Birth Control

Ah pooh, here we go again

A perfect, Godly marriage consists of a man and a woman living as man and wife, freely without anything between them, producing as many children as they can.
That is ideal. That is the perfection.

Unfortunately, we are all fallen people living in a fallen world. Society makes it impossible for most to live up to this perfect ideal. Family planning is a necessity when you are living in a metropolitan capitalist society. It's not good how humans have to limit something as natural as the joining of man and wife, but it is a necessary evil. We need to face that reality.

The Catholic Church has always been against contraception because it doesn't conform to this ideal. But when we moved from an agrarian society to an industrial capitalist society, that ideal slipped away. Nobody followed the teachings of the Church anymore, and it got so bad that in the 1950's, the Church finally relented and allowed the rhythm method to limit family size, with the argument that it is more "natural". But it is like Moses issuing writs of divorce. It was only permitted because of the hardness of our hearts. "IN THE BEGINNING… GOD SAID BE FRUITFUL AND MULTIPLY".

We should be aware of the realities of life and society, and be understanding of that. Only as long as we never compromise what perfection is. Be lenient and understanding, and never stop telling people what God's vision is.

Porn is a very big deal, user. How could you possibly say that?

They would be against contraception.

I'm just saying it's far easier to be misled reading the encyclicals of a modern pope than it is to be misled reading the church fathers.

HV has not clarified things as shown by the various opinions on it in this thread.

The early fathers supported the primacy of Rome of course conditionally, they wouldn't have supported it if it wasn't Orthodox. In their time, it was Orthodox.

Porn leads to masturbation and sexual hedonism, on top of scarring many young girls who accept to star in pornographic movies, it *is* a big deal. There were studies which showed that people who watched porn frequently were more likely to embrace bisexualism than those who abstained.

Reality: fertility crash because it's impossible to get married because all the women are trying to have sex with the same men, using contraceptives. It might even be possible for the government to permit each couple to have X children and contraceptives to be used only by married people. Our current situation is just that women, and men, are empowered to make bad decisions, through contraceptives and other means, and bad decisions are suggested to them through government schools and the media.

Porn is a problem. The existence of the porn industry is a bigger problem, and that will go away as soon as the law saying no copyright protection for porn is enforced. Beyond that, the problem isn't so much that porn exists, as you say, there are people who masturbate a lot and people who don't, but there's a massive crisis in masturbation, sodomy, contraceptive use, divorce, everything other than chastity. We're always going to have wankers and porn, but when we solve this crisis we won't have porn everywhere.

Hey, I just discovered this!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sins_that_cry_to_heaven

I think it's pretty neat that it gets its own Wikipedia article.