alt.education

"Joe Irvin" wrote:
>> Having more children is not necessarily the optimal survival strategy.
>> Faced with the prospect of overpopulation, and a world running out of
>> resources, a society that reduces its population might end up with its
>> fewer offspring richer and better off and producing a higher
>> probability of survival.
>
>Assuming that the world is running out of resources.

It is.

>IMO, its not that the
>world is running out of resources, its the govts and distributions that
>is/are the problem.

The government has nothing to do with it. For the most recent case,
there are too many people trying to use the Colorado River as a water
source. Now they believe that Lake Mead will dry up in a few years if
something doesn't change.

>> It isn't strength of religious belief that produces large families.
>> It is lack of developed. Very religious Catholics have fewer kids in
>> the US than in lesser developed countries. That is because they have
>> other options besides reproducing without limit.
>
>How do you know who are the very religious and who isn't?

I don't. I rely on the researchers who report such things. I think
they ask the people.

But to give some anecdotal evidence:
My dad was raised by very religious Catholic parents. He had 11
siblings. None of the 12 kids had more than 6 kids, and three or four
was more common. Most of the grandchildren are having families with
only a couple of children, if they have families at all. While many
of the kids aren't as religious as our grandparents, a goodly number
of them are.

>I do believe this somewhat though. I don't know what the optimum size of a family should be,
>but it should be, IMO, large enough to replace the dying ... making for a
>stable population. Moslems living in Europe have large familes,

Actually, they don't. They have medium sized families, while the
non-Moslems have extremely small families, or none at all.

http://www.cfr.org/publication/8252/europe.html
< than that of non-Muslim Europeans, which is declining, writes Omer
< Taspinar, the co-director of The Brookings Institution's project on
< Turkey.

In Russia and Spain, fertility is only 1.1 births per woman, about
half the replacement rate. I think the overall European average is
1.5. So the Moslem average might be 4.5. Given my background, I
don't call that a large family.


http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/408410.html
(takes a while to load, for some reason)
reports that the Moslem birthrate is France is rapidly dropping, and
that the average foreigner in France has around 3 children. It is
usually only the first generation that has several children. Later
generations approach the fertility rates of native French families.

>>>I don't know, I think it happens more often than people realize. The
>>>emergency situation more so because its displayed more prominently.
>>>Religious and charitable organizations donate lots of $'s and people also
>>>donate a lot of their time.
>>
>> But never anywhere close to what is called a "tithe".
>
>How do we know that it would have to be close to the tithe?

We know what the total personal income is in this country, It is
running close to 10 trillion dollars. A tithe would therefore be
about a trillion dollars.

http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2007/June/200706261522251CJsamohT0.8012354.html
< after-tax, income, a figure above the 40-year average of 1.8 percent.

<... we cannnot know ... people have to pay taxes that they may have given as charity.

They get a tax deduction for their charitable donations. Sometimes
the donations are exaggerated (the big thing these days is to donate
your used car, deducting the blue book value, when in fact the car
might only be worth a fraction of that amount.

But as noted above, they are donating only 2.2% of their AFTER tax
income.

>Govt, IMO, should be the very last resort for helping people

If charity provided enough, that would be fine. It doesn't come
close. Therefore government gets to do the last resort bit. Even
with government largess, we still have millions of homeless people in
this country.

>... subsidizing
>school loans, mortgages, business loans etc surely take away from peoples
>ability to tithe, IMO.

The don't tithe 10% of their *after*-tax income.

>> Since science cannot detect and test for the supernatural (or it
>> wouldn't really be supernatural), there is only one viable
>> possibility, and it is more a matter of figuring out *how*, than
>> figuring out *whether*, morality is biologically determined.
>
>Why is a scientific test the only evidence you will accept.

Because it is the only kind of test that is objective.

>Is there a scientific test to tell if one loves their mate?

One would have to give an objective definition of "loves their mate"
in order to tell. If it cannot be defined objectively, then it cannot
be tested scientifically.

>There isn't one that I know of but we accept the fact that people love each other.

Do we?

>How about Christian scientists such as Kepler, Newton, and Copernicus were
>men of faith and they didn't seem to need a scientific test for a
>transcendent God.

So? I don't need a test for a transcendent God either (you probably
have the idea that I am an atheist). But I simply call it my belief,
and stop there. I neither require nor expect anyone else to believe
as I believe.

>>>Ones conscience informs one of what to do.
>>
>> So do our biological instincts. We are capable of ignoring many of
>> our instincts, and we are capable of ignoring our morality.
>
>Sure we are, usually our instincts in extreme situations and morality at our
>whim. Ignoring our morality is a battle we face almost everyday.

So is ignoring our instincts. Of course it isn't a battle. One
cannot call it a "battle" if it is simply ignoring them. Most people
give morality very little thought most of the time.

lojbab