I’m thinking 1.2 billion Catholics is quite enough. Rejecting contraception as a most grievous sin, here are some interesting tidbits from Catholics and others they’ve influenced.
Martin Luther said of coitus interruptus—the withdraw method “The exceedingly foul deed of Onan, the basest of wretches . . . is a most disgraceful sin. It is far more atrocious than incest and adultery. We call it unchastity, yes, a sodomitic sin. i.e. Pulling out is worse than sex with your siblings/children. What about pulling out during incest? The reformer finished his decree with this about Onan pulling out. “Consequently, he deserved to be killed by God. He committed an evil deed. Therefore, God punished him.” Wait, was he still catholic?
Clement of Alexandria wrote, “Because of its divine institution for the propagation of man, the seed is not to be vainly ejaculated, nor is it to be damaged, nor is it to be wasted”
John Calvin said, “The voluntary spilling of semen outside of intercourse between man and woman is a monstrous thing. Deliberately to withdraw from coitus in order that semen may fall on the ground is doubly monstrous. For this is to extinguish the hope of the race and to kill before he is born the hoped-for offspring.” Maybe now would be a good time. There are plenty of us.
Of Augustine the Great (hypocrite) Those who do this, although they are called husband and wife, are not; nor do they retain any reality of marriage, but with a respectable name cover a shame”.
There is no way to deny the fact that the Catholic Church has always and everywhere condemned artificial contraception. The matter has already been infallibly decided. The so-called “individual conscience” argument amounts to “individual disobedience.”
The Catholic Church also has affirmed that the illicitness of contraception is an infallible doctrine: “The Church has always taught the intrinsic evil of contraception, that is, of every marital act intentionally rendered unfruitful. This teaching is to be held as definitive and irreformable”.
Who makes this shit stuff up? Control the most basic instinct of man and his nature, control the whole man.
Excerpts from Catholic.com
The church has lost its flock and at complete odds with its members/sinners. “Even among Catholic Americans, whose official church teaching condemns all “artificial” family planning practices, 89 percent believe birth control is morally acceptable and 98 percent of sexually experienced Catholic women have used contraceptives” The other 2% are most likely barren—or priests.
TheCommonAtheist 
Every wasted seed is another thousand plus dollar out of the collection plate. That is the “real” sin, as far as the clergy is concerned.
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I think they have enough, don’t they? Maybe for the sake of our future, we could pace out all these precious lives waiting to be born. Or is god just squirting out spirit children so fast that we can’t keep up? I dunno. Seems we could do this a little differently.
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Side note: as late as the 1950s or so, the church didn’t consider the fetus to be a human being, at least according to the doctrine my mother was taught in the Catholic’s Guide to Young Mothers or whatever the heck that book was that she had back in the day. It stated specifically that following a miscarriage that the fetus was not to be baptized, was not to be given catholic burial, etc. Basically it wasn’t a person. And this was published by a catholic publishing company, and had the impramateur seal on it indicating that it had been approved by the church hierarchy as conforming to catholic teaching. Wish I still had that book. I imagine that my sister threw it out when she went through our mother’s things after she died. She’s an evangelical now and all things catholic are an abomination to her so most of that stuff went right into the dumpster when she cleaned out the house.
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Some of the dialog in the link I posted considered sperm enough of a life of its own. I wonder where this idea originated? Maybe during a time rags were in short supply? 🙂
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@rawgod, I was laughing and fell down from my chair when I read your comment
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Hope you didn’t hurt yourself, Jonathan. But if you did I take full responsibility–I should have foreseen this event and worded my comment more carefully. Next time I’ll make sure you are in bed when you read it.
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Ya don’t wanna get sued…..hahahaha….
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No serious damage done
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Personal privacy doesn’t exist.
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I guess that’s false as Catholics are privately using birth control against the doctrine. Lol. Then it creates a culture of liars. Always hiding something.
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Yeah, likely true.
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I’m in Galway, Ireland right now, Jim, and yesterday as I was walking around a very busy part of town I saw two young men standing behind a table that had a banner hanging from it which looked like it had the word “Atheist” on it. I couldn’t be sure, though, because there were a couple pictures in front of it. I walked over, nudged the pictures aside a bit and, indeed, that’s what it said. I thrust out my hand, smiled and said, “Hi! I’m an atheist!” I’m always so happy to meet other atheists. It seems such a rare occasion.
