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Re: Michelle Duggar Says Overpopulation Is a Lie
I believe in free will within the context of predestination. Sure, we can each decide whether or not to leave our family planning up to God. But in terms of the big picture, we have no control. Ultimately, God has control of certain things, including what happens to His creation. We're all just one natural disaster, outbreak of disease, or war away from death.
I think that 19 kids is the exception. History shows that very few people had that many children naturally. And what Michelle Duggar does isn't leaving anything up to God either. It's charting and weaning to intentionally get pregnant. That's different than what I believe.
Food cooked the day before is free! *eyeroll*
But, AW idiocy aside, not all land can be used for crops. It makes sense to have animals grazing on steep areas, or wet areas, and to have chickens and pigs wandering around eating scraps and stuff.
I don't think you are stupid. You appear to live in a non-urban smaller town, so this gives you a limited perspective.
The same limited perspective I had before having to visit a few smaller towns( I bet much like you call home) in the US. I visited a small town in Alabama and thought I knew how the people would behave. Well I was right about only one thing, they knew I wasn't a local. Otherwise they were a welcoming group of people and I look forward to going back this year. The same can be said for the other small towns I have had to visit because of business.
I did kind of tilt my head at some of your responses during the Trayvon Martin discussion however the last response I read ( of yours) was pretty good. Many dig their feet in the sand when challenged, you appear to consider perspectives of others. I recognize it and appreciate it.
That said, I did giggle at your post about masturbation and there are tons of things we are just going to never agree on. I am used to that, remember my family and friends are pretty much the UN, and my husband and I are not even the same religion.
Thanks to Mrs. Duggar and this damn thread, this is in my head. Anyone else?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKKqLl_ZEEY
Let's not forget how horrible modern farming methods are for the earth. Sure, you think your grains use less resources to grow, but you're forgetting how year after year of tilling the earth that it grows on is killing the environment. And all of the processes we use to artificially put nutrients back into the soil after we rape it are giving us less clean water to drink when it inevitably runs off. We need animals grazing on that land every so many years to give it a rest from the planting.
Vegetarian foods are no better than any other food. And there are certain farming methods that are better than others.
I'm still not convinced that the way I eat uses more resources than anyone else's diets or is any more harmful to the planet.
I appreciate your kind words.
Totally ignoring everything about AW to comment on the original point of this post.
Michelle Duggar is an idiot and doesn't want to face the fact that what she and her family are doing is contributing to overpopulation. If all her kids have babies at the same rate she did, she'll have 400 grandkids!
But, those are all ways of wiping people off the Earth. If people weren't opting to have so many kids as to lead to a population of God's choosing, are you saying he'd create more?
I guess part of what strikes me is that although there are some religions that advocate forsaking all medical care, generally, the belief that the number of kids should be up to God doesn't seem to go with the belief that everything else should be left up to God. For example, the Duggar's obviously have no problem with extensive medical intervention to save a life. That's part of my issue with this...back in the day, for our species to survive, people had to have tons of kids, because odds were many of them would die. Now, we've tipped things in our favor for survival, changing the game, so it seems inconsistent to say that starting life we should leave to God but ending life we're OK to try and do whatever we can to stop it.
My personal belief is that using medical intervention or technology to create a life is different than using it to sustain a life that has already been created. I feel like the Bible is clear that healing and medicine are a blessing from God.
People had large families for many reasons back in the day. It wasn't just because some would die. They also required a lot of people in order to survive - life was much more work and more family members meant more help.
I think people also had children for the same religious reasons back then that they do now.
The difference is that not everyone was having children. So while one family had many, another didn't have any at all. It sounds unfair, but it was also part of God's plan. Now we use technology so that everyone can have children.
I also think the bigger issue is that having a large family back then wasn't an environmental burden the way it is now. People didn't drain the earth's resources like we do in America. As someone mentioned, the average American family of four uses more resources than families twice that size in other areas of the world.
God provided us with more than enough resources to go around. Human beings are just evil and greedy. Some people use more than they need. I don't think the goal should be limiting the size of the population. That doesn't solve the problem, because as more resources become available when population rates decrease, those same greedy people are just going to acquire more. I feel like the goal should be to work to change the hearts of the greedy people to spread the wealth or to change our ways so that we aren't polluting the world's water sources and making it impossible to grow safe food on our land from modern farming practices.
In the meantime, I will continue to do what I feel God is asking of me, which is to give the control over to Him. He will tell me when my family is complete (He could tell me tomorrow that I am done or maybe He wants me to have more children) and in return I will be the best steward of the earth I can be and will work hard to make sure that the people who need those resources being hoarded have a chance at getting them by changing the hearts of the people standing in their way.
Yes, mono-agriculture is a bad thing. Yes, over farming is a bad thing. Animals grazing is also a bad thing because you're introducing an non-native species into the ecosystem. They also carry disease and invasive species in their fecal matter. (As such, they are often banned from areas trying to preserve the ecosystem balance.) The only good grazers are the native ones, and those are often killed because they're (incorrectly) seen as competition of the farm grazers (ex. prairie dogs), or a detriment to crops (ex. deer).
Vegetarian, and even better vegan, *is* a better diet choice over a meat eater's diet, regardless of where their vegetables come from for the environment. Even if the meat eater is eating free range/grass fed beef. Beef/cow is the worst possible thing you can consume environmentally wise. To argue otherwise negates any other argument you have.
Yeah Michelle Dugger is definitely not qualified to comment on overpopulation. Ridiculous.
I agreed that what I said was wrong. She chose to continue the conversation. Now we're having a discussion on why what she is saying is factually wrong. Fine line, but it's there.
