Created For Procreation

[debrand]

Yesterday, G took me to see the Bodies exhibit in Atlanta. It was really interesting (and a little nauseating, at least for the first ten minutes), and I walked away with a new sense of wonder about the human body and the One who created it. No one in their right mind could see the displays and deny that they were the result of intelligent design

Religious people make these type of statements all the time. Surely, they can't be so ignorant that they think atheists sit in their house and never look at the same views they do. Yes, you can feel awe at beauty or the way the human body works and believe that there is no god.

Did you know that women are born with all of the eggs they will ever have, and that there are approximately 250,000 of them?

Yep. I think that I learned it in highschool

The more I study the Word, the less of a case I can make for the idea that children are just another possession to "aquire" when we feel we are "ready" for it. It doesn't make sense for God to give women so many eggs if we were only supposed to try for two or three children, and then say "that's enough." God puts so much importance on procreation in His Word, and it's very clear that children are valuable to Him.

What! Does she think that all those eggs should one day become babies? She'd have to be some sort of gigantic queen bug to have that many children. Her argument makes no sense at all. What about women that can't have children? Do their eggs go to waste?

Are children less valuable to god if a mother only has two? Women, just like men, can have many functions in life. Some women, who are perfectly nice individuals, would make horrible mothers. Others are good mothers but realize that they don't have the resources or ability to care for several kids. Some women just don't want kids. I think that it would be far more wasteful of life to have children for which I can't care.

Commenting on this passage of Scripture, Nancy Campbell says the following:

"In the context of Bible days, arrows were for the purpose of war! We are in a war today and God needs arrows for His army. God wants children born to fulfill His strategies and plans. When a warrior went out to war, how many arrows would he want in his quiver? One or two? No, he’d want to squeeze in as many as he could. The more arrows he had in his quiver, the more weapons he had to slay the enemy and the more protection he provided for himself." -Nancy Campbell, Be Fruitful and Multiply: What the Bible Says About Having Children

The mesage about having many children for god's war freaks the hell out of me.

It's clear that God loves children. And if I am to be an "imitator of God," then I must love them as well

Here is something amazing. I like kids too! And I didn't need any god to tell me to like them.

He knows better than I do about everything, and if God calls children a blessing, then that is what they are.

So, if god calls kids trash, she would view kids as trash. Can't she just like kids because she likes kids?

I can choose to reject them, or welcome His blessings with open arms and a heart of thankfulness.

How is choosing to not have more than a certain number of kids, rejecting kids? Her argument makes no sense.

courageouswomanhood.blogspot.com/

[pixydust]

I think that fundies talk in circles to try to confuse people.

So, with her logic, men should run around having babies with as many woman as they can, because they have tons of spermies, and they should all become babies! Hey, it's an argument for polygamy!

[Daenerys]

I always find it fascinating to think that I began life (genetically speaking) inside my grandmother. So in that way, I'm not 20 but 54!

[tehfanglyfish]

K, I'm bored and procrastinating, so I think it's time for math.

Alright, female humans have roughly 250,000 eggs when they're born. Clearly God has a purpose for all those cells, right? Only something's a bit problematic with this plan. See, human babies have a nine month incubation period. Therefore, at the VERY minimum, it would take 2,250 months to go through all those eggs, which is 187.5 years.

Right now, the average life expectancy for a woman in the United States is 80.4 years (according to Wikipedia). If you take into consideration the fact that human females don't become fertile until they reach puberty, we have to add 10-16 more years onto the 187.5, as well as factor the month(s) that transpire between one birth and another pregnancy.

We're clearly looking at well over 200 years here for a woman to go through all her eggs. If God's plan is for women to "spawn more overlords" (so sorry, had to include a Star Craft reference... just because), then Y TEH WOMENZ NO LIVE LONGER?!?!?!?!?!

[Wolfie]

I just saw a conversation between a college friend and a friend of hers on facebook about how horrible their families were about the fact that they "don't believe in birth control." Of course there was also the random all caps post from somebody complaining how horrible she felt after she had her tubes tied and then had to have a hysterectomy.

