I’m gonna go with “a distinction without a meaningful difference” here.
It still all comes down to, “If you’re not ready to have a kid, then you have no business having sex.” You can argue that that’s a reasonable and morally legitimate rule to apply to married couples, and that really is a matter of “you believe one thing, I believe another.” And as such, it’s not subject to debate. But let’s not pussyfoot around the fundamental meaning of this position.
Bp. Olmstead is reported as having said she needs to repent of her sins before she will be restored to communion. In the tone of the remark as quoted, it appears to imply she’s guilty of sinfully consenting to a sinful abortion. But we both know that the press can misconstrue a statement – just as we might agree that both of us, and lissener and jayjay, should repent of our sins, and come into a right relationship with God. Now, anybody playing the “gays vs. Christians” meme might read that to infer that I consider their sex lives sinful – and I emphatically do not think that of jayjay and have no reason to think it of lissener. I mean things like, e.g., being rude to a waitress or cashier when having a bad day – that’s a sin the overwhelming majority of us are guilty of; being superciliously judgmental and condemnatory of the opinions of others – same thing. So it’s posible that Bp. Olmstead meant “She needs to make a good confession, including justifying to her confessor that what she consented to was one of those rare cases where use of abortificient procedures is not a sin,” as you in your casuistry* on canon law above suggest. But that doesn’t seem to be borne out by the press stories.
This - a thousand times this! It just goes to show that, deep down, the church really doesn’t believe in the power of their god.
Let’s not.
But “sex between married couples for non-procreative purposes is bad,” means that I shouldn’t have sex with my wife, and “sex open to the possibility of conception,” means I can, so I’d say there’s a big difference between those two “without a meaningful difference” statements.
No, it shows that you two have no real understanding of free will and what it means.
Follow your argument to its logical conclusion. If there is a God, and if we assume he has set of desires for humankind to follow, then it goes without saying that there must be SOME act he opposes, but that we could do. It’s easy to talk snidely about blowjobs, but the same reasoning applies to arson or murder: if God opposed them, you might cavil, then why doesn’t He use His Awesome Power to stop them?
Ah ha! You’ve just proved that people don’t really have faith in God! If they did, they wouldn’t make murder a sin (or illegal!) they would just wait for God to prevent it!
And that’s a great argument for dazzling everyone else in your freshman homeroom.
Or, in this case, to garner agreement from the compulsive religion-haters amongst us here.
Yes. I agree it’s possible, and I agree that this meaning does not seem to be borne out by press stories.
But that’s why I mentioned the press in general and my own experience of being interviewed by an NPR reporter six years ago. I was not misquoted, and nothing the reporter said was untrue… but the impression left by the story aired was dramatically different from the impression given in the interview.
If the reporter said nothing untrue, and you weren’t misquoted, is it within the realm of possibility that the fault lies with you?
Of course.
But there are some objective measures to buttress my usual unerring sense of communication.
The interview related to the Knights of Columbus’ annual convention, which I attended as a delegate. The organization had invited George W. Bush to speak, notwithstanding the fact that it is a Catholic group, and Bush’s opponent was John Kerry, who was Catholic – Bush himself was not.
So the reporter asked me to speak about that interesting dichotomy – why was a powerful Catholic lay organization backing the non-Catholic in the race?
The interview lasted nearly thirty minutes. I spoke at length about many factors, to include the fact that we always, every year, invite the sitting president of the United States. Most send letters in response; Presidents Nixon and Reagan chose to accept our invitations and spoke at the Supreme Council meetings in 1971 and 1982, respectively. I spent the vast majority of time running down a list of factors that I believed showed that conservative Catholics would lean towards Bush rather than Kerry. At the end of that list, I did acknowledge that Bush’s position on the death penalty was probably unpalatable to observant Catholics, and that the Democratic party had a long tradition of social justice concerns that fit well with Catholic teaching.
But by measurable time, the vast majority of my time was spent on noting positive reasons for the organization’s support of Bush over Kerry.
Yet the aired interview gave equal time to my Bush plug and my Kerry plug, and included one other interview: a man protesting outside the convention, upset with the Knights. There were two thousand people in attendance, and that was their choice for the second interview.
And apart from that objective measure: the time I spent on each subject compared with the time the aired interview gave… surely my own reputation here should give you pause. If I was interviewed in 2004, is it likely that that answer to the reporter about favoring Bush or Kerry would have been essentially even-handed, giving equal time and approbation to each’s merits?
