The History Channel showed this great program on Easter Island tonight. I was really fascinated and intrigued. Until they started talking about why the island was a desolate grassland when the Europeans found it.
Turns out Rapanui (Easter Island) was first colonized in the five hundreds. The island has several volcanoes and rich soil. The people that settled there were famous for the gigantic statues they made, called moai.
The moai made them rich, and their population centres got crowded. Agriculture depleted the rich soils so they cut down more trees to grow more food. After repeating this process on such a tiny forrest island, they cut down all the trees, and could grow no more food.
Civil war erupted. The island was destroyed in less than 1500 years.
So naturally I overthought it and got very frightened. We could easily do the same thing on a global scale. As animals, our population increases until it hits some limiting factor like the availibility of food. And for every one person in 1800 there are now like six and a half.

Last night there were some very good shows on the History Channel about The Da Vinci Code, the Knights Templar, Priori of Sion, and the Catholic / Christian faith. Most of the stuff was common sense. While under its aegis, Opus Dei operates independently from the rest of the Catholic Church, but they generally aren't involved in conspiracy theories and subversive plots, etc. But something really struck me.
The big deal in The Da Vinci Code, a work of fiction that takes place in the modern world, is the Search for the Holy Grail, Sangraal. By leaps and bounds that you can only take in the world of Faerie, San Graal becomes Sang Raal and the Holy Cup of Jesus becomes a Royal Lineage, the only real cup that can hold the Divine Blood. Reaction to the book was fever-pitch. The books heavy emphasis of the Divine Feminine really scared the patriarchal veins of Christendom, but a deeper chord got struck.
The book held that Jesus and Mary Magdalene (the infamous adulteress) got married and had a daughter, Sarah.
*cue the freaking out*
"Whoa, Jesus never got married! He didn't have children!"
All I wanna ask is, why is that such a big deal, whether he got married or not?
Jesus is fully human, right? If he had not married, surely the Gospel writers would have commented on that pretty huge part of his life. But they are mum, one way or the other, so how do we know?