steve-in-kville wrote: ↑Wed Apr 13, 2022 8:49 am
My wife grew up with the understanding that birth control was wrong, however there was leniency for using the rhythm method. Not sure why one was okay and the other was not.... never heard much over the pulpit.
Not to steal anyone's thunder but what stand would we take on women having tubes tied or men getting "snipped"?
I don't have an ethical issue with either, because they do not terminate a human life. However, it is a momentous decision and other factors enter in, such as what the reasons are for wanting to prevent pregnancy. Many years ago I remember my dad helping a family financially who wanted to reverse such a surgery so they could have more children.
This enters into the topic of why people are so determined to prevent having children. It is a topic that is not often addressed, and I think it matters for Christians. We live in the most prosperous society in history with better healthcare and more conveniences and luxuries than anyone else in history, broadly speaking, yet as a society we are having fewer and fewer children. Christians included. Yes, there are always the individual health stories and financial stories, but I am not talking about individual families so much as society broadly. It is a question that I have found interesting for many years.
I find the practice of birth control for the first 2-5 years of a married couple’s life particularly abhorrent. There is no ethical or practical reason to do this. If God intended for marriage to work this way, he would have made it work this way.
People are also very determined to have children - when they want to. They will spend $100,000s on IUI, IVF, surrogates, fertility treatment, and (eventually) attempting to adopt a newborn. It betrays a lack of trust in the sovereignty of God. Mankind now thinks that he opens and closes the womb, despite the Old Testament being rather clear it is a divine decision.
Marriages are weaker than they ever were before; mental health amongst women has also not improved amongst women compared to 100 years ago. God has a plan for people who don’t want to have children: “To the unmarried I say, it is better to remain even as I.” Modern man lacks the sacredness of the celibate vocation even as he profanes the married vocation and turns it in something akin to harlotry and sodomy.
steve-in-kville wrote: ↑Wed Apr 13, 2022 8:49 am
My wife grew up with the understanding that birth control was wrong, however there was leniency for using the rhythm method. Not sure why one was okay and the other was not.... never heard much over the pulpit.
Not to steal anyone's thunder but what stand would we take on women having tubes tied or men getting "snipped"?
I don't have an ethical issue with either, because they do not terminate a human life. However, it is a momentous decision and other factors enter in, such as what the reasons are for wanting to prevent pregnancy. Many years ago I remember my dad helping a family financially who wanted to reverse such a surgery so they could have more children.
This enters into the topic of why people are so determined to prevent having children. It is a topic that is not often addressed, and I think it matters for Christians. We live in the most prosperous society in history with better healthcare and more conveniences and luxuries than anyone else in history, broadly speaking, yet as a society we are having fewer and fewer children. Christians included. Yes, there are always the individual health stories and financial stories, but I am not talking about individual families so much as society broadly. It is a question that I have found interesting for many years.
I find the practice of birth control for the first 2-5 years of a married couple’s life particularly abhorrent. There is no ethical or practical reason to do this. If God intended for marriage to work this way, he would have made it work this way.
People are also very determined to have children - when they want to. They will spend $100,000s on IUI, IVF, surrogates, fertility treatment, and (eventually) attempting to adopt a newborn. It betrays a lack of trust in the sovereignty of God. Mankind now thinks that he opens and closes the womb, despite the Old Testament being rather clear it is a divine decision.
Marriages are weaker than they ever were before; mental health amongst women has also not improved amongst women compared to 100 years ago. God has a plan for people who don’t want to have children: “To the unmarried I say, it is better to remain even as I.” Modern man lacks the sacredness of the celibate vocation even as he profanes the married vocation and turns it in something akin to harlotry and sodomy.
The non-binary child is taking testosterone pills to grow a beard, and his mother, who can’t believe it, is taking estrogen pills to avoid pregnancy, and if they are not talking to each other, they might ask Francis Bacon or John Locke to serve as a go-between—for both mother and child are liberals, at war with the body as a surprising, unanticipatable given that must be coerced, through technology, into conformity with the rational, self-interested plan of the sovereign self, always floating above and beyond whatever meanings might be apparent in the flesh.
Josh wrote: ↑Wed Apr 13, 2022 11:02 am
I find the practice of birth control for the first 2-5 years of a married couple’s life particularly abhorrent. There is no ethical or practical reason to do this. If God intended for marriage to work this way, he would have made it work this way.
I've heard it said that if married couple waits to start a family until "they can afford it"... they never will
mike wrote: ↑Wed Apr 13, 2022 9:22 am
I don't have an ethical issue with either, because they do not terminate a human life. However, it is a momentous decision and other factors enter in, such as what the reasons are for wanting to prevent pregnancy. Many years ago I remember my dad helping a family financially who wanted to reverse such a surgery so they could have more children.
