Ping!
He's absolutely right about that. I feel it intensely when I'm expecting a baby myself ... that having a baby is an imposition on everyone else in the world, and they're all upset about it.
I think people would have a much different attitude towards children if common sense parenting and religious upbringing was the norm again. It’s hard to regard children as blessing when they are running in feral packs and shooting up each other and innocents that get in the way. It’s hard when you see the growing up without and self control and the parents do not discipline them at all but beg and trick and appease them into being maybe being tolerable for a few seconds until the ADD behavior kicks in and the next episode begins. It’s hard when they aren’t being instructed properly about God, and you know they aren’t because the parents aren’t acting like biblical parents and the kids are disrespectful to their parents and they are allowed to get away with it. When dad isn’t there. When dad and mom aren’t around.
I think if we were back to the way kids were raised, even just 60 years ago, we’d all be better off and we could see where people could begin to consider them as blessings. Many, many kids are out of control with no real correction by anyone. They are going to be tomorrow’s self-centered liberals, ie they will be everyone’s problems as they get older, and then hit legal adulthood.
So..... Hmmmmmm...
Where are all the Catolic families with12, 13, 14, 15, 16 kids, like my Amish neighbors?
Or the Gothard “quiver full movement”?
How is this teaching playing out in the lives of members?
I LOVE Psalm 128.....makes me tear up.
And a memo to my pastor: We're ready for that anti-contraception sermon now...
The word contraception, is a modern word. The biblical word, and the word used by Christian antiquity to describe what we moderns call contraception is Onanism. The word comes from this passage wherein Onan spills his seed on the ground and God kills him for it.,
Up until the mid 1800's the mistaken understanding of reproduction was that semen was literally a seed fully capable of generating life, and that the female was just the fertile ground. We know know that this is not true, and that neither, alone can generate life. Contraception no more destroys life than celibacy. All those sperm, and all those eggs are going to die anyway...
later in Genesis 38, Tamar prostitutes herself to Judah by the side of the road. That's some ethical foundation.
In the Bible, God put Adam and Eve in the garden with the one object in the universe which would bring their downfall, and the one entity determined to make it happen, KNOWING that they would eat from the tree. That's love? If I as a father left my newborn in a room with a killer, knowing the child would die, would I be called a good father?
In the Bible God destroyed everyone and every living thing except Noah and the contents of the ark in the flood because humanity would not obey him. That's love?That's the love of a father?
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