my brother rushed into marriage after his gf started back at church and wouldn’t have sex without marriage. 5 years and one kid later she was having an affair with a coworker.
point being, bible says no sex outside of marriage, there’d be a lot more weddings and divorces imo
i know for sure i’d have been married at least a few times if it was the only chance for sex
I know that the story of Onan has been used as Biblical authority for the proposition that birth ciontrol is wrong (also, with even less justification, that wanking is wrong), but in context Onan’s true “sin” was selfishness. He ‘spilled his seed on the ground’ so that his father’s patrimony would all go to his line of children, and none to support his brother’s wife.
In short, the real lesson is "provide for your relations like you should or God will be very mad’, not “don’t use birth control”.
The odd part is that, in Patriarchal Biblical society, which was at the time composed of pre-iron age tribal nomads, “providing for your relations” took the form of marrying your childless brother’s widowed wife and getting her pregnant until she had a son - only men could inherit, and such a child would be considered, legally, the son of the dead brother.
In short, Onan was taking away her social security, and God fried him for it.
The only way I can think of that the OP’s premise would lead to fewer births would be if it were somehow impossible to get pregnant by anyone other than the person you’re legally/religiously married to. A woman can only get pregnant by the man who gave her his Magic Fertility Ring for example.IOW, eliminate all unmarried and adulterous pregnancies.
Hasids have a higher birth rate/average family size than Mormons, the Amish, or the Catholics. Depending on how the numbers are cooked they average between 6-8 kids with families of a dozen or more being not at all uncommon.
It’s not inconceivable (no pun intended) that when you factor in all the children who used to die in infancy or childhood (i.e. when there used to be many families with 10 or 14 children, it was rare for all to grow up) versus the Hasids who due to modern western world healthcare see all but a tiny minority of their children grow up (most modern Hasid families with 10 or 14 kids would see that many grow up) that the Hasids would have the largest average family size of any group in history.
And when this poster talks about population control, it is as well to listen. 
A +1 for all the above. Onan’s crime was to steal a defenceless widow’s inheritance, thinking he would get away with it by doing the deed in private while publicly seeming to do his duty.
You’ve never actually read the Bible, have you?
So does this mean that all sexual encounters have to be open to the possibility of conception? Or does this mean that you don’t have sex unless you intend to have a baby?
Concubines appear in the Bible from Genesis onward. Abraham’s is the first family whose domestic life is dealt with in any detail and it’s clear he was very much in love with Sarah and didn’t even consider putting her aside or not having sex with her when it seemed she was barren; taking a concubine as surrogate mother was at her insistence, he was unhappy about not having children but did not seem to hold it against her at all. Later on polygamy was par for the course for the rich and powerful throughout the OT and clearly not just for procreation; the first thing Absalom did when he took over his father’s palace was shag the concubines his father had left behind.
Sexual intimacy never really seems to have been about procreation only, and while adultery is a major sin sex-for-pleasure’s-sake never seemed to be, or even non-consentual non-procreative sex: raping female PoWs was permissible. The sex for children only addendum seems to have been tacked on by fanatics far later. (There were also fanatics who allowed sex but not procreation; the word bugger [for anal sex] comes from Bulgar which was a term applied to Albigensians [not sure what the Bulgar/ian association was, if any] who, at least by rumor, practiced anal and other non-procreative sex acts because they believed they were living in the final days and didn’t want to complicate it with having kids.)
Orthodox Jews invented the shotgun marriage 5000 years before there were shotguns.
Of course, many women in those days also died in childbirth, usually after their third or forth child and only had a life-expectancy of what, 30 to 40 years old? They needed to have kids that often in order to keep the population level. Modernly, I believe that the average American has 2.5 children born to them in their lives. Thus, the fact that they used to have children every 1-2 years isn’t pertinent to this discussion really.
Now, if no one where capable to have kids outside of marriage in this alternate universe, I think the population would probably drop a bit, seeing as many people today are so concerned with working and earning money instead of making a family.
40% of babies in the US are born out of wedlock, 60% to married parents. cite.
By race (US only):
83% of asian babies are born to married parents
72% of white babies are born to married parents
49% of latino babies are born to married parents
35% of native american babies are born to married parents
28% of black babies are born to married parents
Second that! Some sects (like modern american fundies) insist on interpreting it according to their own culture, rather than understanding it according to the cultural values of the people who actually wrote it. They are definitely not a good guide to what it actually says.
What’s all this “probably”? Surely for 1000s of years, it was common for people to have children only in marriage in several societies? And they didn’t die out?
Why does it only have to be the Bible, too? Humans were procreating plenty before the New Testament was written and in some cases even before or around the time of the Old Testament without ever having read it. The Upanishads and Vedas say our duty is also to procreate; I’m sure Shinto and the like also tell people to make more people. Because every religion needs MORE worshipers.
I find generally it is non-religious people who delay or even skip childbirth, generally.
Um, okay. If from that one single story someone extrapolated the whole principle that birth control is a sin which millions of people bought into, how did they explain away God’s specific command to impregnate your widowed sister-in-law, which very few Christians seem to do?
Religion is funny.
Seems like if we’re having sex like the Bible wants, there’d be lots more kids.
Humans are not capable by living by the law, which includes the sexual restrictions, so the OP is impossible. God never intended us to live by that law or any hard coded law, but just to live in Love with Him and each other. By placing these restrictions on is we will learn that we can’t follow hard and fast rules, were never meant to, and come to God because there has to be another way, which there is in Jesus.
Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.
I think there was a sect of them in the Bulgarian area. I’ve also seen it spelled Bogomil. Basically, the Bogomils, Albigensians & Cathars were all supposed to be different branches of the same Gnostic dualist, Christian-Manichean movement with taught Jehovah was the Dark Demi-God of Material Creation while Jesus was sent by the Good God of Light & Spirit to save of from slavery to Jehovah & His material realm. Reproduction just puts more pure spirits in bondage to material shells & gives Jehovah more souls to enslave. Also, all matter being evil & all spirit being good, these dualists were accused of believing that nothing they did sexually/materially really did damage to their spirituality so anything sexual was OK as long as it didn’t result in childbirth. Of course, there were also Gnostic dualists who believed in maintaining spiritual purity by indulging in material pleasure as little as possible- thus celibacy, simplicity & even blandness of food were encouraged.