[Sola]

Even if a woman had a child every year of her fertile life, from menarche to menopause, she still would not use a tenth of all her available eggs.

This sort of thing really makes me laugh, if sex was just for procreation then we would have seasons, like various other animals do. So no, we are not created for procreation at all.

[debrand]

Having a large family because the parents want many children does not bother me. However, bringing god into the mix allows the parents to feel that they are super special and far superior to the other, smaller families.

[Conuly]

No one in their right mind could see the displays and deny that they were the result of intelligent design

They could if they took a closer look. Some aspects of the human body are just STUPID all around. If they were designed from scratch, the designer should be fired.

When a warrior went out to war, how many arrows would he want in his quiver? One or two? No, he’d want to squeeze in as many as he could.

If the warrior had a choice between a few well-designed arrows and a couple dozen flimsy, mass-produced ones, the choice becomes less obvious. Is she going to really favor quantity over quality?

If God's plan is for women to "spawn more overlords" (so sorry, had to include a Star Craft reference... just because), then Y TEH WOMENZ NO LIVE LONGER?!?!?!?!?!

And why isn't there more gender imbalance? If the real plan is to have lots and lots of kids, polygamy IS the way to go. One male for every 5 - 10 females, that would mean more babies per year.

[valsa]

When a warrior went out to war, how many arrows would he want in his quiver? One or two? No, he’d want to squeeze in as many as he could." -Nancy Campbell, Be Fruitful and Multiply: What the Bible Says About Having Children

Someone much smarter than I am once pointed out that jamming as many arrows as possible into one's quiver means that you don't have enough room to pull one out when you need it.

Also, the human body is not that great. Who the fuck decided to make the tube it's necessary to cram objects into on a regular basis the same one that we get our also-necessary air supply through? Think how many lives would have been saved throughout history if food and air had completely different tubes to go down the whole way (instead of splitting later) Or if we had gills secondary to our lungs (after all, our planet is 3/4 water) Or if our immune system didn't fuck up so often and cause auto-immune problems. Or if we had shed-able exoskeletons. If an intelligent creator had the option to make a supreme species and could use a combination of any traits present in nature, they could do a lot better than us.

[debrand]

They could if they took a closer look. Some aspects of the human body are just STUPID all around. If they were designed from scratch, the designer should be fired.

If the warrior had a choice between a few well-designed arrows and a couple dozen flimsy, mass-produced ones, the choice becomes less obvious. Is she going to really favor quantity over quality?

And why isn't there more gender imbalance? If the real plan is to have lots and lots of kids, polygamy IS the way to go. One male for every 5 - 10 females, that would mean more babies per year.

Why would women go through menopause? They should continue having babies from puberty until death.

[finleeport]

Its funny that you brought this up.

Last night I had a dream about the fundie women from Quiverfull and Vision Forum all talking about babies and having more babies, and dressed in long dresses and frumpers. Until they were ready to watch a movie, something San Antonio film, but there was a mix up; instead they watched the entire Handmaid's Tale. It made them sick and scared to death watching how the women were treated in such a manner. Then they began to make comparisons to their own lives. Most of them took off and ran away from their husbands with their children, while the men chasing them in fury but never caught up to them.

Strange part was that when the women were running, they dropped eggs and the men stopped to pick them up and protect them like they were sacred or holy.

[doggie]

god wants you to procreate so he can kill or sell your children into slavery. right there in the bible.

[Guest Anonymous]

If a warrior's quiver was jam-packed with arrows, he either wouldn't be able to pull them out fast enough in an emergency, or some of the arrows would break from being crammed in together.

[debrand]

And it only takes one arrow to kill some one. I'd rather have a well trained archer with a few quality arrows defending me than a crappy archer with a quiverful of poor quality arrows.

[doggie]

how many bent arrows in the fundy quiver? or blunt arrows that's what the education we see create bent or blunt arrows.

[AmandaP]

If the 250,000 eggs mean that women should have more babies what does she make of the 39 million sperm per ejaculation?

[CanadianHippie]

If the warrior had a choice between a few well-designed arrows and a couple dozen flimsy, mass-produced ones, the choice becomes less obvious. Is she going to really favor quantity over quality?

