anything he wants to.
Why the Catholic Church is full of it about birth control.
(to paraphrase Genesis 38: 6-10):
Judah acquired a wife named Tamar for his oldest son Er, but God decided that
Er was evil and slew him. (The Bible never explains what made him so evil.) So
Judah tells his oldest living son, Onan, that it now falls on him to impregnate his
late brother's wife, which is apparently some sort of custom at the time. Onan
apparently has mixed feelings about this. He doesn't mind having sex with her,
but getting Tamar pregnant would just be too weird. So he retreats at the critical
moment, "spilling his seed on the ground." This angered God so he slew Onan
also. It didn't take much to set God off in those days.
Now, I'm no theologian and I'm certainly not an expert on Catholicism, but as I
understand it this brief story is the Scriptural basis they use to forbid good
Catholics from using any form of birth control. They assert that Onan was killed
because he wasted his seed, because the only acceptable sexual release is one
that could possibly result in procreation. And is between a married couple. And
only in the missionary position.
It doesn't take a Biblical scholar to study these passages and see that Onan
wasn't killed because of his primitive form of birth control (the pull-out method is
only about ten percent effective at best, by the way. Onan got lucky...well,
maybe lucky isn't the right word). He was killed for disobeying a direct order
from his father and, I guess, from God. They had a lot of crazy rules that could
get you stoned in those heady Old Testament days. And not in a good way.
But we don't continue to observe those rules today. We would consider them
barbaric by today's standards, such as the rule that required Onan to
impregnate his late brother's widow. But organized religions try to preserve the
pieces that suit their purposes, even though they have more to do with the
customs of ancient cultures than the will of God. In this case the purpose of the
Catholic Church is to ensure that good Catholics will make lots more good
Catholics.
The same story is also cited as the reason that masturbation is an affront to
God. In fact, in some circles self-love is still referred to as "the sin of Onan,"
which is kind of funny since Onan was never accused of polishing his own staff.
But, like birth control, it's a way that sperm is wasted that should be used to
make more people
So the sin of Onan and the Catholic ban on birth control is just one more
example of organized religion using the Word of God to help accomplish their
own earthly ends. Not that I have anything against organized religion, they do a
lot of good for a lot of people. I just don't like when they claim to have a
monopoly on God, which the Catholic Church does more than anybody.
Personally, I consider myself a Deist. I believe in God but see it as more of a
personal relationship than a club membership. In other words, I believe that I
have just as much access to God as the Pope. But I was raised a Lutheran and
even attended Lutheran schools until high school. That background makes me
feel compelled to point out the faults of the Catholic hierarchy, just as Martin
Luther did when he nailed the 95 Theses to the door of Castle Church.
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