Antinatalism

Antinatalism, or anti-natalism, is a philosophical position that assigns a negative value to birth. The term is in opposition to the term natalism.

Władysław Tatarkiewicz writes about antinatalist views expressed by Sophocles (c. 496–406 BCE) and by some ancient Greeks before him:

"Not to exist", Mὴ φῦναι, is the best that can meet man. This conviction was given expression by Sophocles in his great lamentation about life, in the... chorus of Oedipus at Colonus: "Not to be born, O man, is the highest, the greatest word. But if you have seen the light of day, then consider it best to depart as quickly as possible to whence you came." It was not Sophocles, however, who invented the idea, "not to exist", and he was not the only one to voice it; the elegiac poets—such as Theognis—expatiated on it no less than the tragedians. Tradition placed the thought already in the mouth of Homer; in response to the question, What is best for man?, he is reputed to have said: "It is best not to be born or, failing that, it is best to pass as soon as possible through the gates of Hades."

In the Bible's book of Ecclesiastes, dating from c. 450-180 BCE, we find:

So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter.

Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive.

Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.

The Marcionites believed that the visible world is an evil creation of a crude, cruel, jealous, angry demiurge, Yahweh. According to this teaching, people should oppose him, abandon his world, not create people, and trust in the good God of mercy, foreign and distant.

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