My family of four (because one was EBF) ate approximately 3/4 of one pastured cow last year. That's all the beef. And we ate ALL of it - tongue, tail, heart, bones (for soup), liver and all. On top of that we ate wild game meat (squirrel, deer, etc.), one turkey, probably 12 pastured chickens, and a few meals worth of pastured lamb and pork. This meat doesn't travel far to get to my door.
On top of that, the majority of my veggies were grown locally or in my own garden, and preserved for the winter months.
I do not eat out at restaurants (I can count less than five times in the last year). I'm not wasting resources by eating at a restaurant that is wasteful with resources.
While you may be talking about the average American diet, you're not talking about me.
I disagree that some vegetarian living in the city somewhere is using less resources than I am. Their couscous, quinoa and soyburgers are grown halfway across the world. These brands are marketed (using resources), packaged (using resources), transported (using resources), put into a grocery store (using resources), etc. Those vegetarians are buying grains and greens from halfway across the country or world in the middle of winter while I'm eating cow tongue and green beans from my garden that I canned myself.
Unless you're talking about vegetarians that grow and preserve their own food, I do not believe that my family eating less than one whole cow of beef in an entire year is more draining to the environment. To argue otherwise, to me, negates anything else you have to say.
I have two comments. One, I don't like the aw bashing. Two, if I believed in predestination, I wouldn't see a point in life. That would depress the hell out of me and make me into a horrible person.
Thanks for an actual source. :-) Vindicated! Cows create more greenhouse gasses than cars. Should I find a source for this? How about the UN? BAM! http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?newsID=20772&CR1=warning
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It's not depressing to me. It's actually comforting.
I would love to have a respectful conversation about it sometime. Dylanite was curious about it before too.
Exactly. Michelle Duggar does not feed her family the way you feed yours. I do not feed my family the way you do yours. You eat on a very, very extreme end of the spectrum. While it is exceptionally commendable, it does not come close to how the average person eats - and that is (one reason) why overpopulation is a problem.
Taking it a step farther, I believe the point is that not only is it 100% unrealistic to expect everyone to eat the way your family does, it would still be a drain on natural resources for the planet to host a population of 7B people. If we were all vegans growing our own food, there would be too many of us. If we stopped driving cars and using electricity, there would be too many of us. I think the point is that no matter how you slice it, there are too many of us.
I am a runner, knitter, scientist, DE-IVF veteran, and stage III colon cancer survivor.
Not really, because you're making broad based assumptions that every vegetarian is eating commercially grown foods. Most of the ones I know are part of their CSA's buying locally farmed foods, or eating their own vegetables. You're guilty of the same assumptions, just facing the other side of the spectrum.
I'm glad your family has taken strides to reduce your impact. However, if we go back to the overpopulation argument, soon there will not be room or resources to have your lifestyle.
And I'm saying that's not accurate. Look, I hate for this to turn into a "let's bash AW" thread, because you know I really don't want to do that. But a dairy cow produces more resources than a beef cow. Dairy cows produce milk for 4+ years. Lots of it. And there are dairy cows which are local to me, so it doesn't take much to transport it. Beef cows only produce one cow's worth of beef, at one time.
Pasture, water resources, antibiotics/hormones (if applicable), slaughter byproducts, packaging and transportation are all things involved in beef production which affect the environment. I really don't want to be a meat basher, because I'm actually fine with whatever diet one chooses for themselves. But the facts are that it's much more efficient to eat a pound of grain or vegetables than to use that pound of grain or vegetables to create a miniscule amount of meat.
Here: (Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer is a great book, BTW):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2010/feb/24/vegetarianism-save-planet-safran-foer
Also, from a biased source, but still:
http://thrivingvegan.blogspot.com/2009/06/resource-efficiency-in-vegan-diet.html
If you put in 100 calories of fossil fuel, you can produce:
18.1 calories of chicken
20.6 calories of milk
11.2 calories of egg
6.4 calories of grain-fed beef
3.7 calories of pork
1.2 calories of lamb
110 calories of herring
5.8 calories of tuna
5.7 calories of farmed salmon
0.9 calories of shrimp
250 calories of corn
415 calories of soy
110 calories of apples
123 calories of potatoes
It also takes 2500 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef.
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You're not growing the population though - when you and Major kick off, you'll have only replaced yourselves
I am a runner, knitter, scientist, DE-IVF veteran, and stage III colon cancer survivor.
This is actually very true as well.
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The religion in which I was raised believed in predestination. Part of it is pretty hard core and marginally depressing, but I can see how it works for some and certainly how the belief came about. The past is filled with people who lived in misery already. :-) I can also most definitely see how predestination appealed to the Scots.
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Well, DH and I are Scottish, so maybe that's why it doesn't depress us
I feel like I should address the "bashing" stuff. I don't mind engaging in a respectful conversation about what I believe. I think it's strange that certain posters feel the need to point out things I say at random times simply to get others to agree with how stupid and crazy I seem, but it doesn't really bother me. I do have a problem with people offering nothing meaningful to the discussion and just always seeming to chime in with hateful remarks meant to put me, my beliefs, or my husband down. I guess it only bothers me because I don't really see people to doing it anyone else as often as it happens to me.
But then I also realize that I ask for it at times. I know going into a thread that what I am going to say isn't going to be popular, so I'm not surprised when there are a lot of negative responses. It's when it gets hateful that I am bothered.
You guys don't need to worry about my feelings or about bashing me for my opinions. I'm a big girl and can handle it. I am prepared for it when I post something unpopular. I just ask that I receive the same respect that other posters receive and that the discussion doesn't turn ugly and personal, as it sometimes always does by certain posters.
I'm definitely curious. I hope I can understand but, even if I can't, at least I can get the fullest grasp on your perspective as possible.
Well, hopefully I didn't turn it ugly and personal.