Polestar

.

Dogma, by itself, is dead. Dogma can help us navigate, but cannot substitute for the polestar. We are cast upon a vast, violent, and changing ocean. For our governance, there is only a spiritual polestar, not a substantive one. For those who would own up to be judged, to become responsible for their own thinking and conduct, there abides an immaterial, political polestar. It abides with asking this question: What is presently needed to be done in order to establish and preserve a society whose adults will continue to be availed decent freedom of expression and enterprise? To ask that question in good faith and good will is to become receptive to answers made far less difficult. To ignore that question, to conflate that polestar with dogma, to hold only to the dogma as the polestar recedes, is to so envy a single lifeline as to cut it in preference to the sainted ship.  The ocean is simply too vast to humor us always to rely on dogma as opposed to the polestar.  We adjust as the tempest of our niche adjusts, or we perish.  Within the tempest with which we find ourselves, a dogma that denies release for children, even as it would prohibit them from employing contraception, is spent.  Being despised in reality, such a dogma feeds disillusionment into immediate gratifications.  It manages a disorderly retreat towards reviving a dark age, where individual responsibility is to be surrendered to the collective --- whether the collective be spiritual or socialist.  Thus, the free and responsible citizen of a city on a hill is to be sacrificed to the old cave of a new dark age.

Aside from concern about capacity, purely from standpoint of aesthetics, there are quite enough people on the planet.  There is hardly reason to worry that enough irresponsible people will not continue to procreate.  Indeed, it is the most irresponsible who most procreate.  The human niche is quite swamped with those who think others must be forced by taxes to finance their irresponsible behavior.  They call this forced financing "charity."  So, the most irresponsible will not support their offspring, much less see to their decent education.  With the collapsing of decent civilization, it's little more than madness to make it our priority to ensure that the breeding of irresponsible, mal-educated, and spiritually misguided children, by such irresponsible children, should continue to go unabated.