Yeah, I’ve had a hobby over the past few years looking into the history of a particular apocrypha text, and its antinatalism is one of the more interesting features, with a great line like this:
A woman in the crowd said to him, “Lucky are the womb that bore you and the breasts that fed you.”
He said to [her], “Lucky are those who have heard the word of the Father and have truly kept it. For there will be days when you will say, ‘Lucky are the womb that has not conceived and the breasts that have not given milk.’”
This line is broken up into two different parts in the gospel of Luke (11:27 and 23:29) but the inherent parallelism makes me think it was originally a call and response as it then appears in the Gospel of Thomas above.
You also have the antinatalism in one of the surviving lines from the lost Gospel of the Egyptians where Salome asked “how long will death continue?” And the response was “as long as women bear children.” Followed by her asking if she’d done well in not having any.
It’s interesting how across history it’s inherently a position that dooms itself to obsolescence when it appears due to adherents dying out without passing it on, even if the inherent merit of it remains true from one age to another.
So we socially have a collective anchoring bias towards seeing procreation and “be fruitful and multiply” as such a good thing, even though this is simply a platform with an inherent survivorship bias and not necessarily actually a good thing at all.
I could not have worded it better myself. It is absolutely a survivorship bias. Those who believe it is good to have children will have children and pass on those beliefs, while those of us who recognize the inherent ills of procreation do not.
And then due to the relatively small number of us, we are written off as psychopaths or pessimists for acknowledging the realities of the situation.
It’s sad, and it’s extremely annoying. But at the end of the day, I’m at least doing my part by not throwing another person unwillingly into this mess to be both a perpetrator and victim
Yeah, I’ve had a hobby over the past few years looking into the history of a particular apocrypha text, and its antinatalism is one of the more interesting features, with a great line like this:
This line is broken up into two different parts in the gospel of Luke (11:27 and 23:29) but the inherent parallelism makes me think it was originally a call and response as it then appears in the Gospel of Thomas above.
You also have the antinatalism in one of the surviving lines from the lost Gospel of the Egyptians where Salome asked “how long will death continue?” And the response was “as long as women bear children.” Followed by her asking if she’d done well in not having any.
It’s interesting how across history it’s inherently a position that dooms itself to obsolescence when it appears due to adherents dying out without passing it on, even if the inherent merit of it remains true from one age to another.
So we socially have a collective anchoring bias towards seeing procreation and “be fruitful and multiply” as such a good thing, even though this is simply a platform with an inherent survivorship bias and not necessarily actually a good thing at all.
I could not have worded it better myself. It is absolutely a survivorship bias. Those who believe it is good to have children will have children and pass on those beliefs, while those of us who recognize the inherent ills of procreation do not.
And then due to the relatively small number of us, we are written off as psychopaths or pessimists for acknowledging the realities of the situation.
It’s sad, and it’s extremely annoying. But at the end of the day, I’m at least doing my part by not throwing another person unwillingly into this mess to be both a perpetrator and victim