Subject: Didja know ?

To: David Lee

From: James Mcgill

Date: 6/14/94 1:17:00 PM

=> David, speaking to John, had the temerity to say: <=

DL> IF the premise you have is correct, we would be witnessing genocide in many countries which are predominantly of the RCC faith. Why do we not see this in Spain? Or in Argentina? Or in Portugal?<<<<

Different historical and cultural backgrounds. One might answer to your question "Brazil, Cote d'Ivoir, Malagasy Republic, etc." Developing countries are put at profound risk by overpopulation, and Spain and Portugal, while they were developing exported a lot of people to their colonies. This option does not exist for developing countries today, however. As for genocide in these countries, what would you call the reconquista? If it had not been for Columbus, Ferdinand and Isabella would have continued their holy war into North Africa, and launched a bloody crusade for Jerusalem. As it turned out, they settled for expelling the jews and committing genocide on many peoples in the New World. The Taino people of Cuba were just the beginning...

DL> The article defeats your purpose, in that it is a RCC publication which: It states their *is* a genocide. It also states that the pope *condemns* the genocide. To then say that because nominally 70% of the population is RCC their is some connection is really, really weak.<<<

The Catholic Church has a lot of influence in the Lake Victoria region as a whole, and that region is very destabalised by overpopulation. Farmland generally split evenly between all sons in a family, and many families are trying to survive on steadily shrinkings plots of land. Many young people end up in urban centers, where the young men are unemployed, and many women survive by means of prostitution. The countriside is destabalised as different ethnic groups are crushed together in the countriside, and the cities are overflowing with a vast underclass.

In the midst of all this the RCC actively encourages large families. I spent a month living with a catholic Luo family in Nairobi, and the mother of the family was getting a lot of pressure from the family at home to have more children than the five that she had. This family was first generation middle class, and a couple more children (the relatives from the countriside thought 8-10 children was a good number) would have dropped them out of it.

Considering the tremendous poverty that would face them if they did not control their fertility, one can hardly blame her kicking her husband out of the bedroom, even if this is an inexcusable act in their culture. This was not doing wonders for the health of the family, as the husband often ran off with prostitutes, and may well be dead from AIDS by now. If this woman had not been proscribed from using contraception, her family would not have been put at such terrible risk.

The point of this extended story is that the [Roman] Catholic Church, with its rigid teachings, did not really have the best interests of this family at heart. Nor, to my eye, does it have the best interests of the entire region at heart. To actively push for uncontrollable population growth in a cultural and political context where that will lead to intertribal warfare is extremely foolish. Thus, I find it hypocritical for the RCC to condemn the Ethnic Warfare that their missionaries have brought about with their short-sided social engineering.

The Pope actively encourages a situation where people feel that there is no room for others to survive beside themselves, and then condemns them for engaging in warfare that may free up a little land for their children so they do not have to live in severe poverty. This is a tragedy indeed.

Cheers, James

Origin: Moring Computer Systems BBS (1:3601/20)