What’s Wrong with the World

Quick question: Whom has Larry Auster NOT attacked? I think Auster does some great writing -- but the guy does have a knack for attacking and alienating people. I think Richard Spencer summed it up best when he said that Auster will take a small point of disagreement and turn it into an existential crisis.

Regarding the interview below, one can get a great sense of European conversions by reading Bede or Gregory of Tours. It seems that many of these European kings were first introduced to Christianity through their wives or mothers. Even though they convert to Christianity, Bede still traces their pagan genealogy, sometimes all the way back to Odin -- highlighting the ancestor worship aspect of paganism and how it's still important in this early syncretism. Although Christian, many of these kings maintain their pagan warrior ethos -- which makes Medieval Christianity more warrior-like and less meek.

As a side note, in previous posts when I've criticized contemporary trends in Christianity (its anti-Western tendencies in the West and its leftward drift in support of universal human rights, etc.), I never meant to imply that ALL Christians today are anti-Western. There are small islands of pro-Western Christianity -- such as here at WWwtW, or Chronicles Magazine, or among some of the Eurocentric SSPX members or Calvinistic Lutherans I've met. My wish is that more of the Christian leadership in the U.S. were like this (actually pro-Western) -- and not not like Cardinal Roger Mahony, Archbiship Jose Gomez, Rev. Richard Land, Rev. Leith Anderson, et al.

Very interesting interview. I would recommend, as a complement to it, David Berlinski's _Devil's Delusion_, which I'm enjoying reading right now.

No doubt I would disagree strongly with both Stark and Berlinski on the merits of the actual evidence for Christianity. (But I think it's interesting to note that Stark's general approach as indicated here, whereby he takes at least the general outline of the New Testament documents in some sense at face value, would definitely seem to mitigate against any silly notion--for which even Bart Ehrman has tart words--that Jesus never existed, though Stark doesn't mention that particular claim.)

Berlinski tends towards a rather _general_ skepticism.

But I think both the interview and the book are to some degree healthy antidotes to the virulent anti-Christian opinion that is becoming more and more respectable today in intellectual circles and that often clothes itself in the guise of Science.

My main corrective would be to point out that not all Christians regard faith as anything other than complementary to reason.

Mr. Salyer would have come closer to the truth if he had written that I regard Christianity as the best thing that ever happened to Western civilization.

Just a quibble: Christianity didn't happen to Western civilization; Christianity created Western civilization. The before and after are different in kind rather than degree.

Good interview, though. That was precisely my own attitude a couple of years before my conversion. :-)

Interview with Rodney Stark three years later in which he says that he is by that time a Christian, though apparently does not identify himself with any particular denomination:

http://www.cesnur.org/2007/mi_stark.htm

Jeff C.,

Just a quibble back at you: What do you consider Greek/Roman/Jewish civilization before Christ? I always thought of it all as part of our great Western heritage.

Lydia, I was particularly struck by this passage:

"Abortion was a huge killer of women in this period, but Christian women were spared that. And infanticide — pagans killed little girls left and right. We’ve unearthed sewers clogged with the bones of newborn girls. But Christians prohibited this. Consequently, the sex ratio changed and Christians didn’t have the enormous shortage of women that plagued the rest of the empire."

Facts like these foreclose any temptation I might otherwise have felt to identify, whole-hog, with the values of pre-Christian antiquity.

Quite right, Steve. And something like it goes on today. Little girls in India are (not all that infrequently) taken home from the hospital and fed the juice of the tobacco plant until they die. Paganism. Hoo-rah./sarc

Jeff C.: "Christianity created Western civilization"

A quibble: You don't consider the pre-Christian Greeks, Romans, Celts or Germans to be a part of Western Civilization? You cast our pagan forbearers into darker recesses of Hell than did Dante? It's wishful thinking and ideological. It's like denying a dog is a dog because you glued some feathers on it.

Lydia: Obviously infanticide is horrible anytime it happens - pagan Europe, Medieval Europe, etc.. It often seemed to be the result of limited resources. The family often already had children and didn't want to take resources away from raising these children (undermining their chances for survival) by diverting resources to another child (who might have had unfortunate physical conditions or been an unwanted gender, etc.). It would have been a very tough decision, I'm sure. Still, the pagans loved their children, even their female ones. Read Cicero's letters about the loss of his daughter and I doubt you will be unmoved.

