In response to the following, Lightbearer politicly said, "Please take your Anti-Mormon Neo-Communistic socialist/environmentalist propaganda elsewhere," and Selek said, "The bottom line is this: you're a liar, a demagogue, and a pious fraud attempting to promote a specific political/religious dogma and willing to distort and defame Mormon beliefs in order to advance your cause."
Here is what I said.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The premise of the play Saturday’s Warrior was that the temporal life of the earth extends about 6,000 years from the Fall of Adam to the second coming. According to Biblical chronology, Adam fell around 4000 B.C., which schedules the second coming to begin in the year 2000. If a day to God is a thousand years to us, then the Fall happened immediately after God’s post-creation day of rest which was, of course, a Sunday. With that calibration, the years 1000 to 2000 are Saturday, and the Millennium, when Jesus comes back to personally rule the earth for 1000 years, satisfyingly falls on a Sunday.
Ezra Taft Benson said the following, which might have been the single-most frequently general authority quote over my years in seminary:
For nearly six thousand years, God has held you in reserve to make your appearance in the final days before the Second Coming. Every previous gospel dispensation has drifted into apostasy, but ours will not. … God has saved for the final inning some of his strongest children, who will help bear off the kingdom triumphantly. And that is where you come in, for you are the generation that must be prepared to meet your God. … Make no mistake about it—you are a marked generation.
http://LDS.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?vgnex ... &hideNav=1
That is the paradigm of Saturday’s Warrior. God was saving his very strongest children for the very last. LDS children in the late 20th century were the few, the strong, and the warriors who would win the battle raging in the hearts of men. They are the ones who wouldn’t bend with the wind or the change, but would fight the world alone in the minutes before Christ’s triumphant return.
From that perspective, the church’s (then) anti-birth control policy made perfect sense. There was no reason to worry about the balance of the earth’s ecosystem in a hundred years because long before that, Christ would return to personally lead the world through whatever those times would be like. But in preparation for His triumphant return, it was crucial for LDS families not to hesitate to bring his strongest children into the world—because after all, that was the generation that had been reserved for the final inning. It would be tragic to only field seven or eight players for the bottom half of the 9th.
Since then, people the world over have chosen to have fewer children, and the rate of growth has been decreasing. Various estimates show the population explosion slowing down and gently ending over the next several decades. While our civilization is in a mode where we are consuming resources faster than they naturally regenerate (e.g. carbon levels increasing in the atmosphere, over fishing, reliance on a finite amount of fossil fuel), and while there are going to be some tough transitions (e.g. impending retirement crisis) it is quite realistic to think that our children will rise to the task and get the world into a long-term prosperous equilibrium. So if anybody’s wondered, I am personally very optimistic about the prospects of humanity.
However, I get extremely frustrated when short-sighted and selfish people get on their high horses and moan about the challenges associated with declining growth. It’s as if they think the challenges associated with a slowing growth rate prove that the long-term solution for creating a prosperous earthly environment for the human family is unfettered exponential growth. That’s like a family that makes $3,000 a month but spends $4,000 a month using the comfort of that lifestyle and the pain of fixing it as proof that the best way to ensure a wonderful future for their family is to never balance the budget. What could be more selfish and short-sighted?
It’s time to put the Saturday’s Warrior mentality to bed. It’s time to look at the long term implications of our lifestyles and live in sustainable ways. We can’t base our lifestyles on an exponentially growing population and the consumption of finite resources and think that Jesus is going to soon appear to magically fix the long-term consequences.