Tuesday, February 23 2010 - 10:19 AM
The mythologies of 'God' and 'overpopulation'
The Duke: “If one were to assume for a minute that God does not exist, then would it not be interesting to determine where this God myth began and who designed this hoax that has affected billions of humans? If Guy is correct, then the God hoax has to be considered genius as it has spread to every corner of the planet. The person who constructed this fable needs to be identified, and I’m hoping that Guy can shed some light on the mystery [sic].” —forty-eighth comment post.

In considering the origins of the God myth, I find any and all possible answers to the question “Who designed this hoax” as being unimportant if not completely irrelevant in that, in my opinion, the question of why – Why was the God myth created? – should be our only concern. (It can, I believe, be likened to the lingering questions surounding the assassination of Jack
Kennedy: the why of it all being our only real interest.)
Suffice it to say that, much like the origins of a particular language, the origins of the God myth are ancient, entangled and involve perhaps literally millions of individuals throughout the totality of human existence.
As for The Duke’s “…the God hoax has to be considered genius as it has spread to every corner of the planet,” I will say that, to me, the God myth’s continuation involves far more manipulation than it does any amount of genius; meaning that, to pacify and thus control the afflicted with snake oil of any variety
requires but intrigue not genius. This goes to the very essence of Karl Marx’s “[religion is] …the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world” or his "Religion is the opiate of the masses. " So, in my mind, contemporaneous dogmatic religions are but cheap parlor tricks destitute of genius.
Toward my answering The Duke’s question “…where [did] this God myth begin…?” it is my
opinion that, originally humankind’s spirituality was organized along the lines of goddess worship mostly because women’s ability to give birth to new life was regarded as being both divine and mysterious. But, once men came to understand their role with respect to human reproduction, goddess worship – matriarchy/cooperative society soon fell victim to a silent “coup d’état” which eventually led to the supplanting of goddess worship by god worship as the dominant expression of spirituality. So too, and accordingly, did this lead to the supplantation of matriarchy by patriarchy – by so-called individualism.
To fasten the very best of intentions to the origins of god worship, I suppose that one might say that it was at least partly influenced by a desire of rather primitive peoples to elucidate the origins of not only themselves but the earth and the universe as well. But humankind now possesses a tremendously better understanding of the origins of our species, the earth and the universe; so much better, in fact, that had such an understanding been available all along then the God myth and thus religion would not likely have gained traction. No one now would choose to return to that stage of human social evolution when human beings enjoyed no real philosophy -when human beings only had mythology – when human beings believed that they inhabited a flat planet, or when it was believed that the earth was circulated by the sun rather than the converse. Indeed, never would humankind have invented theism were we to have known then what it is that we know now. And again, that was the best-case scenerio; one that does not take into consideration the aforementioned overthrow of matriarchy by patriarchy and all of its nefarious implications.

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In response to the same post which The Duke responded to (see hotlink listed above – forty-seventh comment post), a friend of mine asked: “Why did you say that ‘poverty causes overpopulation’ when everyone knows that overpopulation causes poverty?”
(I hereby apologize for my not having better explained that statement.)

As previously stated, poor people – most especially those residing in, say, Sub-Saharan
Africa – are given to bearing a very high number of offspring due to the fact that the majority of babies born into squalid poverty do not survive to adulthood. And, due to a clear lack of such things as private pensions and government programs the likes of our Social Security
program, the very poor are oftentimes completely dependent upon their surviving children to support them during their advanced years.
However, alhough hunger is certainly rampant within these populations, that hunger is not caused by the need to bear a high number of children – by overpopulation. For hunger results from the production of foodstuffs as merchandise for sale with the intent to create profit. Not unlike the production of any other form of merchandise, the producton of virtually all foodstuffs is governed by the misanthropic concerns of agricultural capitalists and, of course, by the pressures of market demand which is obviously decided by one’s income rather than by basic human need.
Exacerbating these already bleak situations is the fact that, throughout many parts of the Third and Developing Worlds, as many as perhaps hundreds of millions of peasants have been driven from subsistence agriculture as agricultural capitalists have incorporated gigantic expanses of farmland in order to grow cash crops such as bananas and coffee to be exported for consumption within the Industrialized world. The infrastructures of these societies are then left underdeveloped as a result of these capitalist’s antisocial behavior, and their economies are unable to expand quickly enough to assimilate both the displaced peasantries and normal increases in populations. Consider, for example, Haiti, where American-based rice capitalists have “dumped” large amounts of American-produced rice thereby forcing thousands of small, Hatian rice farmers out of the business and into the already overcrowded and desperately poor Hatian capitol of Port-au-Prince. This and many other practices of western capitalists and their governments – particularly the US government – is what keeps Haiti in a hopeless cycle of extreme poverty and therefore unable to cope with the aftermath of its recent earthquake.
Given the astronomically high levels of unemployment and the very low wages within nations such as Haiti, poorer workers simply lack the sort of income required to buy the foodstuffs they need – even as massive amounts of food is to decompose in fields or storehouses in order to guarantee high prices and thus high profits for agricultural capitalists.
Therefore, it is quite clearly the profit-driven capitalist system which causes overpopulation, poverty and famine.

Persevere..
Yours in revolution
Guy Robert Marsh
Lancaster, 93536
Member-at-large (since 1990):
Socialist Labor Party of America (est. 1890)

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(Note: As per usual, the following sort of comment posts will be stricken; those containing childish or otherwise offensive material; those whose content consists of more than fifty-percent cut-and-pasted material; and those containing video clips – regardelss of whether or not they might also be accompanied by any amount of original writings [the embedding of URLs or “hotlinks” within comment posts that serve to lead readers to video clips will be accepted as long as said posts also contain original writings of no fewer than fifty words]. I thank you all.)

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