(June 19, 2015 at 1:17 pm)Jenny A Wrote: Onan spilled his seed because he did not want to give his child to his dead brother Er. God was displeased and killed Onan. Now, we know for certain that avoiding his duty to give a child to his brother was displeasing to god, because it was a violation of the law. How do you get from there to declaring the method by which he broke the law to be bad under all circumstances. If that were the case, you'd expect there to be a law in Deuteronomy prohibiting birth control.
One might argue that God was simply angry with Onan for failing to honor a commandment to produce a child with his dead brother’s wife. But if you look at Deuteronomy 25:9-10, it is clear that the penalty for this failure is public humiliation, not death (the widow “shall go up to him in the presence of the elders, and pull his sandal off his foot, and spit in his face; . . . And the name of his house shall be called in Israel, the house of him that had his sandal pulled off”).
But that's not what happened. Onan’s actions evoked a much more serious response from God, and early Jewish and Christian commentators believed that by spilling his semen Onan had violated God’s natural law, the design he built into the human race, which led them to condemn the practice of birth control as being against God’s law.
