Race Relations

In the October/November 2020 issue of Free Inquiry is the article “Farewell to the Pink Race!” by S. T. Joshi. The article celebrates the death of the European race, claiming that “no one need lament their obliteration from the earth.” I want us to live in a society where there is no hate between races as there is in this article. Articles such as this one encourage a world of races hating each other and celebrating the extinction of a race. This prevents society from living communally and keeps races fighting among themselves instead of toward a greater good. Please get rid of these race-hating articles. Just because it’s hating on White instead of Black doesn’t make it okay.

Also in the October/November 2020 issue is the article “Raised on Respectability Politics” by Leighann Lord, which states: “If White people felt comfortable around us—we’re just like them except with a permanent tan, then maybe we’d be free to live our lives.” Using the words us and them confirms there is a difference between the races and furthers the dehumanizing “us/them” mentality by using those words. Black people are not the same as White people; there are scientific differences among skin color and hair qualities and several medical conditions. Additionally, two White people will not give birth to a Black person, or vice versa. So scientifically it is known the two races are distinguishable, so to say they are not causes me to doubt the integrity or possible ability of the author. I do not claim one race is better or worse, simply identifiably different.

Is the author trying to say the two races are culturally identical? That is not true either. African Americans have an identifiably different cuisine, language, values, music, and comedy style. (Obviously there are exceptions on both sides.) Similarly, I can distinguish between a person from Italy and a person from Germany. In my opinion, cultural differences should be celebrated not suppressed. One culture is not better or worse, but to pretend they are the same is at best misleading and also becomes dangerous. For example, in the same article the author claims Black and White people are indistinguishable but also says Black people should not be expected to behave and speak the same as White people, referred to as “respectability politics.” Who can succeed in that situation? A Black person is being told they are indistinguishable from White culture (denying a fact of nature and also of culture), but at the same time is being told they don’t have to speak or behave like everyone else who is supposedly just like them (except with a suntan). That is an untenable situation. Who could do well when what they have been told does not agree with what they can see with their own eyes?

I think all persons should have equal opportunity, but I will not try to tell children that two easily distinguishable races are actually one indistinguishable race—that will only be damaging for all involved.

Don Konecny

via email

Response from S. T. Joshi:

The only thing I have to say to Don Konecny’s letter is: *sigh.* I was naively hopeful that my screed would be readily interpreted as the satire that it so obviously was. I was consciously following the example of Ambrose Bierce, who wrote several “future histories” that pungently expressed his views on society and government during his day. Well, I suppose that in at least one reader’s view I failed in my mission, just as Jonathan Swift failed when in “A Modest Proposal” (1729) he proposed relieving poverty by selling babies as food—and was taken seriously. How he must have sighed.

Overpopulation

Re: “The Moral Imperative of Being an Overpopulation Activist” by Karen L. Shragg, FI, June/July 2021. Thank you for bringing back to the forefront a subject that once was the major topic of the environmental movement. Drs. Paul and Anne Ehrlich understood this “core issue,” and the group Zero Population Growth (ZPG) was one of the first national groups to be created. It remained a respected and strong group until around 2000, when a new director took over. I was then on the local Seattle board and saw firsthand the direction this person wanted to take the group. It was seen that money was needed to more fully promote the mission. The name was changed to Population Connection, and the connection, which included immigration in the basic formula, was removed. Many of the existing board members left as we saw the end of the group as we knew it. Later, on a PBS production To the Contrary, it was said that some anonymous person/group donated $100 million to both ZPG and the Sierra Club to remove immigration from their missions. Industries often rely on a controllable and cheap source of labor, so it wasn’t hard to imagine their role in this downsizing.

However, despite the diminishing role of human overpopulation, the issue is even more relevant today than ever. I continue to hear about the dangers of the “birth dearth,” and countries such as China are trying to get their citizens to create even more of us. Without the ability to control our numbers in a peaceful way, nature will do it for us. Nature cares little for her creations, and the outcome has already shown how ugly and miserable it will be. I wish more people would see where we’re headed.

