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Jun 3, 2022Liked by Esha

Extremely interesting conversation, but Esha - you far too frequently interrupt, and often before Justin has a chance to finish his sentence. This sometimes makes things hard to follow, at least for me.

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Yes, Sam Harris is a bit of a jerk and likely anti-Muslim, amongst other deficiencies, but what some of us are arguing is that religion *in general* is not the way forward, at least the supernatural part. A great deal of the moral teaching may still be useful, but we simply argue that following it blindly because it is supposed to come from a supreme being (when it is blatantly obvious that it was written by men to justify their employment in relatively cushy jobs) needs to be questioned. Jefferson created a bible where he literally cut out the supernatural parts and pasted the rest together, because the supernatural parts were so absurd, but he considered Christ a great moral teacher. What we object to is basing public policy (like killing someone for "blasphemy") on giving credence to some self-appointed authorities just because they say that they are "on a mission from God".

And in terms of overpopulation, in view of accelerating species extinction due to human activity (climate degradation being an especially dangerous example), we think it is time to ask why it makes sense to endlessly expand the human population. This has nothing to do with Malthus or eugenics, and applies to all humans, not just Africans or any other specific groups. If anything it would be more important to reduce population in wealthy countries, since they tend to contribute disproportionately to climate change and species extinction. So the question is not "how many people could we possibly cram into certain space without them starving to death", but why in the world would we want to even try? We should also look at immigration in this light. Of course, there are refugee situations where most would probably agree that it is immoral not to shelter some people. But if, as it appears, many of these are motivated to pursue a conspicuous consumption lifestyle elsewhere, then when they immigrate they become part of the overpopulation problem (as defined above). Rather we should be pushing *all* nations to come to population levels that are sustainable, without emigration, in terms of minimizing and ultimately eliminating further species extinction, and even reversing climate degradation. From time to time, with "tech fixes" (and less likely, lifestyle changes) it may be possible to safely expand human population, but now is not one of those times.

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