posted
OSC's books consistently contain the thread of the call of reproduction and its religious connections. For those of common belief, I was wondering if you could elaborate.
I grew up in middle American protestant land where reproduction was a more pragmatic matter - reproduce, hopefully by choice, when socially responsible (when you can parent well emotionally, financially, etc) and birth control was acceptable and in compliance with religion and morality (debate aside regarding methods-assume one not contentious as to how it works).
Other denominations (or religions) see reproduction as required or at least best (and in some the more children the better), birth control as interfering with God's will, and the inability or choice not to have children incompatible with the happiness that comes with devotion.
My question is what are the theologic roots of these convictions? Do they derive from the "go forth and multiply" passage, or is it more than that biblically? Or is it more doctrinal and traditional than literal?
posted
Perhaps you could give some examples of the 'call of reproduction and its religious connections.' I'm not sure exactly what you are referring to, so any attempt at an answer would just be a shot in the dark.
Posts: 1412 | Registered: Oct 2005
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posted
It is interesting that when a society at large disobeys the "be fruitful and multiply" command, they are at risk of being unable to sustain their social system, which in many cases, relies on a perpetual working class to care for the elderly. Those countries that have fallen for the "the world is too crowded" mumbo jumbo must resort to massive immigration to keep their economies and social programs afloat.
I guess God knew what He was talking about. But, the people of said countries have settled on the Matrix idea that "We are a virus" instead of "God made the world to sustain human life...and a multiplying one at that."
Posts: 72 | Registered: Aug 2000
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quote:But, the people of said countries have settled on the Matrix idea that "We are a virus" instead of "God made the world to sustain human life...and a multiplying one at that."
Is this really an either/or type of situation? I don't think that we should assume that 'God' made the world to be able to support humans, regardless of how many people there are on the earth. What was the count I heard on TV the other day, something like 1.6 billion more people in the next 20 years? So what happens in 100 years? or 500? There is no way that many people can live off of what our planet is currently producing. I suppose if there was a way to coerce the planet to produce , what, 100%? more resources as well as house all of the people, it could work. But I don't see that as a viable option.
But that doesn't mean that I see us as a "virus" either. All species go through an ongoing cycle that involves growing too large in population for their environment to support. Then the species starts to die off as a result of the over population. Then they reach a point so low that the destitute species can survive again. Then they start growing in numbers again and reach their ideal level. And then it all starts over again. It is completely natural. I suppose that translates into "it is God's plan." It just hasn't happened to us yet, but unless we see it coming and do something to make the transition easier on us and the planet, we will, in my considered opinion, reach a point where the earth can no longer support us and we will either move off planet or start dying off until we reach a low enough number.
I believe that religion perpetuates this cycle. Right now many religions say to multiply. On the down cycle, I can only imagine what they will say. Hmmm... I like that; good idea for a story: Religious scholar investigating why religion warns against procreating freely and commands contraception realizes it is based on the death of billions due to overpopulation of the planet thousands of years in the past. Hilarity ensues. I like it.
Posts: 2596 | Registered: Jan 2006
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posted
Vonk, do not worry about 500 years ahead. Everybody knows that the end of the world has happened on 06/06/06. Posts: 114 | Registered: Jan 2006
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posted
Well, actually, you are right that there is no need to worry. But the end of the world is really going to be on December 21, 2012.
Posts: 2596 | Registered: Jan 2006
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posted
I don't know about mormonism, but I was raised Catholic. Even though birth control is against Catholic doctrine, few people I knew actually followed that rule. Still, for some reason I came up with a personal belief against it, because I simply saw it as wrong. For one thing, many birth controls don't actually stop "conception" (sperm meeting egg) they merely stop the female body from attaching to the egg. This bothered me because, for me, that would be exactly the same as murdering my child. Of course, I realize this belief isn't for everyone, and it hasn't always done wonders for my life. It IS the reason I have my beautiful wonderful son, but it is also probably the reason that I'm a single mom. I told my ex I did not believe in birth control, and so I think he married me and said he was a baby for less than ideal reasons... oh well!
