A popular theory amongst people at the moment is that the meaning of life is to make babies. While I accept that creating a new generation of humans is an important part of life, I do not think it is the exhaustive purpose of our existence.
For one thing, we live in a world where overpopulation is more or less the biggest threat we know. The huge and rapidly increasing amount of people living on Earth today is the cause of depletion of resources, using up of space, more pollution, faster global warming, and much more besides. This in turn leads to a more conflicted world as nations and social groups fight take part in an intensified fight for land and resources. In short, rapidly producing children is a self-destructive task, and any philosophy which says everyone should have lots of children is dangerous.
Also, I don't the the naturalist/Darwinist argument for birth being the ultimate cause actually makes sense. Darwin's works state that the purpose of members of a species is to ensure the survival and development of their species. Making new people, obviously, is an important part of this, but it's surely equally important to help make the world safer for the new generation that is made. If one person has ten children but does nothing to look after them, another is infertile but adopt all ten of the children and raises them well, and a third provides water sanitation for the city where the children live, who has best contributed to the survival of the species?
To be totally honest (and sorry, I am about to be intolerably patronising), I think a lot of people subscribe to the idea that having children is the purpose of human existence just because it's easy. "To make children" is an extraordinarily simple answer to an extremely complicated question. It's also something the majority of us are physically capable of doing. As such, it's a very attractive prospect.
Unfortunately for those people, contributing to the survival of humans and improvement of the human condition is a far more delicate affair than just making lots of babies. There are those who's primary call is to be parents, yes, but there are too many other things which need to be done for every single human to dedicate their life only to their family.
I apologise if I seem to be degrading or trivialising the importance of family and parenthood in any way. That was never my intention. All I am propagating is an objection to the view that the making of children is the only source of meaning to our lives.
For one thing, we live in a world where overpopulation is more or less the biggest threat we know. The huge and rapidly increasing amount of people living on Earth today is the cause of depletion of resources, using up of space, more pollution, faster global warming, and much more besides. This in turn leads to a more conflicted world as nations and social groups fight take part in an intensified fight for land and resources. In short, rapidly producing children is a self-destructive task, and any philosophy which says everyone should have lots of children is dangerous.
Also, I don't the the naturalist/Darwinist argument for birth being the ultimate cause actually makes sense. Darwin's works state that the purpose of members of a species is to ensure the survival and development of their species. Making new people, obviously, is an important part of this, but it's surely equally important to help make the world safer for the new generation that is made. If one person has ten children but does nothing to look after them, another is infertile but adopt all ten of the children and raises them well, and a third provides water sanitation for the city where the children live, who has best contributed to the survival of the species?
To be totally honest (and sorry, I am about to be intolerably patronising), I think a lot of people subscribe to the idea that having children is the purpose of human existence just because it's easy. "To make children" is an extraordinarily simple answer to an extremely complicated question. It's also something the majority of us are physically capable of doing. As such, it's a very attractive prospect.
Unfortunately for those people, contributing to the survival of humans and improvement of the human condition is a far more delicate affair than just making lots of babies. There are those who's primary call is to be parents, yes, but there are too many other things which need to be done for every single human to dedicate their life only to their family.
I apologise if I seem to be degrading or trivialising the importance of family and parenthood in any way. That was never my intention. All I am propagating is an objection to the view that the making of children is the only source of meaning to our lives.
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