Infanticide aside, in some respects the pagans were more "pro-children" than were the early Christians. Ancient paganism was largely ancestral and often involved ancestor worship. It was not a creedal religion; it was passed on by blood and progeny. Thus, having children was vital for the continuation of the family cult. Marriage for them was concrete and entailed procreation. The Latin verb for "to marry" (maritare) also means "to impregnate." Contrast this to some of the accounts of early Christian marriage - which was more ideological. I remember reading accounts of early Christian marriages that were so ascetic that the husband and wife wouldn't even copulate because they thought it unholy. This, of course, seemed entirely bizarre to the pagans who thought children the natural and desired consequence of marriage. Fortunately, for the European Christians, Roman pagan marriage customs eclipsed the more austere early Christian view of marriage.

"What do you consider Greek/Roman/Jewish civilization before Christ?"

I consider it vastly overrated. Roman government, Greek culture, and Jewish religion met in one place: the crucifixion of the one perfect Man. Even an allegedly enlightened ruler like Marcus Aurelius was still a killer of Christians. It doesn't seem to me that either Christ Himself or his apostles were overly impressed by classical culture. Nor am I.

It would have been a very tough decision, I'm sure.

That leaves me...speechless. Well, okay, not exactly. But I'm trying to resist blasphemy.

Lydia, by no means was I trying to justify infanticide. And my comment wasn't even so much directed at you -- I know you were being sarcastic -- as it was toward what I believe to be a common misconception that, since infanticide, often in the form of exposure, occurred in the ancient world, the ancients somehow loved their children less. My intuition is that it was rare and only the most dire necessity called for it. In most times or places, I imagine that parents love their children and want to see their success. I suspect that humans have evolved so that they're somewhat "hardwired" not to want to harm their own children.

Here's Thomas Fleming in a recent discussion on exposure:

"General tendencies and universal laws admit of exceptions and violations, and, as regards children, nature in the raw does not present an entirely encouraging spectacle.  Chimpanzees from one band will kidnap and eat the offspring of another, and among human beings the exposure or killing of sickly, deformed, or surplus infants is far from unknown.  The tales of exposure found in Greek literature have been, to some extent, confirmed by historical research, although it is difficult to draw general conclusions.  But surveying from a distant perspective the vast experiences of primates, including man, two broad generalizations can be made. 

First, most primate and human parents attempt to raise all their children, sacrificing even their own self-interest to that of their offspring; second, under some circumstances, some parents will neglect, abuse, abandon, or kill their children.  In many cases, either the parents or the social group is morally sick.  Colin Turnbull’s portrayal of the IK, an African people so impoverished that they routinely refuse to take care of their children, is the classic case in the anthropological literature, and one can parallel his account with examples drawn from wealthy as well as slum neighborhoods, private schools and Indian reservations.  But setting aside pathological cases, there have been otherwise wholesome societies in which infanticide is regarded as a morally and socially acceptable practice.  Scarcity of resources is the principal pressure against rearing large numbers of children, especially in the case of a child who, because of deformity or sickliness, is unlikely to lead a productive life.

As the human species is made, men and, to a greater degree, women take satisfaction in the rearing of children.  For people who make their living by hunting or farming, additional children are not regarded so much as mouths to feed as hands to work.  Under normal conditions, then, it is not natural to dispose of a child, born or unborn.  In some economic circumstances, however, children can become burdens rather than assets.  In times of crop failure or in a modern city, parents cannot hope to realize a return on their investment.     In the absence of other pressures, the mere inefficiency of child-rearing would not constitute a sufficient incentive to infanticide, if only because parents very quickly become attached even to a deformed child.  If, however, there are means of depersonalizing the infant–if deformity, for example, renders him taboo–the parents will find it easier to harden their hearts."

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2010/06/14/conservative-credo-iv-the-abortion-debate/

"Ah but, someone will say, the ancients exposed unwanted children.  Some did.  We have little idea of numbers.  Some attempt has been made to indicate that skewed sex ratios, where we have such information, indicate high rates of female infanticide, but, as has been pointed out repeatedly, girls were undercounted even within upperclass families.  There were two kinds of exposures.  Non-viable or seriously deformed babies were left to die, as indeed many would die even with the best care.  From a pre-Christian perspective, a seriously deformed baby (I am not talking about club foot) if it survived would be a drain on family resources that would injure the other children.  The other case is that of a family under economic stress.  In this case, unless the whole community was undergoing a prolonged famine, the child was picked up almost immediately either by a childless family or someone who wanted to rear a slave.

