“If you expect people to remain “candid” with you, you will have to take them at their word when reasons are shared.”
Motivations or not, facts are still facts. You disagree with what the Catholic church teaches on contraception. You also left the church. If you flipped a coin, and kept getting heads, you would think that this warranted more investigation.
This is what I’m seeing. If I were to ask Ex-Catholics, I would be very, very surprised to see any of them saying that they believed that the Church was right on conception. Why? I don’t know. I have my suspicions.
It’s not something you can draw out one piece at a time. There’s some fundamental difference here that’s associated with the other fundamental differences.
“What did you think when you read the previous survey results posted by Daniel1212 about the percentage of Catholics that disagree about contraception YET stay in the church?”
You familiar with evaporation? Same principle. The ones who stay are the ones who don’t have the same energy as the ones who leave. But it’s the same underlying problem with both of them. That’s what I want to get at, because once that is understood, then you tackle both problems at once.
It doesn’t have so much to do with contraception per se, but it has to do with the understanding of the body.
BenK, I understand what it is that you are attempting to convey re: the issue of contraception.
It would take a whole thread and a lot of words to give this subject its proper due and respect.
There is nothing “ridiculous” or “strange” or “perverted” about the Church’s teaching on this.
I was a certified Natural Family Planning instructor for 12 years. I helped over 150 couples to understand their “combined fertility”, enabling them to use their marital love as designed by God-—not altering their natural, God-created bodies. Many couples came to me because they wanted children—not because they did not want them-—and everyone who came for instruction wanted to know as much as they could about their gift of human fertililty.
I was invited to give a presentation of NFP to the (Protestant) Bible College in my area. The dean had to give his permission for me to come, because I was Catholic and I was instructed not to make any reference to my Faith.
So I didn’t. I gave my presentation using a strictly
Scriptural basis and Scriptural passages to indicate the value of fertility awareness and the Theology of the Body.
My presentation was entitled “The Covenant of Marriage” and—praise God— was very well received by the college students. Some of them wrote me letters of thanks, and asked me to train them in NFP and I also received a very gracious letter of thanks from the professor who first invited me to come. He told me that there had been a very positive response to my coming there.
I will add, that there is no way that NFP can be legitimately called just another form of contraception.
But again, as I have already said, it would take a thread of its own to do it justice.