by Nathan Natas 26 Replies latest jw friends
Remember the GLOBAL FOOD SHORTAGES of 35 years ago?
So long as we reject autocrats....as long as we keep our markets and society open and decentralized....our laws equally enforced and respectful of human rights....avoid wars....and embrace science and technology and reward those who advance it, we will always produce enough food.
The Malthusians have been proved wrong again, and again, and again.
BTS
We have one man to thank for preventing this mass starvation: Norman Borlaug
He is credited with saving the lives of over a billion people worldwide by creating high-yield crops.
Yes indeed.
Green Revolution.
We need more, please.
BTS
There they were members of the Saude Lutheran Church, where Norman was both baptized and confirmed.
Say, what, dear Elsewhere (peace to you!)... a non-atheist scientist... whose research virtually stayed starvation in several countries?? Say it isn't SO!! (Funny, I was confirmed Lutheran when I was 12 (my mother's entire family was/is Lutheran - disowned me en masse when I became a JW). If I had to choose a religion... which I don't/won't... it would probably be that one. Very kind, compassionate people, for the most part. They do really try. Just couldn't get past that whole Nicene Creed thing... as well as their "silent" excommunication practice. In both lights, they're really just Protestant Catholics, IMHO, which didn't/doesn't do it for me).
But still... a scientist that believed in God. I'll wager there are more... a LOT more... out there...
Thank you and, again, peace to you!
A slave of Christ,
SA, who, yeah, is being a little sarcastic. Just a teenchie-tad. Discussions have kind of warranted it... and I think I've earned it...
Examine every starvation situation on the planet today and you will find the primary cause to be, not a lack of food, but human greed and corruption .
Paul Ehrlich and Rachel Carson scared me far worse as a young man than anything my Witness relatives ever said.
The differences between Watchtower publications and the two books The Population Bomb and Silent Spring is the former is based on religious superstition and the latter were based on science, observation and logic, some of it faulty. I don't think much has come out of Ehrlich's work, although he still defends it more than forty years on. It was basically a rehash of the Malthusian catastrophe argument which posits that populations will grow to the extent they outpace their abilities to feed themselves - which has been proven wrong in a global perspective because, coincident with their growth, populations figured out how to multiply agricultural yields using science. The science employed, primarily the development of pesticides and more recently genetic engineering, is what Carson's warning is all about. We can thank Rachel Carson and her book for the environmental movement, good and bad.
One defense of Ehrlich is that he was directionally right. While we folk in the western world get fatter and fatter, 35 or 40 million people in third word countries die of malnutrition every year. We are complacent in our comfort to the detriment of those who are living and dying with a reality we have for the time being avoided.
Aguest,
He did not save a billion lives by quoting scripture. He did it using science.
TD,
:Paul Ehrlich and Rachel Carson scared me far worse as a young man than anything my Witness relatives ever said.
Yes. They were both frauds. We can thank Rachel for the needless deaths of millions of people from Malaria and other diseases since her book came out. And Paul Ehrlich was a grandstanding crackpot.
Don't forget Noam Chomsky, Alfred Kinsey, Betty Freidan, Al Gore and a host of influential people who are either crackpots, sadly misguided, self-serving or just plain evil.
Farkel
What we are really discussing is not SIGNS of the End.
We are discussing the Watchtower Society's PRETEXTs for claiming knowlege of the End.
What they were marketing door to door was FEAR and any old thing they could quote which produced fear was fine by them.
Remember that Pastor Russell used a meteor shower as PRETEXT for claiming Christ was about to take his throne!
World War I was used as a pretext for claiming the Watchtower predictions were correct--even though the entire context of their message had to be twisted into revision to make it workable.
FEAR is a mighty weapon and absolute proof of nothing.
Fear is the biggest motivating factor in the world, even bigger than love. It's no wonder these people use fear to manipulate so many people.
