Natural Selection As The Theology Of Scarcity, Or: Seasons Greetings!

"If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my race," returned the Ghost, "will find him here. What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.

"Man," said the Ghost, "if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be that, in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh, God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life amond his hungry brothers in the dust!"--A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

I've written about the theology of scarcity so much I'm just going to link to the general category.  But if you want to see it in a sentence, this will do:

its [a biological grouping's and an idea's] right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals

That's a quote, with slight emendations, from Thomas Huxley in the late 19th century, defending the idea of "natural selection."  An idea predicated on the Malthusian notion that there isn't nearly enough to go around, so some of us deserve all the fixin's, and others don't deserve what goes to the dogs.  Let me quote Malthus directly:

A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents, on whom he has a just demand, and if society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food and, in fact, has no business to be where he is.  At nature's mighty feast*  there is no vacant cover for him.  She tells him to be gone....(Essay on the Principle of Population, quoted in The Christmas Books by Charles Dickens, Vol. 1, ed. Michael Slater, Penguin, 1982, p. 257.)

It's an old, old story; which doesn't justify Malthus in the least: 

Instead, suddenly a woman whose daughter had an unclean spirit heard about him, and came and fell down at his feet.  The woman was a Greek, by race a Phoenician from Syria.  And the started asking him to drive the demon out of her daughter.  He responded to her like this: "Let the children be fed first, since it isn't good take bread out of children's mouths and throw it to the dogs!" 

But as a rejoinder she says to him, "Sir, even the dogs under the table get to eat scraps (dropped by) children!"

Then he said to her, "For that retort, be on your way, the demon has come out of your daughter." 

She  returned home and found the child lying on the bed and the demon gone.  Mark 7:25-30 (SV)

There are fine examples of people convincing God not to be as narrow minded and prone to draw boundaries as people are (like Genesis 18:20-33). The theology of scarcity, in other words, is not a cudgel to wield against others: it's a warning of how easy it is to substitute your preferences for what the world needs; your desires for what justice would actually be.

Dickens ends Scrooge's time with the Ghost of Christmas Present memorably, especially after the Christmas Day the Ghost travels through indicates plenty and contentment for almost everyone they pass or visit:

"Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask," said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit's robe, "but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?"

"It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it," was the Spirit's sorrowful reply. "Look here."

From the foldings of its robe it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

"Oh, Man! look here! Look, look, down here!" exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared outmenacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

"Spirit! are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more.

"They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!"

"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.

"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"

Dickens knew who he was talking to, even if Huxley's comment was 37 years in the future of Dickens Carol. Malthus, after all, published his essay in 1803. The Ghost might as well be talking to Huxley as talking to Scrooge.  He might as well be talking to us.  One thing Dickens emphasizes in his famous Carol is that we are all bound to each other.  Marley makes it a mortal obligation that curses those who don't fulfill it for all eternity.  Scrooge exemplifies the living curse of that refusal to be a part of the community of humanity:  he lives alone, a cramped, contentious, and unhappy person.  The real lesson Scrooge learns is to regain his humanity, and share that with humanity, in order to be human himself.  It's just shy of a real spiritual revelation, a real spiritual conversion; but it's a better vision of humanity and how we should then live, than Huxley or Darwin or Malthus ever proposed.

*irony fully intended