Jack M. Pedigo

Lopez Island, Washington

Thank you, Karen Shragg, for writing “The Moral Imperative of Being an Overpopulation Activist,” and thanks to Free Inquiry for publishing it.

I have been concerned about overpopulation since Paul Erlich published The Population Bomb in 1968 and the world population was 3.5 billion. The cover of The Population Explosion published in 1990 states: “From global warming to rain forest destruction, famine, and air and water pollution—why overpopulation is our #1 environmental problem.” In the following years, Erlich was largely dismissed with claims that our technology could solve any problems caused by an increasing population. Now we are nearing eight billion, and in the intervening fifty-three years we have done little or nothing to slow the growth. Over the past many years, I have read hundreds of articles and listened to numerous “experts” discuss the above problems enumerated by Erlich as well as others, and none of them—no group, organization, or governmental body—is willing to touch the third rail of overpopulation. I have long considered overpopulation to be the root cause of all our ills—environmental, economic, and societal. And for a long time, I have thought I was alone in this opinion. I am glad to find that there are actually activists out there and people brave enough to discuss the issue. I just wish their voices could be louder.

It is my belief that Nature is sending us a warning with COVID-19—that its immutable laws are violated at our peril, and there are too many people on this Earth. At my age, maybe I shouldn’t care. I honestly don’t have a lot of sympathy for humanity, which I feel is sowing the seeds of its own destruction, but I do care about this beautiful planet and the innocent creatures who share it with us.

Phyllis Murphey

Lower Lake, California

Tom Flynn comments: Thanks to readers Jack M. Pedigo and Phyllis Murphey. Something tells me you will both be delighted with my op-ed in this issue!

God’s Lost Children

With reference to Gregory S. Paul’s article in Free Inquiry, June/July 2021, I enjoyed reading it very much but I would like to raise the following observation:

I have read the sermon by C. H. Spurgeon that is referenced in the second footnote. While I acknowledge that the subject of this sermon is infant mortality, I can see no reference or allusion that acknowledges “the mass death of children” or “how incompatible that is with the idea of a benign creator.” Quite the contrary; Spurgeon would never have acknowledged that.

I wonder if Paul could give the quote from Spurgeon that led him to make this statement in his article.

I am a new subscriber in the United Kingdom and love the publication. Thank you.

Kevin Skippon

via email

Gregory S. Paul responds:

My essay notes that concerning the mass death of children, Spurgeon—who, like all professional theists, was a manipulative propagandist—“cynically waved away the catastrophe by pretending to know that of course the kind creator allows all those little ones into his blessed heaven.”

In section 9 of his depraved sermon, Spurgeon prattles on about how God/Jesus is so caring and tender to human youth and creatures, never mind the massive agonies and premature death that regularly occurs on the planet Spurgeon imagines the mad deity created. He observes “that upon the best statistics it is calculated that more than one third of the human race die in infancy, and probably if we take into calculation those districts where infanticide prevails, as in heathen countries, such as China and the like, perhaps one half of the population of the world die before they reach adult years.” According to modern studies, those statistics are essentially correct in terms of both infant (1–2 years) and overall (7–13 years and below) child mortality not caused by human action when it comes to the global population prior to the early-mid 1800s. Although sly—as is common to theists—in trying to assign higher mortality levels to heathen lands where infanticide occurred, which his own stats do not show, one has to give the famed pastor some credit in being apparently nearly unique to his profession in admitting the horrifying numbers. That the basic stats were known to theists even back in the 1800s makes the never-ending evasion of the Brutalization of the Innocents all the more egregious and depraved. The pastor presumably lacked the historical demographic data needed to calculate the total number of children who had died up to then, which would have been about two billion or a few percentage points lower than now.

Hope that clears things up.

That no FI reader has turned up another example of a theist directly addressing the scale of the Children’s Holocaust supports that none has done so.

Erratum

I am reasonably certain that Ibn Waraq is incorrect when he stated on page 47 of the June/July Free Inquiry that the end of the Old Kingdom of Egypt dates to 3335 BCE, or 5356 BP (Before Present). As per Wikipedia, the Old Kingdom ended in about 2200 BCE, or about 4,200 years ago.
Dennis Middlebrooks
Brooklyn. New York