Posted on 06/09/2010 6:00:15 AM PDT by NYer
We can choose to go along with God’s will or refuse to do do. We can choose to honor what God would have us honor, or choose to dishonor what He would have us honor.
Plenty of room for free will.
We don’t get to decide what’s true or not. We can choose whether to be in illusion and imagine we can decide what’s true. That is the downward path of darkness, and we can choose to follow it. Of course, we delude ourselves thinking it’s the right path. But we once we choose to invent our own truth, our consciousness is tainted by self-will, and black appears white, and white appears black.
The ultimate purpose of free will is so we can choose to love God. Love is not love if it is not freely chosen, it is slavery. God is not a slavemaster, He enjoys our love when offered with a free heart, and reciprocates a millionfold.
Actutally I am good at giving directions but I’ve noticed that many people are not, and most women are not.
Perhaps, but it's harder to mistakenly interpret "multiply."
My question was about your statement:
"One can only assume that if God has given us these tools [IVF, BC, etc], then we should use them as long as they are used within the context of God's divine purpose of a husband and wife."My question was: And what is that? [God's divine purpose for man and wife.]
So that I'm clear is "be fruitful and multiply" your answer to what is God's divine purpose for husband and wife?
Even if one completely ignores all other considerations, hormonal contraceptives - not just oral, but injections and implants - are phyically damaging to women.
I draw pretty good maps, but I can get muddled when giving directions, especially in Spanish. Mapquest is a real gift!
So how do you feel about people having children that they cannot afford to financially care for?
“People” have friends, family, church congregations, and so on to help them when they need it. A gentleman I knew only slightly once put a check for $500 in my pocket at Mass. And we have paid the rent for a family whose father was out of work.
As a separate issue, “can’t afford” is a very flexible concept. People have the strangest ideas of what they and their children “need.” Practically every family today has more space and more amenities than my parents did when I was a girl, and unimaginable luxury compared to what my grandparents considered adequate.
So you believe that it is a good idea to have more children than you can afford so long as someone else steps up to do it for you?
What if that someone else isn’t there? What then?
This has to have been referenced already: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkIOG1Y9GVg
No, I believe that “can’t afford” is often a temporary situation, or something that the parents can change by adjusting their lifestyle, and so it’s not something that everyone should have a cow over all the time.
In a functioning community, people help each other when they have needs. This generally means that at one point, Family A might need help, while at another time, it’s Family B. Or several people have needs, but they are different needs.
“No, I believe that “can’t afford” is often a temporary situation, or something that the parents can change by adjusting their lifestyle, and so it’s not something that everyone should have a cow over all the time.”
My brother and his “wife” have 5 children. They are living off of one minimum wage job and 400 per month in food stamps and whatever they can beg from our parents.
“In a functioning community,”
How many of those do you know of?
“This generally means that at one point, Family A might need help, while at another time, it’s Family B. Or several people have needs, but they are different needs.”
Isn’t this how welfare got started?
I’m not responsible for the nation’s welfare system. I vote against it when I have the opportunity.
Let’s go back to principles. Where in Christianity (or some other belief system, if you subscribe to such) do you find the idea that every family must guarantee that it will be a self-sufficient economic unit, in perpetuity, before the family can have a child?
Conception can be often avoided if necessary with care and knowledge by natural methods - meaning, avoiding sex when the woman is fertile.
That said, sometimes conception takes place.
People who want to please God would then accept the new life as a gift. I suppose adoption would be an option but it’s hard to imagine a husband and wife giving up a baby for adoption because “they couldn’t afford” to raise the chil.
Many people raise children with very little money - what some wealthier people would think was not near enough - and have happy families.
Cannot afford to care for is very relative.
Children need loving parents much, much more than they need the fanciest toys and gizmos or stylish clothes.
Christian community, you help each other, in addition there's family and charity.
Government Welfare is no comparison, it's the anti-charity.
“Where in Christianity (or some other belief system, if you subscribe to such) do you find the idea that every family must guarantee that it will be a self-sufficient economic unit, in perpetuity, before the family can have a child?”
Can’t remember anyplce in the Bible......is common sense a gift of God like free will?
“I suppose adoption would be an option but it’s hard to imagine a husband and wife giving up a baby for adoption because “they couldn’t afford” to raise the chil.”
It happens a lot, all over the world in fact.
My common sense says that it’s pretty much impossible, in this unpredictable universe, for anyone to know what’s going to happen to him tomorrow, let alone make guarantees for an entire human life of perfect self-sufficiency.
Nor do I think it should even be a goal. From the beginning of our existence, as a single cell, we need another to survive, and we need others to thrive. Every day of life depends on the sufferance of others: someone could have run the stoplight and killed me this morning, someone may decide to shoot me this afternoon.
Imagining that we run things is idolatry.
Luther was a great teacher but not an infallible authority.
FR thread: Protestants and Birth Control.
You can follow that link to find the usual excerpts from Luther, Calvin, Wesley, etc., who interpreted the Onan incident as showing God's detestation of what he did: having intercourse while deliberately frustrating the fertility thereof. This, they say, God found morally offensive precisely on those grounds. As well, these eminent men of the Reformation cited this lesson as being applicable to their own Christian contemporaries, to whom the levirate obligation would be inapplicable.
So my first questions are: why do you think these reformers thought that the Onan incident was a moral lesson for the present (their own Christian communities)? Was it because they believed that Christians also have a levirate obligation? If not, then was it because they found the choice of sabotaging the natural fertility of intercourse morally objectionable?
It is only recently (since, say, the 19th century) that anyone started making the novel argument that Onan's sin was simply, and only that he refused his obligation in the custom of the time, which was to provide his brother's widow with a child. Why does this argument seem, even at first glance, insupportable? Because the biblical penalty for not giving your brother’s widow children was public humiliation, not death (Deuteronomy 25:7–10). Not only that, but Onan's father, Judah, also refused to impregnate the widow Tamar (he refused to have intercourse with her) --- but he was not struck dead by God.
This shows that Onan's sin was more than merely not fulfilling the duty of a male next-of-kin; his sin was the sacrilege of "going through the motions" of real intercourse, while deliberately perverting it so it would be infertile.
This is the conclusion that was reached by the Jewish Talmud, by early Christian leaders such as St. Jerome and St. Clement of Alexandria, and by all of the Protestant Reformers (Luther, Calvin, etc.) In fact, it's what all Christians agreed for almost 2,000 years, before the pro-contraceptive Anglican Lambeth Conference of 1930, which broke with all previous Christians in calling evil, good.
I can't find any writer of the Lutheran, Calvinist, Reformed, Puritan, Baptist, Anabaptist, or any other Christian before 1900 who wrote that deliberately nullifying the natural fertility of intercourse was a morally upright thing to do.
So my next question is: can you?
I did not intend to imply that he was any authority, but merely one among myriads who believed Christianity and contraception were incompatible.
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