Did God Curse Us?

This post is about something disturbing I have come to think about for some time now. Incidentally this came up for discussion in my own home, my mom and dad asked me the same thing during the same day.

I have been troubled for sometime about the question of whether God actually blessed human kind or He subtly cursed us when He said........."Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."

To understand my predicament, one should first come to know why the above words from God actually could be a curse as well. Human population, globally, has swelled to it's greatest. All that was said in those words from the Bible has come true. Humans are now truly spread around the globe, people are now able to see what is there around the world, people are able to travel, people have conquered most of the terrible diseases and can be seen in every nook and cranny on the face of the planet.

So, where is the curse? It's surprising if we haven't felt it so far, and the fact is most people are still oblivious to it. It is said that a frog in a jar of water wouldn't know if the temperature is steadily raised and would eventually die in the jar instead of jumping out of it. The same is true of us at the moment. We have conquered the globe, but we have also started to put enormous pressure on it's limited resources. There simply isn't enough for all of our collective greed, if every country in the world desires to reach the benchmark of development now seen in North America and Europe, we would simply extinguish all resources on the planet and would force extinction upon us.

According to some estimates, the current rate of growth of global temperatures is to make most of earth unlivable by 2050, we would start to witness severe food shortages by 2020 and so on. Current estimates by some scientists show that if everyone in the world is to live like Indians do, earth can support 15 billion people, like Rwandans, upto 18 billion and like people in the US, not more than 1.5 billion. With India and China racing to reach living standards in US and Europe, we would soon start choking on ourselves. As if this is not enough there is a lot of research still going on to increase longevity of people. So, if the impending doom of the curse is still not evident, it does put a serious question upon our mental faculties. On a lighter note, if you had noticed those famous words from Bible, they don't say anything about us colonizing the outer space, they only say that we fill this planet of ours'.

So, is this truly a curse? Is God such a cruel guy to have cursed us at the same time that He so dearly blessed us? Was He shortsighted when He blessed humanity? I don't think so, He blessed us, gave us intelligence above every other creature and from time to time He has taught us to think out of the box. If you notice carefully, just at the time we began developing cures to deadly medicines, just as we began increasing agricultural output and just as human population began to explode exponentially........we also found ways of controlling birth rates, which starkly, are being ignored even now. Well, some ignore it because they are drowned in religious dogma, some because they don't have access to contraception and some because they keep waiting for children of either sexes and many more reasons.

When I look around, it is ridiculous to notice that even during 80s and 90s there have been a lot of people who had more than two children per couple. It is even more ridiculous to notice that many of these are educated people. I have personally come across people hanging on to skewed religious doctrines leading to uncontrolled births. Gifts are to be kept dearly, not spoiled and Earth is the only thing of it's kind gifted to mankind. I'm personally against abortion, but methods to avoid pregnancy neither break nor bend any rules. It is time we thought out of the box, Jesus himself taught this when He asked only the person who never sinned to stone the prostitute!! God truly gave us the choices to make and the roads to take, amazingly He did give us ways to control our population just at the time it really began to explode, don't you see that He hasn't really cursed us? It is our narrow thoughts that have the potential to turn it into a curse. This reminds me of a dialogue from an eminent movie "at the precipice we evolve and change", I sincerely hope that we change before it is not too late for us to notice that we have already slipped beyond the point of no return.

Here is where some content in this article has been picked up from and believe me, it is truly scarier than most horror films: