Uhhh…the person I quoted did…
Do you think that all people who get evicted and forced on the dole are faithless cretins? no matter how faithful you are God doesn’t always provide. If you believe He does then you have to believe that everyone who lives in poverty are faithless animals deserving of their fate. You sound like a perfect candidate for the “health and wealth Gospel”.
Walk a mile in my shoes and you’ll think your situation ain’t so bad.
If it requires judging others level of faith, no thanks… I have my hands full worrying about my own walk.
Back to the topic…:ehh:
Maybe I contribute to the over-population of straw men by posting.
“Being on the dole” is being provided for. It may insult one’s pride, and of course, we should always be working as hard as we can to provide for ourselves, but as you know, pride is one of the seven deadly sins.
We differ on what our main goal is. I brought up how over-population concerns relate to abortion earlier because many on this board do share the view that abortion is immoral, yet they may fall for fears of overpopulation. I think it’s important that they understand how overpopulation concerns and contraception are often link with abortion. But my main goal is not to simply reduce the number of abortions–my main goal is living morally and getting to heaven.
So…you still didn’t explore that question. If you have such a grave reason to delay children, why in the world would you be using artificial contraception?
Furthermore, celibacy is a vow to refrain from sexual behavior including sexual intercourse. This is commonly a vow taken by religious people.
The link is through the mind of overly zealous people
this is simple incorrect
this is simple incorrect
People to not have to be immoral, whether they have 50 condoms or none. The fact is more babies are lost* when no method of birth control is used. That is simple math. No pregnancy requires the immoral action of killing. Anybody who deliberately misleads even when promoting NFP needs to re-read their catechism. The Church’s position is no outside interference in the process so the condom is banned.
But it’s precisely for that reason that your argument was a “straw man.” In other words, you were admitting that your fellow Catholics on this board who might be concerned about overpopulation agree with you that abortion is wrong–and I also agree with you on that. So you are holding out this bogeyman of “people who want to use abortion to reduce overpopulation” when in fact that isn’t a live option being debated. Nor is there any necessary link. Obviously if people think abortion is a legitimate option, then when contraception fails they may turn to abortion. But we are all agreed so far that abortion isn’t a legitimate option, so it becomes completely irrelevant for the points we do disagree on.
This raises several closely connected issues. One of them is whether as a matter of social policy it’s legitimate to take actions in order to save life that might have the unwanted side-effect of promoting sexual immorality. I had this argument some time ago with regard to AIDS in Africa. (I would say that yes, it is legitimate). Another is whether the effect you describe (if your statistics are accurate, a point on which I will reserve judgment until I see further evidence) could not be counteracted through clearer instruction regarding the failure rates of contraceptive practices (in fact, I hear that such instruction is taking place in contemporary sex-education programs, to the extent that liberals criticize many of these programs for greatly exaggerating the risk of failure). However, the most relevant point is that if we are talking about reducing pregnancies across the board (both to prevent birth-control-by-horrific-disaster and to prevent abortions), then you can’t just talk about out-of-wedlock pregnancies, obviously. It is possible that unmarried people do have more sex when birth control is more available. But obviously our goal is not to prevent married people from having sex (at least I hope yours isn’t!), and one presumes that married people are more likely to have sex anyway than unmarried people (stereotypes about married people losing interest in sex to the contrary!). So I don’t think you have shown that promoting purely natural means of birth control is going to reduce the number of abortions or going to be more effective in preventing disaster-as-birth-control.
My point is simply that whatever the moral problems with birth control (leaving abortion out of it), it is far more moral to make birth control available than to sit back and willingly allow huge numbers of people (including many children, born and unborn) die from disease and famine. I recognize that you and other hardline defenders of the Catholic position will disagree with this premise. To me, this constitutes a very good reason for moral people to think twice about accepting the Catholic position. If birth control is indeed such a serious sin, then you are right–but those of us on the fence about whether it is sinful and how sinful it might be find your callousness about massive amounts of death and suffering a pretty persuasive argument against the view that birth control is in fact a matter of such grave moral significance. We know that allowing lots of people to suffer and die when you could prevent it is a bad thing. So a moral view that leads you to acquiesce in this has a strong presumption against it from the start.
Edwin, I sent you a pm, but I want to address this quote here since you brought up that my hardline stance might drive you and others further from accepting the Catholic Church’s position. I apologize if I sounded callous.
