From what i undestand, antinatalisme talks about how bringing someone into existence is morally wrong. life contains inevitable suffering. creating life means eposing someone to pain without their consent.
I was wondering if anybody believed in this while also being religious and what their point of view is on the subject.
Personally, I am not religious but if I was, I couldn’t bring myself to live for a god when I haven’t ask to live
It seems kind of pessimistic to sum everything up as pain and suffering when in actuality, it is pleasure and joy that wouldn’t be possible unless you could meaningfully lose/sacrifice something lesser for something greater.
You can’t violate/reject a consent that doesn’t exist. You can’t respect/accept it, either. And once it begins to exist, it is structured such that it won’t want to stop existing as long as you respect/accept it.
So the answer is to affirm consent structures rather than prevent their beginning to exist.
of couse living also means pleasure and joy but, i feel like you have to obatin happiness while pain and suffering is natural. Yes being alive means you can experience joy and pleasure but not everyone can experience this. say for exemple: a mother gives birth to a kid in the middle of a war that has been going on for multiple years. Thats not an environement that someone should live in and there’s is a big chance that he dies before he is even being able to feel happiness.
Why would we consider pain and suffering the norm? If they were the norm, we would never even notice them. The norm is just a feeling of okayness, which you could say is the absence of spectacular pain or spectacular pleasure. As a position of neutrality, wouldn’t you put that on the side of pleasure and joy?
I think only someone addicted to thrill seeking would consider okayness to be suffering and pain.
What if the baby being born was the end of the war because everyone stopped fighting to protect the baby?
If you truly despaired over being born, over existing, then you would already have offed yourself. That is what people do when they no longer want to exist. It happens. I don’t condone it of course.
Antinatalism is a belief that having children is immoral because life itself is evil. It is closely related to “efilism” as “efil” is simply life spelled backwards.
Again, despite the arguments that may be more or less interesting for these positions, they are self-defeating. Which can be exampled by the thought experiments often employed by people who think this way, such as “if you were to observe earth and the natural world, all of the killing and pain and torture and eating each other alive, and you could push a button and end it all painlessly, would you do it?” Such a thought experiment poses an interesting question, but notice the form of the thought experiment: it acts from a position of omnipotent absolute power to end all life, or to make all life infertile which is another instantiation of the thought experiment.
The reason why such a Godlike position is required in their abstract thought experiment is because their own position, on its own within the actual context in which it exists, is logically self-refuting. Why? Because anyone who believes in efilism/antinatalism will simply not have kids, and may even kill other people; but everyone else who doesn’t believe in these things will keep having more kids, and protecting them from people like efilists/antinatalists.
So, in a situation where there are two groups, one composed of people who refuse to reproduce and the other who actively do reproduce, which group do you think would win out in the end? Obviously. Because the group of people who refuse to reproduce simply erase themselves from existence.
Oh, and the whole argument over “ideas can be spread regardless, blah blah” is also irrelevant here, not only because of the correlations between genes and ideas/mental health/personality factors but also because, even if we stipulate here, there is literally no reason to think that the pure idea of efliism/antinatalism would ever achieve enough ideational, cultural, emotional power to hold sway over a majority of people in any given society let alone in the entire world. Nor, as I can tell or have ever seen argued by any efilist/antinatalist, do I see any reason to think that humans can be re-wired instinctively through ideas, culture etc. to want to stop having kids. Oh sure, modern decadent western post-industrial civilization is already de-valuing having kids but that is a consequence of temporary affluence and the accumulation of harmful gene mutations in the population due to the prolonged absence of Darwinian purifying selection. This will naturally resolve itself when those civilizations which do not reproduce themselves are eventually, obviously, over taken by those that do reproduce themselves and value themselves in terms of reproducing their own next generation.
Hence why the efilist/antinatalist must frame his own thoughts in terms of “well if I had absolute Godlike power, I can easily see that pushing a button to painlessly end all life or make all life infertile would be the logical ethical thing to do”. Sure, maybe that is true. But it will never happen, because you or anyone who thinks like you will never have that kind of power.
So apparently the dude you linked to before is all about this topic that keeps coming up over and over again, which was popularized by that dude?
How many people care about this as if it’s a real thing? Are you telling me this is where Philosophy has been going recently? For reals?