This enters into the topic of why people are so determined to prevent having children. It is a topic that is not often addressed, and I think it matters for Christians. We live in the most prosperous society in history with better healthcare and more conveniences and luxuries than anyone else in history, broadly speaking, yet as a society we are having fewer and fewer children. Christians included. Yes, there are always the individual health stories and financial stories, but I am not talking about individual families so much as society broadly. It is a question that I have found interesting for many years.
If you ever run across someone needing that sort of thing again, I know a cheap place, about 3k in the states.
Its interesting to me that the poor often have more children then the rich and often a poor person doesn't make a choice of if they can afford another child or not, they simply have another child and figure it out. Too often the wealthy decide they can't afford it and that is interesting.
Precisely. G.K. Chesterton understood this back in the 1920s when birth control was a new thing.
G.K. Chesterton wrote:The Birth-Controller does not bother about all these things, for the perfectly simple reason that it is not such people that he wants to control. What he wants to control is the populace, and he practically says so. He always insists that a workman has no right to have so many children, or that a slum is perilous because it is producing so many children. The question he dreads is "Why has not the workman a better wage? Why has not the slum family a better house?" His way of escaping from it is to suggest, not a larger house but a smaller family. The landlord or the employer says in his hearty and handsome fashion: "You really cannot expect me to deprive myself of my money. But I will make a sacrifice, I will deprive myself of your children."
steve-in-kville wrote: ↑Wed Apr 13, 2022 8:49 am
My wife grew up with the understanding that birth control was wrong, however there was leniency for using the rhythm method. Not sure why one was okay and the other was not.... never heard much over the pulpit.
Not to steal anyone's thunder but what stand would we take on women having tubes tied or men getting "snipped"?
This is a controversial issue. There is a big difference between contraception that disallows a newly formed fetus from attaching to the uterine wall, such as an IUD or the birth control pill. Two methods I definitely would be opposed to. Barrier methods such as condoms and diaphragms prevent the egg from being fertilized in the first place. And the rhythm method would do the same.
In the past there were situations when no birth control was used, the mothers would be having babies 12 to 18 months apart year after year and were overwhelmed, some having "nervous breakdowns". Is it wrong for a couple to space their children so the mother's body can recuperate and she can enjoy her little ones in their baby years? They can still have a large family even if spacing the children. And is it wrong for a couple who has a large family and the woman is in her late forties, for using some kind of barrier method of birth control.
Women still have as many “nervous breakdowns” today; mental health has not improved in the last 100 years.
If God intended for people to have sex without the possibility of children, he would have designed our bodies that way. He didn’t. The modern culture is full of lies such as that sex is something you should do for your own pleasure. It isn’t.
I think this should say "for your own pleasure alone." Because sex is clearly something intended for the purpose of pleasure in addition to obvious purpose of procreating.
mike wrote: ↑Wed Apr 13, 2022 12:00 pm
I think this should say "for your own pleasure alone." Because sex is clearly something intended for the purpose of pleasure in addition to obvious purpose of procreating.
mike wrote: ↑Wed Apr 13, 2022 12:00 pmI think this should say "for your own pleasure alone." Because sex is clearly something intended for the purpose of pleasure in addition to obvious purpose of procreating.
The telos of sexual activity is not self-gratification of the individual.
mike wrote: ↑Wed Apr 13, 2022 12:00 pmI think this should say "for your own pleasure alone." Because sex is clearly something intended for the purpose of pleasure in addition to obvious purpose of procreating.
The telos of sexual activity is not self-gratification of the individual.
Of course it isn't. But a God-created activity may have more than one purpose. It may have one chief purpose (telos) and many other lesser purposes. The telos of sex may be procreation, but God also intended it to be a pleasurable activity that enriches marriage.
mike wrote: ↑Wed Apr 13, 2022 12:00 pmI think this should say "for your own pleasure alone." Because sex is clearly something intended for the purpose of pleasure in addition to obvious purpose of procreating.
The telos of sexual activity is not self-gratification of the individual.
Of course it isn't. But a God-created activity may have more than one purpose. It may have one chief purpose (telos) and many other lesser purposes. The telos of sex may be procreation, but God also intended it to be a pleasurable activity that enriches marriage.
I would agree with that. I see an issue when some secondary side effect becomes secular society's telos, which ultimately leads to poor marriages and poor health.
The telos of sexual activity is not self-gratification of the individual.
Of course it isn't. But a God-created activity may have more than one purpose. It may have one chief purpose (telos) and many other lesser purposes. The telos of sex may be procreation, but God also intended it to be a pleasurable activity that enriches marriage.
I would agree with that. I see an issue when some secondary side effect becomes secular society's telos, which ultimately leads to poor marriages and poor health.
I agree. We probably do the same thing with food and other things.