Abortions were quite dangerous, and it was certainly safer to bear than abort.  Nonetheless, the ancients certainly knew how to procure abortions.  The Hippocratic Oath explicitly forbids the administration of the pessary, a sort of abortifacient pebble, though Hippocrates and some other physicians recommended exercises to induce miscarriage.  I don’t know whether such exercises actually worked, and scholars have puzzled over the apparent discrepancy.  One thing we might say is that an exercise is not the same as an insertion or a surgical intervention. Some ancient discussions of abortion techniques are aimed exclusively at cases where the mother’s life is threatened–far more common in the days before modern medicine–or the baby had actually died.

There is little or no evidence of abortion as something socially acceptable by normal people.  Juvenal, in a famous passage, talks about the degeneracy of Roman women in his day and accuses them of getting abortions.  Now, Juvenal as a satirist goes over the top on every subject, but his testimony is valuable, because he reveals clearly that normal people viewed abortions–but not exposure–as shameful.  Christian writers are not always to be relied upon as witnesses because they quite naturally liked to paint the pagans in the blackest colors.  Non-scholars will say that we just don’t know enough about the ancient world.  In fact, we know more than many think.  We have important witnesses in comedy to everyday attitudes; we have gossipy historians like Herodotus; and, best of all, we have the letters of Cicero on everything under the sun, the elder Pliny’s encyclopediac Natural History, and his nephew’s letters, and what we do not find is moral approbation of infanticide or abortion.

Certain classes of women would have had incentives, particularly prostitutes and concubines who would lose business or status by carrying a baby to term.  These women also had no husbands to complain, if they were robbed of offspring.  Abortions were not illegal because ancient law rarely intruded itself into private and domestic life; there was little regulation of marriage and divorce, except where property and citizenship were involved, and even the prosecution of homicide in classical Athens was treated as a kind of civil action that had to be brought by the murder victim’s next of kin.  Modern “scholars” who equate lack of legislation with moral indifference are either not doing their homework or lying.  A good case in point is a Roman law on abortion.  A couple could decide on an abortion without being subject to criminal charges, but a wife who had an abortion without her husband’s permission might be put to death.  We’ll come back to this point.

I am not going to produce  a survey of ancient or Medieval texts on infanticide and/or abortion, but I shall confine myself to one point.  Parents–mothers especially–are supposed to love their own children.  To kill what we are supposed to love is to overturn the moral order.  If we set aside the extreme cases–to save a mother’s life, to eliminate an unfit child that is a threat to the survival of his siblings–then we can join the ancients (apart from rich degenerates) in viewing child-rearing as a blessing and a duty and in ascribing at least as much authority over infanticide to the father as to the mother.  What we shall see that just as morality completes our nature, so Christianity completes our morality."

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2010/05/31/credo-for-conservatives-iv-abortion/

I've heard stories of how in some places like Africa women choose child to starve because they literally don't have enough food and one of their children HAS to starve. I don't know if a similar motive was behind the use of infanticide in the ancient world.

The Chinese (and apparently Indian-didn't know that) habit of killing girls is really sick. They're not doing it because one of the children would starve anyway, and besides, we should always protect our girls to the point of fighting to the death for them.

Of course, our women murder their unborn infants so they can retain the freedom and independence to do ......... whatever.

The West is an amalgamation of Classical Greco-Roman, Christian, and Northern Germanic-Celtic cultures. The Christians borrowed from the traditions of others and incorporated them into the Church. The very low-church types, puritans, etc. have always wanted to strip these elements, the leaven of Rome if you will, from the Church. Since most people here seem to be RC, EO, Anglican and Lutheran that thinking should't have much appeal here.

My intuition is that it was rare and only the most dire necessity called for it.

Mr. Roberts, your words here speak for themselves, as do your words of 11:31.

Rodney Stark is not convinced of what your "intuition" says--some "dire necessity" "calling for" sewers clogged with the bones of baby girls. Neither am I. He also does not see us as needing to "join" the pagan world in its valuation of children, particularly baby girls. Neither do I.

