Hard to believe that up until 1930 ALL Christian denominations banned birth control. Now, it is ONLY the Catholic Church. That should come as no surprise because our Lord promised that He would send the Holy Spirit to guide the Church and that the gates of Hell would not prevail against it. Thank you, Lord!
Wow, NYer, we Catholics are the real counterculture. We are the radical freethinkers. Most people in modern culture are quite willfully unable to think along the lines you posted. Thanks.
Just to stir up discussion about the sin of Onan:
Onan sinned against God, by refusing the commandment to raise up sons for a dead brother. He sinned against that dead brother Er by denying him posterity, and his father Judah in disobeying him, and against Tamar, Er’s widow, by using her body and refusing to give her children. So one might ascribe to him many sins other than coitus interruptus (or by extension any contraception.)
Er had sinned against God so badly that God killed him, but not so badly that he was to be “cut off” without descendents.
How much did Judah sin when he thought to withhold his surviving son Shelah, thinking that Tamar’s bed was dangerous? Did he sin in having intercourse with a harlot(as he thought Tamar was?) Did he sin in ordering Tamar and her unborn children to be burnt for harlotry?
Did Tamar sin in playing the harlot with Judah?
To me this chapter is so messy; there is so much wrongdoing; that I would hesitate to use it as a major foundation for any conclusions about sexual morality within marriage. You might read it and say, well sure there was a whole lot of sinning going on, but you can tell that the big no-no is coitus interruptus because God killed Onan. All I can say is that has never set right with my gut moral instinct.
Mrs VS
What about tubal & ectopic pregnancies? In those cases, the child cannot be saved, but surgery can save the mother. Note that in this rare case, the destruction of the unsaveable fetus is an unintended side effect of a livesaving operation, not a desired goal. (Intentional destruction of the fetus is always murder, of course -- this much I learned in Evangelicalism back in my Operation Rescue days.)
I'm not arguing with you, I'm just genuinely desiring to understand the Catholic position. I always thought that the unintended double effect was acceptable in such a sad (and RARE) case.
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One of the oppositions that to NFP that has been posed to me (by a Catholic) is that it by definition refuses the marriage debt at certain times. I’ve never considered it a problem because (at least as I understand it) the decision to abstain is supposed to be a mutual one.
That said, I can see where it could become a problem in mixed marriages, where one spouse sees nothing wrong with artificial birth control and especially so where ABC is not seen as unbiblical, while refusing the marriage debt is.
Any thoughts?
ping for later