DW asks about overpopulation and marital submission:
I’m a fairly new reader of your blog and a big fan. I have two questions. Some of my friends are scientists—a biologist, a chemist and a biochemist. They all tell me that the world is overpopulated. I don’t believe them. Do you think the world is overpopulated? Also, since you’re a Christian, do you believe the stuff Paul wrote about a wife being submissive to her husband? I’ve been… trying to figure out how to argue for the traditional Christian view that the husband is the head of the wife and that women shouldn’t hold authoritative positions in the Church in today’s world.
I think some parts of the world are overpopulated, which is to say the parts of the world that cannot manage to feed or maintain civilized societies without external support. It is absurd to be sending vast quantities of food, medicine, and money to third world nations that cannot provide for themselves while simultaneously permitting third-world immigration. This is actually a monstrous policy that not only ensures devastation throughout the third world, but throughout the civilized world as well.
If you consider that the Nigerian city of Lagos alone has 1.6 million more Nigerians than there are Swiss in Switzerland, it should be readily apparent that Europe’s money, technology, and medicine has helped expand the African population to quantities it can no longer reasonably support than America’s money, technology, and medicine could support China.
So, the world is overpopulated in parts and the consequent idea of substituting immigrants for natives – or electing a new people, as the Democrats are now explicitly doing with their creation of an “Obama Coalition” – will turn out to be even more disastrous than the attempts to industrialize the uncivilized have been.
As to the second question, yes, there is no shortage of historical and scientific evidence in support of the Biblical concept of female submissiveness in marriage. It should not be necessary to argue this at all with fellow Christians, as the Churchian concept of mutual submission is not only illogical, it is outright anti-Christian.
In light of the Biblical analogy, the concept of mutual submission requires the belief that Jesus Christ submits himself to his church. I would no more accept a nominally Christian authority that taught “mutual submission” as being legitimate as I would one that taught one should pray in the name of Obama instead of Jesus Christ.