The Internet is large and life is short. I will simply repeat your words, with emphasis, from 11:31, and leave it at that.

Obviously infanticide is horrible anytime it happens - pagan Europe, Medieval Europe, etc.. It often seemed to be the result of limited resources. The family often already had children and didn't want to take resources away from raising these children (undermining their chances for survival) by diverting resources to another child (who might have had unfortunate physical conditions or been an unwanted gender, etc.). It would have been a very tough decision, I'm sure.

All right, at the risk of loss of dignity, I do have something to add: However odd one may think marriages with vows of no sex (and as a Protestant Christian I do think such marriages very odd) the attempt to compare such marriages to pagan infanticide in order to make the pagan world seem more "pro-child" than Christianity in some significant respect is nothing less than obscene and fills me with disgust. It brings to mind G. K. Chesterton's words, which I give here from memory, "Let us do with babies as we do with puppies. Let all the babies be born, and then let us drown the ones we do not want."

Lydia, in bringing up the concept of early Christian marriage my purpose was not to compare it with infanticide (I wrote "infanticide aside"), which would be perverse, but to show that paganism, unlike early Christianity, viewed children as the natural and desired result of marriage.

MA, saying that there were a few Christian marriage in which the spouses remained celibate "for the Kingdom" does not show that the religion didn't place a great value on children, nor does it show that the Christian religion did not view children as the natural and desired fruit of marriage. That just doesn't follow logically. It is perfectly possible to view something as a good and still to give it up for something that is either more urgently necessary or a more noble good.

If you were to provide solid evidence that the Christian religion promoted childlessnes among married couples, and indeed promoted so thoroughly as causing a reducing population of Christians, then your point would be made. But I think that the evidence is squarely against that: few marriages were in fact childless by choice, and the few people who went around promoting childless marriages as if it were the natural and normal form of Christian marriage were labeled heretics. So, NO, early Christianity did not view marriage the way you're saying.

Tony: I do not deny that most early Christian couples might have copulated and had children. Nature beckons. I wrote, "Contrast this to some of the accounts of early Christian marriage - which was more ideological. " It does not change the fact that at least _some_ Christian married couples were celibate and refused to copulate - not as a matter of circumstance (which will happen at any time or place) but as a matter of religious belief. Read the selections from Carolinne White's Early Christian Lives. To the pagans, this celibacy was very bizarre, as procreation was built into the pagan conception of marriage.

In view of Mr. Roberts's recent remarks extenuating infanticide among the ancients, it might be worth pausing for a moment to see what the common people said about it themselves. I therefore offer a letter from a laborer to his wife and family, Oxyrhynchus papyrus P. Oxy. 744, dating from about 1 B.C., which I will quote in full:

Hilarion to my dear wife Alis, many greetings, also to Berous my lady and Apollonarion. Know that even now we are still in Alexandria. Do not fret. If they go their way, I will remain in Alexandria.

I beg and call upon you: take care of the little child and the minute we receive our pay, I will send it up (river) to you.

If you give birth -- the best of everything to you! -- and it is a boy, let it alone; but if it is a girl, expose it.

You told Aphrodisias, "Don't forget me." How can I forget you? Please do not worry. Year 29 of Caesar, Payni 23.

The evidence of the Roman satirists regarding infanticide is often discounted because they may be presumed to emphasize the exceptional; and it is not the exceptional that gives character to an age, but what is assumed to be normal. That is precisely what Hilarion gives us here. His letter is sympathetic, masculine, direct, and affectionate. And he takes it for granted, and assumes that his wife and kin will take it for granted, that infanticide of a female infant is acceptable.

The bones of baby girls clogging the sewers do not lie. They bear mute testimony to a horrible truth about the pagan side of the Roman world into which Jesus was born.

Of course the Christians reproduced and do not die out -- in part because the Roman pagan view of marriage eventually tempered the more extreme view of marriage that one found among some of the early Christians.

Tim: Of course there are many accounts of exposure. It did happen. But what percentage of people was exposing its children? Parents, I think, are hardwired to love and nourish their children - a fact supported by evolutionary thought. It takes unusual circumstances to harden parents' hearts. Regarding daughters, both Caesar and Cicero cherished theirs. Cicero was distraught when his daughter died.

