Escalating Eco-Silly

Children aren't SUVs, they're people, and when it comes to having them you should give thought to more than just their estimated carbon footprint.

Still, considering how often those without children are demonized by those that do (especially conservatives), it's not surprising that they jumping on an environmental rationale to justify their decision. I suspect if childlessness was less scorned, then we wouldn't hear "Don't have kids, save the planet!"

But Tom, you started with the claim that survival is not a moral value. It's the PRIME moral value. To a human being, one's own survival and the survival of one's genome is the prime morality, and to the race, it's the continuation of the race. Even the conflict between individual survival and group/descendant survival (sacrifice) is a natural one, and provides the explicit basis for intellectualized human moral "codes." It's everything else past that that's derived from human sophistry.

You said that it was an animal value, not a human one--but we ARE animals. That's an unrebuttable truth. You said that animals don't talk about sacrifice. Do you speak all their tongues? Yet animals DO sacrifice, and animals that live in groups fight and sacrifice in groups. You said that humans generally don't eat their own, even to survive. Good thing you qualified that one a little--humans do indeed eat their own to survive at times, and have throughout history. When doing so for survival, they generally do not kill to do so, but eat the already dead to avoid joining them.

You imply I'm making an atheist's argument, at the same time reducing the point itself to absurdity. ("I have to disagree with this. It strikes me as a rather classic form of reductionism that's employed by atheists...ie 'We're really no different then protozoans.'" Protozoans aren't animals, BTW.) Sorry, I would say that animals too are capable of and clearly demonstrate moral behavior. Indeed, many radical enviros make the very claim that animals are more moral than humans.

You can retreat into the faith claim, but it's still a claim that only faith and/or revelation can produce moral behavior, that there is no morality without them, which is absurd. Consistently moral behavior is clearly demonstrable in both animals and atheists. And the basis of human moral codes is still (genomic) survival of self and/or group. We can take on frills via theology, but they're artifical inventions that vary wildly by the faith. And most all of them still come back to the preservation of the group genome, the survival of the genome. Those that do not do so directly do so indirectly by enhancing group authority, by enabling humans to live together in groups.

Now (and NOT to ascribe this position to you--IMHO we're arguing a teleological side issue) what we get from the "humans are a disease on the planet" meme is a specifically anti-moral position (Bender voice: "Kill all the humans!") being advanced under the label of morality. Such a position can only be classified as "moral" by the rationalizing human perversion of natural morals--there is no other way to reach that racial suicide advocacy otherwise.

Theologists can play their games, but when "moral" behavior can be demonstrated among all animal groups, it becomes racial pride to believe that only humans are capable of morality, and that racial suicide, er, I mean "ultimate sacrifice" could ever be a moral act.