Children and the future

I do appreciate and largely agree with the connection between the sterility of the spirit and the barrenness of the body presented here, but there is something disturbing from the Bible that comes to mind about marriage and family life. For doesn't Paul himself say that it is better not to get married, because this world was passing away and the Kingdom of God was drawing near? "the appointed time has grown short; form now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none" (1 Cor. 7:29). I realize that this passage could be read as associating chastity with the highest spiritual condition, but might this passage show that the Christian religion is not as friendly towards or compatible with family life as most of us - and I include myself - would like to believe?
I do think that having children does strengthen one's ethical sense, and I say this as a parent myself. Children tie us to the future, and also to each other, in that as a parent one comes to regard others as children who are loved, or ought to be loved, by their parents. And yet, the priorities of the New Testament seem to point in a different direction - aren't the positive examples of family life in it few and far between?

I got a real chill after the movie Children of Men came out. I was reading bulletin boards (can't remember which), in which viewers were saying, "What's the problem? Why is everyone in the movie so upset that they can't have children?" I really don't think that many younger people today would care if they never could reproduce. Their attitudes would change, of course, as they aged - and saw how everything around them was falling to pieces. But it would take a long time. That's one point in the book that the movie totally reverses. England in the book *wasn't* a breeding ground of chaos. England had installed a Lord Protector (a somewhat Cromwellian figure) *precisely* to avoid the urban breakdown shown in the film. That's how the LP kept his power - he promised people that he would do whatever he could to keep the infrastructure functioning, as long as he could. Everyone knew they were doomed - they wanted to die in relative comfort. That's why the English were willing to give up their freedoms - because they hoped to die with the lights on, rather than in caves in the dark. It came down to that. Other countries were far below England in terms of social chaos and infrastructure collapse. That's why, in the book, the English were able to import indentured servants from other countries to take care of the old and sick (at least for awhile.) When those servants got old and sick themselves they were summarily deported (obviously to die.) It was a no-win game - but the point was that the English were going to die in comfort, so they thought. Another point about James's book - it was an allegory. There is no way that with her scenario the human population could have been restored easily. It takes about 30,000 individuals to have a genetically diverse enough population - and it's not clear that 30,000 or so babies were being born at the same time as Julian's, or that they could even find each other across the whole planet (especially with collapsed infrastructure.)

Yes, and thank you, Another Believer, for being so brave.