BTW, infanticide occurred in Medieval Europe all the way up to the 19th century. There are accounts of children being left in the streets, on church steps, in trash heaps, by rivers, etc.

From the Encylopedia of Death and Dying:

"During the Middle Ages, exposure was a prevalent practice due to overpopulation and the large numbers of illegitimate births. During the Renaissance in Italy, the abandonment rate was in excess of 50 percent of all babies.... In 1741 Thomas Coram, a retired sea captain, was so disturbed by the sight of infant corpses lying in the gutters and rotting on dung heaps that he opened Foundling Hospital in England to "suppress the inhuman custom of exposing new-born infants to perish in the streets" (Langer 1974, p. 358)."

I'm sure the above is probably an overstatement for Christian Europe, but infanticide was still taking place. It did not end with the conversion of Christianity.

Hilarion's letter does not imply unusual circumstances, and it shows no love whatsoever towards his hypothetical infant daughter, doomed when she is not yet even known to exist.

You're just digging yourself in deeper, Mr. Roberts. Seriously, you should stop now telling us about the agonizing decisions, driven by "unusual circumstances," the ancient pagans made to kill off their daughters (specifically), clog the sewers with their bones, and create gender imbalances in their society.

"Infanticide aside, in some respects the pagans were more 'pro-children' than were the early Christians."

I also hear that the crime rate in D.C. isn't too bad aside from the murders.

Imagine comparing two men as to their "pro-woman" attitude but asking that we do so "aside from" the fact that one beats his wife every night and the other does not.

By the way, it's a "tough decision" to put one's dog down. It's a heinous evil to murder one's infant daughter.

M.A.

Pagans in all ages have abandoned their unwanted infants, right through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Rousseau -- that stalwart defender of Christian orthodoxy -- boasted of having abandoned all five of his illegitimate children.

In The Kindness of Strangers, John Boswell estimates that urban Romans in the first three centuries A.D. abandoned between 20 and 40% of their infants by exposure, though he suggests that a fair proportion of them were probably rescued. By whom, I wonder? No doubt sometimes by slave traders. But I would be interested to know what percentage of those exposing their children were self-identified as serious Christians -- and what percentage the Christians formed of those who exhibited aliena misericordia.

Tim: But doesn't Boswell in his book say that infanticide was common in both pagan AND Christian Europe? From the cover: "In The Kindness of Strangers, John Boswell argues persuasively that child abandonment was a common and morally acceptable practice from antiquity until the Renaissance."

Lydia: I'm not disagreeing that infanticide took place in both pagan and Christian Europe. But don't you think that parents, especially mothers, are hardwired to care for their own legitimate children? Or do you think that people are naturally murders who care nothing for their own children?

For once, I must register some disagreement with Michael Baumann: I don't think that classical culture is overrated.

I'm teaching Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, Crito & Phaedo, just now, and finding myself in awe of these texts, in a way that I never used to be. In my younger days, I used to carp & snark about all the many errors of reasoning etc. But now I read them in historical context and find myself just staggered by the extent to which they lay the foundations for so much that is worth preserving.

Matthew knows a lot more than I do about pre-Christian history, so I wonder what he would say about this passage from Stark's interview:

"If you look at the Roman world, you have to question whether half the people had any humanity. Going to the arena to enjoy watching people tortured and killed doesn’t strike me as healthy. I’m a big football fan, and I see that, when some player gets hurt, they bring out an ambulance and the doctors take twenty minutes to get him off the field. They don’t want people hurt out there. But these people did. They’d shout, 'Shake him! Jump up and down on him!'"

Isn't it true that the Romans, from Aristocrat to canaille, took pleasure in cruelty in a way that we would find almost unimaginable, today?

Steve, it is true the ancients did seem to enjoy violence, e.g. the gladiator games in Rome. Human life was cheap. Slavery was widespread. The growth of the Roman empire seemed to exacerbate these tendencies. The gladiator games in the mid-Republic were nowhere near the magnitude that they reached in the empire. The conquest of new peoples increased the supply of slaves, who in turn displaced the poor Italic peoples (this problem starts in the Republic and continues into the Empire.) Under Christianity, the gladiator games and slavery eventually disappear. But gladiator games had their own pagan critics (Cicero) and slavery later reappears in the modern world under Christianity. Regarding torture and inflicting pain, Medieval Europe here might definitely take the cake.