Posts: 1321 | Registered: Jun 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Von: [QB] It is interesting that when a society at large disobeys the "be fruitful and multiply" command, they are at risk of being unable to sustain their social system, which in many cases, relies on a perpetual working class to care for the elderly. Those countries that have fallen for the "the world is too crowded" mumbo jumbo must resort to massive immigration to keep their economies and social programs afloat.
I guess God knew what He was talking about. But, the people of said countries have settled on the Matrix idea that "We are a virus" instead of "God made the world to sustain human life...and a multiplying one at that."
Von, that is just a ridiculous and wrong oversimplifaction of why developed countries tend to have less kids per capita than developing countries. It has little to do with "we are a virus" and overpopulation mumbo-jumbo. It's debatable how much religion has to do with it, I'll just note that extremely Catholic counties like Italy are not exempt from demographic transition.
quote: Demographic transition From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In demography, the term demographic transition is a theory describing the transition from high birth rates and death rates to low birth and death rates that may occur as part of the economic development of a country from a pre-industrial to an industrialized economy. [cut large portion] In stage three birth rates fall due to access to contraception, increases in wages, urbanization, a reduction in subsistence agriculture, an increase in the status and education of women, and other social changes. Population growth begins to level off.
During stage four there are both low birth rates and low death rates. Birth rates may drop to well below replacement level as has happened in countries like Italy, Spain and Japan, leading to a shrinking population, a threat to many industries that rely on population growth. The large group born during stage two ages and creates an economic burden on the shrinking working population. Death rates may remain consistently low or increase slightly due to increases in lifestyle diseases due to low exercise levels and high obesity and an aging population in developed countries.
posted
I'm still waiting for clarification on "the thread of the call of reproduction and its religious connections". It seemed to me like OSC talks more about "having babies" as being fulfilling and a goal that the protagonists believe will ultimately help them be happier. Unless you mean the Women of Genesis books, and then... yeah... it's kind of religious. It might be in Saints but I don't recall it.
I mean, you've asked for input from others who share Card's belief system, but the fact is very few of his characters share that belief system.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
why waste your time worrying about when the end of the world will be... why not live your life as though it were unexpected?
what if you lived as though you love those you love, disliked those you dislike and remembered the rest only long enough to learn from them...
Posts: 1355 | Registered: Jul 2006
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posted
pooka, it does seem like a common thread in OSC's writing to me--not necessarily the religious connection, but the call to reproduce and attach your legacy to the "web of life."
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
I don't recall making a religious connection with the "web of life" idea. I get the web of life from the theory of evolution, as applied to community theory (in community theory, evolution is Lamarckian, because communities can consciously and unconsciously self-adapt through manipulation of stories, laws, customs, etc.).
Basically, the idea is that any community that does not highly value stories that promote participation in the web of life - i.e., not just reproduction, but reproduction within families, which then become the strongest instruments of cultural transmission from generation to generation - is a community that has decided to weaken and die. It happens that there are religions that promote this idea, but rarely for that reason; it's usually in the "god's will" category, like a lot of other stories. What matters to me in my fiction is that if I'm creating and depicting a viable society that endures over time, then its most influential members will be honoring those who give a high priority, not to engaging in sex, but to engaging in family-building across generations, and the socializing of those children into full, respectable participation in community life.
This seems so obvious that people rarely even notice it, let alone include it in their fiction.
I ALSO include the religious lives of my characters, since the vast majority of people HAVE religious lives and to write about characters without religion is like writing about cars while pretending there are no wheels. Religions are powerful means of transmitting the stories that build - and that wreck - a society. Especially the religions that don't think they ARE religions <grin>.
But community theory and the particular religious beliefs of any community I depict are only related when they happen to overlap. Religions often behave in counterproductive ways - I show that. Being a firm believer in family-building THESE days is an aberration (or rather, admitting it is), and so I rarely have my characters overtly discuss such things in order to avoid irritating readers needlessly.
To get down to the raw biology of it, the hunger to have children is present in all living things, including the passion to have sexual intercourse and make new members of the species (see how even DYING tomato plants still devote their last remaining energy to squeezing out seed packages?) Of course there are plenty of people who have decided not to have children or who believe the last thing they want is to have children (or more children than they already have), who nevertheless reveal by their behavior that the biological imperative doesn't give a rat's *** about what your conscious thoughts are. You can have your vasectomy or your tubal ligation, and yet your body doesn't know about it - it hits various crisis points and you still find yourself wanting to mate with anything that fits your body's criteria for "appropriate mate."
