humans Can Get Out Of It. There is no thought about doing good for goods’ sake, it’s all venal and self-centered logic.
As for a compromise, who exactly is the Pope bringing together with the statement that AGW exists and needs to be curbed? Christians who already believed that and atheists who already believed that? That’s not a very wide aisle to reach across.
For now Francisco got in trouble the American religious right and their political representatives who refuse to environmental warming. Now it’s not just a problem of atheistic scientists or the left. In fact, some Republican presidential candidates are whining at the statements by Francis
Regarding family planning, Francis certainly kept the official position of the church, but here the views of Francis are not as influential: most Catholic women do not pay attention to his church on this issue. 98% of American Catholic women use contraception .
This duplicity puzzles me greatly. The Catholic Church is, by design, a hierarchical, authoritarian organization. It inculcates an attitude of obedience at the risk of damnation in its young over generations. But when American women are presented with the choice between obedience and effective family planning, they simply throw off the chains that bound them. How can they face communion or confession? What sort of mass compartmentalization is it? This seems to me to be a breakdown in the brittle shell of coercion that is the Church. If birth control can be ignored, isn’t that just an old man in a dress behind that velvet curtain? No wonder the Church is fading and the popes spew nonsense.
The denial of human caused climate change is a major point of the conservative religious right wingers, which is just about the entire republican party these days. The reasons for this denial are not wholly due to religious dogma but also because of republican dogma. Just to admit to global warming would also imply the need for national efforts to due something about it.
Anything that takes national government assistance is simply a non-starter to the republican view. Never, never admit government can do anything useful about any problem. Just say repeatedly that government is useless and cannot do anything. Also, deny a problem exists. The Pope can say whatever – these folks are not his sheep.
“The Pope can say whatever – these folks are not his sheep.”
Maybe, but some of them look like that:
Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, George Pataki and Jeb Bush are catholic.
The Republican candidate with the highest negatives amongst Republicans is not The Donald, but Lindsay Graham. Graham accepts that climate change is mostly man made. Iirc, the percentage that would never vote for him is 40%. (If it’s not that, it’s somewhere in the 40s.)
Yup. Somehow the relgionists in this country have equated the admission of man-made climate change to a sin. “God wouldn’t allow such a thing.” Facepalm ad nauseam.
As for the shameless Republican shills, they are so far up the asses of big oil they wouldn’t admit it even if they knew it to be true. (And what you said.)
It is probably true that New Atheism has emboldened more people to !*come out publicly*! as atheists, and that in turn the rise of New Atheism is a justifiable backlash against the rise of theocrats in the Republican party and 9/11, but yes it is certainly true that the percentage of atheists (hidden or public) in the scientific community has been pretty steady for many many decades.
“provisIonal” not
“provisonal”
So, basically, the Pope says, “Yeah, Climate Change is a serious problem that must be addressed – oh, but don’t ask us to do *our* part to address it. That’s against our religion.”
Yeah, that’s pretty much all religion in a nutshell. It always comes before common sense and common good. Ugh.
I tend to refer to the P*pe as Mr Bergoglio since he is not the boss of me and his ‘position’ means nothing. Yet some people (not necessarily Catholics) get all upset about my lack of ‘courtesy’. Tough.
Not a bad idea!
In child rearing, one of the most successful strategies is “catch ’em bein’ good”, i.e. rewarding good behavior on those rare occasions when it happens.
I think that applies here.
Outta space, the earth is. Don’t need no Eskimo of starving child to tell me that (VH)
This would be the same Pope whose church just recently came out against polio vaccines in Kenya right?
http://www.worldmag.com/2015/08/kenyan_catholic_church_battles_government_over_polio_vaccine
https://imgflip.com/i/p4aj2
Unbelievable!
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