They were petitioning for the repeal of the blasphemy law in Ireland. The Catholic church has had such a tight grip on Ireland for so long and it’s brave men and women like these who are working to be free from that stranglehold.
Here’s a link to their website and the blasphemy law page:
https://atheist.ie/campaigns/blasphemy-law/
The 5 Reasons to Vote Yes on the referendum are very enlightening.
I know this has little to do with contraception but with all the crap the Catholic church (not to mention so many other religions) imposes in the world, it gives one a spark of hope that there are people like these out there, chipping away at that ridiculous, bombastic, self-aggrandizing edifice.
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8% of Irish Catholics don’t believe in god. Figure than one out.
https://radio.rte.ie/radio1highlights/8-irish-catholics-said-dont-believe-god-low-hurdle-catholic/
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The percentage is even higher in Spain. In certain countries Catholicism takes the role of quasi-nationality. Brazil used to be one of them before the Evangelical invasion. People know the saints, saint days, participate in religious events – but believing is a whole other story.
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Strange, huh? It’s quite a fundamental part of the whole “religion” thing to actually believe the god exists.
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I think catholic is as much a culture as a belief at this point. Catholic Atheist will be the new denomination.
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After living in Panama a few years I concluded if it wasn’t for women the church would fold. The men stand outside the mass and bullshit, and all in all if there were no stigma to atheism, all but 2 would admit they don’t believe it.
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Thanks. Here’s a snippet from the link “‘If you ask people ‘What is your religion?’ they will give an answer typically that is a religion. But if you ask them, ‘do you have a religion?’ a lot more will say, ‘No, I don’t’. So the figures we think are much higher than they actually are”—It’s higher than 8%, I can guaran-goddam-tee-it!
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Blasphemy laws? Well, my first thought is leave it in place so when the muslims take over won’t require any gerrymandering. But, that is pretty courageous to petition a law openly that has traditionally carried a very high penalty. Great comment Z. I’ll check the link. Enjoy your trip!! Awesome!
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It is interesting indeed that a billion “Catholics” keep defending and funding the very enterprise that emphatically condemns their infallibly-declared “mortally-sinful” behavior. (not to mention turning a blind eye to the whole pedophile priest cover up… a topic for another time and place).
That said, is it too optimistic to view such widespread rejection of one of the church’s central edicts as a sign of progress? As a necessary stepping stone on the path toward abandoning the church completely?
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I think we share the same optimism. That is one corrupt and abusive organization. Anybody that puts their kids in that now is a fool.
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Catholicism is a club which handles births, deaths and marriages without you having to think about it.
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And its priests handle your children in a variety of prurient ways with total acceptance by its leaders. Hell, if one of its priests is caught diddling a minor, they simply place said priest into another parish without letting the new parish be burdened with why the new priest just suddenly showed up one day. Yeah, Catholics–a grand group of individuals to be making moral decisions about sex and the sexual behavior of other people. I’m so proud to have been raised as one for decades.
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Pride, foolish pride. Hey diddle diddle, the priest likes to fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon. The little boy cried when he saw him in court, and the priest will work somewhere else soon.
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Probably made contraception a sin simply to promote the number of believers & probably made suicide a sin simply to prevent believers taking a short cut to heaven. All comes down to simple self preservation.
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Well, Ken, somewhere along the line bodily fluids became very important to god. I don’t know why but could only guess it has something to do with being WRONG…again. This is part of the immoral, drip fed morality of god. Maybe it’s a mistranslation, and was supposed to say ” save your seamen” not semen. Like the word celibate—they inadvertently forgot the r
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oh boy, this is a whole kettle of worms, isn’t it? I should point out that the sin of Onan, which Luther talks about where god kills Onan because he “spilled his seed on the earth”, as they say, had nothing to do with birth control except peripherally. The law at the time was that when a man died without an heir, the deceased’s brother was supposed to impregnate the widow so the resulting child could be raised as the deceased’s heir so the deceased’s family line could continue. Onan was killed because he refused to get his sister-in-law pregnant out of the fear that the resulting child would contend with his own children for their inheritance. That was the real “sin”, his reluctance to obey the law and continue his brother’s family line.
