That's nice. I was responding to your claim that contraception was intrinsically immoral. Contraception != fornication.
Contraception prevents the conception of children, which is the function of coitus. It is therefore a perversion of nature. But don’t take my word for it: one of the most elegant philosophical arguments on this subject was advanced by the eminent moral theologian, Pope John Paul II, who I regard as having been the foremost moral theologian among Western Christians until his repose in 2005 (after which time, I regard Dr. James Kennedy as having been the leading moral theologian, until he was disabled by a heart attack at the end of 2006 and reposed less than a year later; since that time I am inclined to regard Dr. Albert Mohler and Gerhard Cardinal Muller as the foremost Western moral theologians. Among Eastern moral theologians, we have so many good ones in different areas of practice between the Eastern Orthodox communion, the Oriental Orthodox communion, and even the roughly one million Assyrians of the Church of the East who have now miraculously survived two attempted genocides in a one hundred year period, and who also have the largest population of vernacular Aramaic speakers in the world, nearly 700,000 strong, but one particularly well known Eastern Orthodox moral theologian I personally admire is Fr. Josiah Trenham, whose parish is also tackling the problem of excessive funeral costs and the immorality of cremation, by keeping a simple casket manufactured by the nuns at the nearby Convent of St. Barbara continually ready in the basement of his parish for the next person who will need it, and helping to organize programs to ensure even the less well off members of the Orthodox church have access to Christian burial.
For one of the few things that offends me almost as much as contraceptives is columbaria, in particular, when one sees a columbaria on a mainline Protestant parish. Christians are supposed to be buried intact, entombed inside the naves of churches, not burned up like pagans and then shoved into niches on the outside wall of the narthex. Cremation is acceptable for Christians only when it is forced on us by a third party. It is for this reason that the Eastern Orthodox churches provide only the Trisagion service, and not a full Pannihkida, or memorial service, and burial, in the case of persons who voluntarily chose to be cremated. But I digress.
I suppose you will find this all very shocking and perhaps amusing, but we Orthodox Christians have a different perspective on things, one which is based on communion and the immersive experience of liturgical beauty, in which one can experience a foretaste of the world to come, as opposed to the dry and intellectual aliturgical worship and the irreverant praise and worship music that has become dominant in so many denominations and non-denominational megachurches.
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There is of course a stronger and more specific connection between our opposition to contraception and to cremation, that being that all humans exist in the image of Christ our True God, and so to destroy a human embryo, or to burn the body of a deceased human, is an act of iconoclasm, for it is literally destroying an icon of Christ, the same as if one melted down a crucifix, smashed a rood screen or stained glass window or set fire to an iconostasis.
Likewise, divorce is unacceptable, because families are icons of the Holy Trinity. To divorce one’s spouse without a very good reason, for example, they are abusing you physically or mentally, or exploiting you or have abandoned you, is equivalent to taking Andrei Rublev’s classic Trinitarian icon
The Hospitality of Abraham and ripping it to shreds.
Iconoclasm and Pelagianism are the great evils of our time.
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