Fashions can change what we admit to; technology can allow us to take actions that oppose our natural impulses; but the natural impulses are still there. Doesn't mean they're good or bad, just that the bodies we use in this life are the result of an awful lot of genetic weeding, so however we might bend it and twist it, the hungers are still there.
Which is why I'm amused at the people who think I'm making some outrageous political statement by having the gay guy in Homecoming decide to marry and have children. As if being gay meant that the biological imperative to reproduce somehow got extinguished in that person. There's no evidence that gay people, per se, don't have that deep hunger to have children in the normal proportion. Who you want to sleep with might get turned one way or another by whatever cause, but what does that have to do with the imperative to look upon your offspring and raise them to acceptibility?
(In saying this, keep in mind that evolution has not quite caught up with community formation, so we still have an awful lot of alpha-male behavior - spread the seed into every possible vessel and run away. In short, males have not yet been universally domesticated - hardly a surprise, since the civitas is still, in evolutionary terms, quite young in human evolution, and a minority of alpha-male behavior actually still confers a genetic advantage over the rule-compliant majority - as long as the majority is rule compliant! A very complex subject. So lots of gay males exhibit alpha-male patterns of behavior, which are still reproduction-centered but to NOT build families. Nevertheless, societies in which alpha-male behavior is normative ("everyone lies about sex") do a much worse job of creating a continuous civitas - alpha males generally make bad citizens in a long-term-survival civitas, though they CAN contribute in small numbers.)
And now that you've seen me writing, even this informally and cursorily, about the subject, you can see why I rarely use fiction as an overt vessel for putting forth my ideas. I can recall only one, in the Shadow series, who was explcit about it - but he was precisely the kind of character who would be working at the cutting edge of the interface between biology and civilization at the level of individual and family behavior. I couldn't NOT have him be aware of it.
Most of us, most of the time, simply drink in this information like air. Our stories take these impulses and desires into account, not explicitly, but integrally. The whole romance-fiction industry is built around these stories. The whole pornography industry is built around the desire to destroy the reproduction/marriage connection. But the core impulses, the deep unconscious ones, are taken into account by BOTH. And the stories built upon them do their work regardless of whether writers or readers are even remotely conscious of what it is they're doing.
Posts: 2005 | Registered: Jul 1999
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posted
I am honored to see your response, and delighted it is just as you present the thing en masse over the course of years and novels. I agree with what you have said here, and I see very little that would seem to argue against planned family building, just more focus on family building in general. Perhaps that answers my question, since it was within the context of family that I was thinking.
As an aside: I would challenge the comment regarding you not using fiction as a vessel for your personal/spiritual/religious convictions.
Intentional or not, it is the common theme holding your literature together as a body of work, and what makes it authentic and consistent enough to be a source of both entertainment and refreshment to so many. Agreement with your ideations (or those expressed by characters for that matter) is unnecessary, as your easy way allows the reader to consider and wonder rather than take a stand.
Posts: 49 | Registered: Apr 2006
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posted
I think that if Card is UNintentionally including his own personal worldview in his fiction (something that ALL writers do), then it isn't quite fair to say that he is "using his fiction as a vessel for his personal convictions". Stating it that way seems to imply that he is doing so consciously and artificially.
Posts: 1539 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
A lot of Mormons manage to think OSC is contraversial and even dangerous. He's not out there to wrap sunday school lessons in storylines.
But in any interview with him, the influence of his beliefs on his work comes up and he freely admits that the influence is there, though it is not conscious. The influence of every other category he belongs to comes through as well.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
Puppy, you miss my point. It was a compliment and something I believe authors do and should do whenever the spirit moves them.
And sometimes they do the opposite just to bug themselves or to challenge readers. I just happen to think OSC is quite disarmingly talented at expressing his heart. Posts: 49 | Registered: Apr 2006
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posted
One of the reasons I like certain authors is that they put parts of themselves and their beliefs in their books, so I can try to figure out who they are by reading their books.
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