Why in the world are these people so obsessed with sex? I’ve never understood that. This obsession they have, this — this need to stick their nose into the sexual relationships of others, ths need to control the sexual relationships of others, has always struck me as being voyeuristic, even perverse.
I vividly recall that when my spouse and I went to be interviewed by the priest who was going to perform the ceremony, the questions he asked were *very* personal, to the point of being creepy. I was asked several times to confirm that I was, well, physically able to perform the act, shall we say, that I wasn’t impotent, with the thinly veiled implication that if I wasn’t able to do it and father children he wouldn’t perform the service. It was all very, very creepy, embarrassing and made me want to go home and immediately take a shower. In light of the revelations about the widespread sexual abuse going on in the church, thinking about that interview and what might have been going through his head at the time makes me want to go shower again.
The questioning also put me in a bit of a catch-22 situation because under church law I should have been a virgin because I hadn’t been married yet, so how the hell would I even know if I could “perform”?
DAD:
There are Jews in the world.
There are Buddhists.
There are Hindus and Mormons, and then
There are those that follow Mohamed, but
I’ve never been one of them.
I’m a Roman Catholic,
And have been since before I was born,
And the one thing they say about Catholics is:
They’ll take you as soon as you’re warm.
You don’t have to be a six-footer.
You don’t have to have a great brain.
You don’t have to have any clothes on. You’re
A Catholic the moment Dad came,
Because…
Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.
CHILDREN:
Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.
GIRL:
Let the heathen spill theirs
On the dusty ground.
God shall make them pay for
Each sperm that can’t be found.
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Surprised they don’t have a little collection bucket for those that can’t wait—and choose to masturbate. Sick people have been known to save it. Wonder if this is the root of that illness too, but I digress.
Not sure what year your interview was, but I’m imagining a little more innocent time possibly? Is this a poem of importance among Catholics of some time? Obsessive
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The interview with the priest was in 1980, long before the truth about the widespread sexual abuse became public.
The poem is the lyrics of a song from the Monty Python movie The Meaning of Life which, and was a wickedly delicious satirising of the church. Here’s a link to the whole scene with the song in it on youtube:
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You are the man! I’d forgotten that. I get a lot of those clips from the Brits and SA’s.
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You beat me to it! As soon as I read the post, I was thinking that it needed that clip to go with it.
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As an entirely boring note, Catholic sexual morality is derived from the Gnostics. The sin of Onan came to be interpreted as perverting the “purpose” of sexual activity – which in their view should be exclusively for reproduction.
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Entirely boring, but you masterfully turn a seemingly boring note into a magnificently boring statement. :)) It does go to show how ridiculously un-inspired and preoccupied the founders were with nearly everything…ok, completely everything.
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Surveys show that American Catholic women, 90+% of them, have used artificial birth control for decades. This is why the Catholic men are trying to get the laws changed to make birth control devices harder to get (abortions, too). They want the secular government to enforce a church rule they cannot enforce themselves. So, at least in this country, the problem is not with the millions of Catholics, but with the Catholic elites.
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Thanks Steve. They are at near complete odds with the church itself. How many times will the church prove its own fallibility before everyone just walks away? The fact is the church has no more control than we give it. They have no salvationary power at all. The things I quoted is from their core, if they had their way it would be enforced. Thank god for secularism.
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I never realise that a packet of condom could an all powerful god from creating new life
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Well, every good thing comes from god. Condoms are good things. Btw, you know what kind of rubbers midgets wear? Condominiums.
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Cute!
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Anything can make perfect sense to the willingly delusional. Starting with a supernatural realm paradigm as a foundation, the end product is limited only by your imagination. We typically refer to the phenomenon as story telling, aka fiction and in an era that predates the scientific method, fiction and fact were thought to be synonymous. With the roots of humanity’s collective knowledge dating back to the use of a common language the paradigm has become like a vestigial reasoning organ. It is no longer functional, will become diseased and can often be terminal.
Or not.
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Fiction still outsells nonfiction 3-1. We do like stories, don’t we?
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Just thought I would remind everyone, 108 Hail Marys will abolish all of your sins and you can still enter the Kingdom of Heaven! It’s gotta be a great way to live.
But I’ll pass anyway. I don’t like kingdoms, and I hate dictatorships…
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Hear, hear!
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That’s True Man
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