Good morning and thank you for taking time for this discussion.
At this point, I’ve addressed each of your arguments and they are interesting, but I find them certainly not sufficient to require all believers in Christ to not use artificial birth control.
I did say early on that any conception control that results in abortion is morally wrong, under the command not to murder.
That all said, I think we’ve reached a point after 8 requests for specific Scriptural support for your position, that as I knew when we started, it doesn’t exist.
Nor were you able to post any definitive Scripture-derived principles to make a definitive argument that applies to all Christians and Jews.
As such, I continue to support your right to use or not use birth control as you judge morally correct, based on your understanding of all the factors in your life.
I must now go bring my wife and 19 children (who are quite a blessing!) out for lunch. I’ve got the bus warming up right now. We have one unfilled seat and are just waiting to see if we get the full blessing! If twins, I’m gonna need a bigger bus.
Just kidding.
I have two bio kids and one adopted kid - all adults now and producing a new crop of humanity.
Best.
Bottom line, you fault me because there is --- you claim ---no explicit chapter-and-verse I can cite, which says "Thou shalt not contracept."
Yet Christian teachers for well over a millennium reasoned that the Onan chapter was, like the rest of Scripture, "inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness", and taught exactly that moral principle: don't engage in sex while trying to turn off its procreative power.
You can't really maintain that one Biblical condemnation equals zero Biblical condemnations. Note that the modern Anglican U-turn (the first historic instance of a denomination supporting contraception) was a non-Biblically sourced surrender to the secular culture's position. Why would anybody think that would be authoritative, or even persuasive?
Look, it's the Christian wisdom of the ages vs some Johnny-come-lately 20th century revisionism. Were the pro-contraception Anglicans in 1930, openly departing from the uninterrupted Christian tradition, more sound than everyone that came before? Really? They had the word from the Holy Spirit, and up to 1930 everybody else was wrong?
What are the odds?
Plus, it is a mistake to think that every situation subject to moral discernment is found explicitly in the Scriptural text. Once a moral principle has been established in the Bible, every possible application of it need not be mentioned. For example, the general principle that theft is wrong was clearly established in Scripture; but there’s no need to provide, chapter-and-verse, an exhaustive list of every kind of theft.
On these issues you have no refutation. And as for the analogy I brought up about medical ethics (e.g. deliberately impairing normal physiological function is unethical), you have had nothing to say.