Posted on 11/24/2019 2:51:38 PM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
I used to think like most evangelicals when it came to family planning. I strongly opposed abortion, but embraced contraception and thought Catholic objections to birth control were on par with praying to Mary.
Abortion, I reasoned, takes an innocent life and is clearly wrong. But contraception merely prevents conception. What could be wrong with that?
Sadly, I had never considered arguments on the other side. When I did, I found they arent flimsy or far-fetched. Theyre solid and Scriptural. And they arent just Catholic either.
Every Protestant Reformer opposed contraception. In fact, before 1930, every church Protestant and Catholic did as well.
Yet today, most evangelicals embrace contraception. In fact, were so enthusiastic about it, were promoting it worldwide.
The Christian aid group World Vision now works with the pro-abortion Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help women in poor countries time and space their pregnancies. So does Christian singer Amy Grant. Theres even a faith-based organization whose main purpose is to promote family planning. Not surprisingly, Bill & Melinda Gates are contributing to this group too.
Today, Western nations spend billions to control population in the developing world. Supporters say the impetus for this is concern for women and children. Critics say thats not so. The only reason the West wants to reduce population elsewhere is because it wants more resources for itself.
In any case, the issue of birth control isnt just personal; its global. The stakes dont just concern the size of ones family, but the fate of people worldwide and the witness of the Church.
Over the last 60 years, many evangelicals have promoted a view that earlier Christians would have thought immoral. We didnt do this because we studied Scripture and found prior interpretations lacking. Instead, we were swept along by culture.
(Excerpt) Read more at stream.org ...
Just because humans put a scale on bad/worse/worst, doesn’t mean God does.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
Isaiah 55:8-9 King James Version (KJV)
But we know that certain sins cry to Heaven for vengeance. (Why would that be if some sins werent more serious than others?)
“But we know that certain sins cry to Heaven for vengeance.”
No; we don’t “know”. It’s Catholic culture (made up stuff — “numbering” sins); not Scriptural.
Genesis 18: 20-21
Exodus 22: 22-23
James 5:4
Can a Protestant help me here and give me the Scriptural condemnation of birth control?
Im sure there was a reason that Protestants didnt practiceu birth control for over four centuries (and it wasnt just because they didnt get the word that the opposition to it was a Catholic thing).
Japan doesnt allow a lot of people into their country, and has been pointed out here, its going to haunt them.
Its only been since 1930 that protestants have accepted the sin of birth control as a virtue.
Spilling or wasting your seed into a condom is the sin of Onan, and God cursed him for it.
Spilling or wasting your seed into a condom is the sin of Onan, and God cursed him for it.
Thats correct; the Lambeth Conference opened the door.
I find it somewhat amusing as a Catholic that I know the practice is condemned in the Bible but that there are Protestants here who claim its not. (I imagine they would have us believe that they were all actually mistaken for four centuries when every Protestant denomination condemned the practice.)
The incident relating to Onan is covered in Genesis 38:8-10; he paid with his life for the offense.
The protestant view on moral matters is in constant decay. We visited Germany this summer and noticed that while the Catholic Church attendance there is very sparse, the protestant churches in Germany are like a fart in a Kansas wind storm. They are GONE, vaporware.
The Catholic Church in Germany will have to grow back from the roots, after being burned in the VCII wildfire. But at least it has roots.
But that also means that Protestants can no longer refer to Sacred Scripture to support their points, because Sacred Scripture is true. (They will all end up like the Protestants on this thread: they will not respond to the Truth we point out and will simply walk away.)
The problems with the Church in Germany (and throughout Europe) began long before Vatican II, even as Vatican II seems to be the preferred punching bag for all problems Catholic.
VC II was the culmination of decades of intellectual rot, springing from the errors of modernism, Kant, and Hegel.
VC II was a “sin against the Holy Spirit” insofar as evil men did evil things to the Church, then attributed it to the Holy Spirit. Maybe it does not fit the exact definition of a SAHS, but it certainly could be the fruit of men who had already committed the SAHS.
Jesus Christ forewarned us, telling us that we will know evil men and their actions by their fruits.
The damage was in the aftermath, when the progressives in the Church went about promoting abuses in the spirit of Vatican II.
But as you point out, there were decades of intellectual rot that led to that point. (Pointing to the Council as the cause of our current state is really a very simplistic way to avoid acknowledgement of the other problems that preceded it.)
What do you mean by “valid council”? Validly convened? There are some who dispute the prudence of calling a council, yet refusing to address the primary issues of the day, which would have been to condemn atheistic communism and modernism. On the contrary, the subject of communism was taken off the table from the get go. Pope John XXIII was either a tool/fool or he was in on the revolution which was driven by the free masons in the curia.
Or do you mean that the progressives wrote a bunch of documents and then forced the Holy Spirit to bless their work? That is, a cabal did evil to the Church and then said the Holy Spirit inspired it?
Lefevbre had significant problems with several of the documents, especially the one on religious indifferentism, Dignitatis Humanae.
It should be noted that VC II actually had a named spirit. That is, the “Spirit of Vatican II” is separate and distinct from the Holy Spirit. It is a fallen angel.
The AUTHORS or...
"Did GOD really say?"
Genesis 3
There are a LOT of people who think GOD really said things to Joseph Smith.
Without this Spiritual Mother; procreating up in heaven with the Spiritual Father; NONE of us would be here today.
--Mormon teaching
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavenly_Mother_(Mormonism)
While many of the others are starving for lack of food.
https://www.google.com/search?q=hunger+around+the+world&ie=&oe=
...what it means to claim that Christian marriage is Trinitarian (in that it mirrors the Trinity).
You forgot to say that this 'gift' is ONLY distributed by Rome!
"One indeed is the universal Church of the faithful, outside which no one at all is saved, in which the priest himself is the sacrifice, Jesus Christ, whose body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the species of bread and wine; the bread (changed) into His body by the divine power of transubstantiation, and the wine into the blood, so that to accomplish the mystery of unity we ourselves receive from His (nature) what He Himself received from ours."
--Pope Innocent III and Lateran Council IV (A.D. 1215)
Basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, the Council teaches that the Church, a pilgrim now on Earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and baptism and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through baptism as through a door. Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.
This affirmation is not aimed at those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ and his Church: Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the gospel of Christ or his Church but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their consciencethose too may achieve eternal salvation. "Although in ways known to himself God can lead those who, through no fault of their own, are ignorant of the gospel, to that faith without which it is impossible to please him, the Church still has the obligation and also the sacred right to evangelize all men" (CCC 846-848)
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