Commencement speaker at Catholic university: “Christianity is the most dangerous of devotions”

Here we go again:

The nation’s largest Catholic university will feature a commencement speaker who believes “the rest of life would benefit enormously” from the extinction of mankind, considers Christianity “the most dangerous of devotions,” and boasted about weakening the “dissolutive, oppressive institutions of organized religion.”

Population guru E.O. Wilson will address a combined ceremony of DePaul University‘s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and its College of Science and Health on June 10. The date is his 83rd birthday.

Although he is by training a myrmecologist who has discovered 450 different kinds of ants, the Harvard professor made his name as the father of sociobiology in the 1970s.

Along the way, he has expressed his enthusiasm for “population control,” internationalism, and displacing the “oppressive” force of religion.

While being interviewed for the 1999 Canadian radio series “From Naked Ape to Superspecies,” Wilson stated “if all humanity disappeared the rest of life would benefit enormously…the forests would grow back, the whole Earth would green up, the ocean would teem, and so on.” However, “If the ants were all to disappear, the results would be close to catastrophic.”

Population, he believes, has reached a catastrophic breaking point. In 2002, he told PBS’s Ben Wattenberg, “We all, or most all, realize that humanity has pushed its population growth pretty close to the limit. We really are at risk of using up natural resources and developing shortages in them that will be extremely difficult to overcome.” He added, “We have this bright prospect down the line that humanity is not going to keep on growing much more in population…and then begin to decline.”

In his 2003 book The Future of Life, he wrote, “The encouragement of population control by developing countries comes not a moment too soon.”

Wilson was optimistic that “we are draining away the instinctual energy from nationalism — that’s a big help.”

“I think we’re seeing the beginning of the draining away from the dreadfully dissolutive, oppressive institutions of organized religion,” he said.

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