In "A History of Torture in England," L.A. Parry wrote:

"...What strikes us most in considering the mediaeval tortures, is not so much their diabolical barbarity … as the extraordinary variety, and what may be termed the artistic skill, they displayed. They represent a condition of thought in which men had pondered long and carefully on all the forms of suffering, had compared and combined the different kinds of torture, till they had become the most consummate masters of their art, had expended on the subject all the resources of the utmost ingenuity, and had pursued it with the ardour of a passion."

Don't get me wrong. I'm not a blind defender of the ancient pagan world. The decadence of the Roman Empire, or instance, is not something that should be emulated.

Just a quibble: Christianity didn't happen to Western civilization; Christianity created Western civilization. The before and after are different in kind rather than degree.

Just a quibble back at you: What do you consider Greek/Roman/Jewish civilization before Christ? I always thought of it all as part of our great Western heritage.

The point as made by Hilaire Belloc and Christopher Dawson is that these disparate elements of history and tradition were united through Christianity and it was at that point that the West itself came into existence. It was the coming together of all these traditions within Christianity that created the West as we know it. To them, the Roman Catholic Church was the foundation, upon which the rest of European culture and civilization was then built.

"Contrast this to some of the accounts of early Christian marriage - which was more ideological. I remember reading accounts of early Christian marriages that were so ascetic that the husband and wife wouldn't even copulate because they thought it unholy. This, of course, seemed entirely bizarre to the pagans who thought children the natural and desired consequence of marriage. Fortunately, for the European Christians, Roman pagan marriage customs eclipsed the more austere early Christian view of marriage."

I'm a little confused by this as well, doesn't it say in Genesis "be fruitful and multiply" does that message appear to you to be Anti-Children. Pointing to a few people who misunderstood the basics of Christian thought and then using these people as the evidence to re-write the entire history of Christianity on your own terms, comes across as dishonest on your behalf.

"I'm sure the above is probably an overstatement for Christian Europe, but infanticide was still taking place. It did not end with the conversion of Christianity."

If there were a large numbers of illegitimate birth's taking place then the people weren't acting like Christians were they. The fact that many of there other actions were also Un-Christian as well isn't thus surprising. The point is not that these actions or behaviors no longer took place within Christian Europe, (its impossible to put an end to all amoral behavior) the point is that came to be looked down upon by the society at large due to Christianity. Christianity did prohibit these actions, where as paganism did not, the views on infanticide were remnants of the old paganism. Even if infanticide did take place it was in no way near the same percentages as before.

I haven't read Boswell's book, but his thesis seems to be: "child abandonment was a common and morally acceptable practice from antiquity until the Renaissance."

Phantom Blogger: Genesis might have stated to be fruitful, but the asceticism of the early Christians is well documented. What's unique about European Christianity is its syncretism with European paganism. Medieval European Christians adopted many fine things from paganism: marriage practices, law, philosophy, holidays, the warrior ethos, etc. Men like Charles Martel were products of both traditions. If only we had more Charles Martels and Archbishop Turpins today and fewer Roger Mahonys and Jose Gomezes.

What people might be expected to be hardwired to do and what they actually do often diverge. I should have thought that fathers would be hardwired to behave much differently from Hilarion. His letter chills the blood. And the widespread, differential killing of baby girls is _irrational_ from the perspective of social stability, so one might have thought that people would be hardwired not to do it. But there is no point in being a prioristic about things when we have data about what people actually do. And mothers do not always have the main say in what happens to their infants: Husbands and in-laws are sometimes very influential. (In-laws especially so in India.) The Christian can of course point out that the fall of man explains such surprising barbarisms as the pagan female infanticide Rodney Stark talks about.

Quite right, Steve. And something like it goes on today. Little girls in India are (not all that infrequently) taken home from the hospital and fed the juice of the tobacco plant until they die. Paganism. Hoo-rah./sarc

What, you mean real paganism is not a "girl-positive, Earth-mother religious system" where the sacred feminism is exalted?

Genesis might have stated to be fruitful, but the asceticism of the early Christians is well documented.

??? The asceticism of early Christians was: a) not total, b) in conformity with Jesus's admonition that not everyone is called to celibacy, c) being fruitful does not have anything exclusively to do with material riches or greed.

The Chicken