I don't think he's going to want to "squeeze in as many as he could" either. Think about, you are in battle, you reach for an arrow in your quiver (which is squeezed full of as many as you could possibly put in there), fumble to get your fingers between tightly packed arrows, finally get hold of one and pull, and it's stuck, you pull harder and suddenly all your arrows are scattered around you. You fire off the first one and get shot down scrambling to pick up a second. You aren't going to want more than you personally can reasonable handle in that quiver.

[CanadianHippie]

Religious people make these type of statements all the time. Surely, they can't be so ignorant that they think atheists sit in their house and never look at the same views they do. Yes, you can feel awe at beauty or the way the human body works and believe that there is no god.

And yeah, I believe intelligent design is a crock, and I've probably spent more time studying the human body than she has.

[Rachel333]

We're clearly looking at well over 200 years here for a woman to go through all her eggs. If God's plan is for women to "spawn more overlords" (so sorry, had to include a Star Craft reference... just because), then Y TEH WOMENZ NO LIVE LONGER?!?!?!?!?!

Well, duh, in the old testament people lived hundreds of years. I'm sure they had hundreds of babies just like God intended.

[Deleted07]

This reminds me of a friend from my highschool days. Married young out of HS and said she was going to have as many children as her husband wanted. We're 25 now and she has 7!

But thing is with each child born, they seem to be degenerating or something? Sorry if thats the wrong term. What I mean is they have all had multiple problems, a few are autistic, then she had one with brain cancer, another has an immune deficiency, now her latest one has an issue where he cannot reproduce new cells, and such (not sure of the specifics but its incredibly sad) the child will not survive past 5 if he's lucky. Meanwhile she still says she would have more!! When its clear that their genealogy or something is off!

If it were me, I'd be thankful for the ones I had that were healthy and concentrate on the ones I did have that needed extra care, not looking to just have quantity over quality as someone else above said!

[Rowan]

Someone much smarter than I am once pointed out that jamming as many arrows as possible into one's quiver means that you don't have enough room to pull one out when you need it.

Also, the human body is not that great. Who the fuck decided to make the tube it's necessary to cram objects into on a regular basis the same one that we get our also-necessary air supply through? Think how many lives would have been saved throughout history if food and air had completely different tubes to go down the whole way (instead of splitting later) Or if we had gills secondary to our lungs (after all, our planet is 3/4 water) Or if our immune system didn't fuck up so often and cause auto-immune problems. Or if we had shed-able exoskeletons. If an intelligent creator had the option to make a supreme species and could use a combination of any traits present in nature, they could do a lot better than us.

ITA. No intelligent creator would put the playground between the sewers. :angelic-halo:

[Conuly]

I'm still stuck on this.

There are animals in this world that DO subscribe to the "lots of them, little attention to them" method of child-having. They have litters. If humans were supposed to outbreed everybody else, wouldn't we have litters too? Up until very recently, even having twins meant one of them might not make it, and triplets were lucky to survive. (Higher numbers of multiples, of course, were RIGHT out.)

And we know that both maternal and infant health declines the more closely spaced the babies are. It's one thing if you have two babies in two years, but having seven babies in seven years takes a real toll. Wouldn't this NOT be the case if we were deliberately designed with the goal of having as many kids as possible?

I shouldn't be using logic, should I. I should just be sighing.

[Free Me]

If the 250,000 eggs mean that women should have more babies what does she make of the 39 million sperm per ejaculation?

Yeah, I don't remember exactly how many sperm a male shoots out every time he, ahem, shoots off but I know its way more than I want running around my house!

[notsocommon]

So, with her logic, men should run around having babies with as many woman as they can, because they have tons of spermies, and they should all become babies! Hey, it's an argument for polygamy!

That is what men did in Biblical times...fundies just ignore that bit.

[Jessica]

Who the fuck decided to make the tube it's necessary to cram objects into on a regular basis the same one that we get our also-necessary air supply through?

... or that it was a good idea for babies to come out the vagina?! Sheesh!