So – sure, it’s possible. But not too damn likely.
Well, if we are stressing the importance of precision, is this really true?
Artificial birth control does not, to the best of my knowledge, “prevent even the possibiity of conception.” It reduces the possibility of conception.
Free will only makes sense in the absence of a omnipotent and omniscient deity. That you still believe is such a fairy tale doesn’t give much credibility that you can call our arguments juvenile. If you want to debate how many angels dance on the head of a pin by all means have at it. It still doesn’t negate the fact in your theology that he can interfere with the natural order of things as he sees fit.
Do you even know of any others?
Why couldn’t an omniscient and omnipotent being permit free will, if that’s the circumstance that pleased him? I’m not asking you to believe that, I’m asking why you think it’s not possible for free will to exist simultaneously with an omnipotent God. I don’t see the disconnect.
It’s the omniscient part that’s trhe sticking point. If God knows what the person is going to do in every single case, then free will is out the window. Only the illusion of free will is left, because apparently the person is destined by god, or by some kind of programming that god understands, to make the predestined ‘choice’.
It is the combination of the two. Knowing what I’m going to do is not the same as having the power to influence what I’m going to do. If I was created in such a way to make a specific choice knowing that I’d make that choice, then it isn’t me making the choice, it is my programming.
No, it’s still saying that in a ton of circumstances beyond the control of the married couple in question, the RCCC is telling them that they can’t have sex.
I remember when my wife and I were still teaching, and were working insane hours during the academic year for all too little money. We were barely able to take care of ourselves, let alone even think about taking care of a child, though we desperately wanted children. In that situation, the RCCC would have denied us the solace of sexual relations, because for overwhelming reasons, we weren’t open to the possibility of procreative sex at that time.
So I say: yes, the RCCC is telling married couples they can’t have sex. Not all married couples, not all the time. But enough of them, enough of the time. So fuck 'em.
Is this supposed to be an argument so absurd we all see that the logical conclusion of our assertion is ridiculous?
Because I don’t think that at all. I think that the existence of laws against murder do underline the fact that most people realize there is no omnipotent, loving god out there, and we have to take care of ourselves.
What kind of bastard sets people up with “free will” to choose the wrong thing, when the punishment is eternal torture? Just create the damn universe properly in the first place, Oh Perfect One, so that people can be happy and good and not have an opportunity to hurt each other.
Anyway, as others have pointed out, the internal logic is fucked anyway. NFP can be very, very effective, while every form of birth control can fail. I think the church embraced the Rhythm Method, which is not effective, then got kind of backed into a corner when knowledge and technology got to the point that non-drug, non-device birth control became effective.
Also, I have to point out that the “selfishness” rule is so typical. It shows the underlying misogyny of the whole system. Basically, women are to be compliant baby factories, happy to give up their lives even to give a zygote an hour more of life, and any woman who tries to get out from under this, yet still have sex, commits the sin of selfishness. Oh Noes!
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that men have no situations where they are demanded to risk death to save someone else. Hell, men are allowed to kill to protect property, but women are supposed to die rather than have an abortion. Yes, ladies, your lives are worth less than a car stereo. Congrats.
So the men have the power, they create the rules, and it just so happens that the rules favor men. Gosh, what are the odds?
That’s true, in that no method of artificial birth control is 100% safe. Indeed, a strict parsing of the words “prevent even the possibility” would eliminate almost every possible method, since mathematically speaking even tubal sterilizations may spontaneously reverse themselves. But when read in harmony with the word ‘artificial,’ the actual teaching is that using artificial methods of birth control, things that physically are intended to prevent conception, are the intended target.
But you’re quite right. The words are not accurate.
Really?
You mean here where he writes this about an ectopic pregnancy?
This is literally one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read anywhere.
The American Academy of Family Physicians describes an ectopic pregnancy thusly:
http://www.aafp.org/afp/20000215/1080.html
In the world according to Bricker and Catholic officials an ectopic pregnancy is not a medical emergency but something akin to murder over which a woman should feel guilty about.
If I was imprecise in language initially I apologize. However that still does not remove my distaste for an organization that promotes policies on sex and reproductive matters that are frankly misogynistic, irrational and cruel.
To point this out is not anti-Catholicism or let alone bigotry of any sort as has been repeatedly implied.
Wouldn’t “Women & children first” run counter to that?
(Don’t get me wrong - I think it is rooted in the same male dominanted culture, but it does seem to be a situation which you say doesn’t exist).