God created “very good water”

Duane Snow is a likeable soul, so I regret having to use his words, but they make a very important point. [August 14 news: “Snow softens: Only Fenwick is jonesin’ for dredging”

Mr. Snow’s comment that NASA technology for recycling urine into drinking water “may be great for members of the Sierra Club, but [he’s] not excited about it” illustrates the necessity of limiting human population.

Hard as it is to believe these days, water used to be drinkable right out of streams. When we didn’t have so many humans and so many concentrated sources of farm animals and plants to feed them, streams weren’t contaminated by an overabundance of animal waste, pesticides, and soil runoff.

But nowadays they are. Consequently, public-water supplies require purification via technology that is far inferior to the natural cleansing the Earth is capable of performing. That’s why folks on wells tend to have tasty water whereas folks on many public water-supply systems suffer with the taste of chlorine.

All of our environmental woes boil down to human overpopulation. In the Bible, God didn’t tell only humans to go forth and multiply; He said that all of His creatures should do this. We know what happens whenever there’s an overpopulation of other kinds of critters: they eat themselves out of house and home and then they start to die of disease. Even if technology could save us from this same fate, the quality of our lives is negatively impacted— as should already be obvious to all.

Limiting the number of humans is not about abortion. It’s about folks choosing to bring fewer children into the world for the benefit of all. People know how to do this; they are obviously already practicing birth control. Otherwise healthy, sexually active women would be giving birth to upwards of a dozen children by the time they reached the end of their childbearing years.

Christians who argue in favor of not limiting population growth often say that environmentalists worship the creation instead of the Creator. They argue that God granted man dominion (i.e. ruling power) and, in so doing, granted man the authority to degrade the creation.

But permission to rule is not permission to destroy. In Genesis 1:4-31, God declares seven times that everything He had created was either “good” or “very good.” It’s hard to understand how anyone who worships God could consider harming, if not totally destroying, that which his God considers good.