Question about a married man who gets a vasectomy? Is this a sin?

jtbdad said:

I have known families with so little resources that they had to decide between medicine or food. And before someone makes the argument that this does not happen in the U.S. guess again. The U.S. does a poor job of taking care of their own. A trip just a couple hundred miles from my home brings me to one of the most impoverished areas of the country. The sad thing is we have the resources and yet somehow have not managed to get them where they are needed.

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Furthermore, let me add that such impoverished citizens often have much larger families than those who are financially stable. The reasons are manyfold--not only do larger family sizes often limit the amount of time and money available for higher education and job training for these parents, but lower levels of education to begin make it much more likely for the parents to not be able to properly understand or use contraception.

There really is no rocket science needed to interpret the verses saying how children (or marriage) are blessings. The people addressed in Scripture clearly desired to be married and to have large families, so obviously they were blessings for them. Also remember that Middle Eastern culture, then and now, has always placed great emphasis on lineages and geneaologies--in fact, in NT times, some extreme Pharisees argued that those who never married (for whatever reason) were to be considered as dead men for the lack of heirs. Yet Paul, Jesus, John the Baptist, etc. clearly chose to neither marry nor have children, and they were obviously called to this life. Arguing that secretly God meant to say "commandment" and that every single mainstream translation of Scripture has erred won't get us anywhere, unless it can be proven that everyone has somehow gotten the original Hebrew wrong.

JunkYard, I think that JTBDad is right... it did seem somewhat like you were egging him on via such phrases as "wearing feelings on the sleeve", "you are protesting too much", etc. I'd really like this to stay a theological debate and not turn into a series of personal challenges.

So maybe Junkyard Dog, you could just summerize all your posts and how they relate to original post. I think you are saying the same thing over and over and I think the summary would help me clarify things in my mind.

Thanks

McDLT said:

So maybe Junkyard Dog, you could just summerize all your posts and how they relate to original post. I think you are saying the same thing over and over and I think the summary would help me clarify things in my mind.

Thanks

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Seems like this thread has pretty much died, anyway...