While writing about this Hsu imbecile, I also found two awful articles, one by Wayne Grudem and another one by John Piper
Grudem writes:
This was a common pattern in Jesus’s earthly ministry, and the inclusive nature of the expression “all those who had any who were sick with various diseases” allows us to suppose that Jesus also healed the infertility of many women (and men) who’d previously been unable to conceive and bear children.
This is stretching it. We don’t read that Christ Himself helped anyone to have children. He even recommends celibacy in Matthew 19.
Even if it’s true that children are usually seen as a blessing in Holy Scripture, it does not mean that there is a duty to have children. Further, most such verses are part of the Old Testament. Christ even says (Luke 23:29):
For, behold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck.
Says Grudem:
Someone may object that this isn’t the “natural” process of conception through sexual intercourse that God intended. But such an argument must assume a definition of “natural” that arbitrarily excludes modern medical means from what we consider part of nature. Is not the laboratory equipment used for IVF also made from resources God planted in the earth? Are not the medical researchers and medical technicians, with all their wisdom and skill, part of God’s creation also?
More intellectual stretch marks. All this technology was invented by white Europeans, a small, a tiny fraction of humanity did it. God had little to do with it, and the ethical implications of new inventions are usually not black and white. Modern technology can be said to have had many unwanted, negative influences on our lives.
Even medicine, as we have seen during the last years, can be used against man.
To go from precious metals to smartphones is a long way, and it is preposterous to claim that the existence of IBM or Google was God’s will.
Another revealing quote:
Similarly, consider a husband who uses Viagra or a similar modern medicine to overcome erectile dysfunction so that he and his wife can have intercourse and conceive. Is that process to be rejected as “unnatural” because he’s using modern medicine to overcome his medical problem? Surely not. The Viagra is made from materials God placed in the natural world, and so it’s also part of nature considered in a broad sense.
He cannot be serious. Why would someone need viagra? This stuff is marketed to old men who can’t constrain themselves – or to those who, because of our modern world, have such problems prior to old age.
The Bible certainly teaches chastity, it teaches that we ought to restrain our appetites.
A revealing quote:
[…]
there was no connection between sex and conception. They were unable to conceive. It was the infertility that separated sex from conception—and IVF is overcoming that infertility. For many infertile couples, they have perfectly normal and happy sex lives, but due to some medical reason, they’ve been unable to have children. There is no biblical command that says “conception must only be the result of sexual intercourse,” but there is abundant biblical testimony that clearly teaches the blessing of children, the blessing of overcoming infertility, and the blessing of using God-given wisdom and resources to develop medical solutions to disease and disability.
“[h]appy sex lives” …? OK.
There is, as I wrote above, also abundant testimony to restrain our appetites, to live chaste lives, even celibacy is taught in the New Testament. No matter what some Protestants will claim, the teachings regarding celibacy which exist in the Catholic and Orthodox Church do have a biblical basis.
It has to. Because if God taught, as some Christians claim, that we must marry, that we ought to, then this would not only put pressure on people, but also place too much importance on something that the heathens do, too. Unlike reading the Bible, praying, living the faith and sharing it – which, even if we fail, is possible for everyone, unlike entering marriage.
Now John Piper, who’s at least a bit more sceptical about IVF:
[…]
I mean, creating a human being is the great glory and mystery.
[…]
“God often uses foolishness and even evil to bring beauty into being.”
First off, Piper, too, had to cite from the Old Testament.
As Andy Nowicki once wrote—in his Notes Before Death, I think—life is a wonder or mystery not in an overly positive or emotional sense, but rather in the same way death is: life should not exist but does, with death taking life from one minute to the next, making it disappear.
Further, I’m fed up with Christians praising this life and the birth of children. It may be a gift to the parents, as Andy Nowicki, himself father of a son and daughter, wrote in Considering Suicide; but is life a gift for the child? I don’t like my life, I am glad when I’m dead, and little depresses me more than all the crude brutes I encounter almost daily.
Most people are alive because of horniness, there usually was no wish to have a child, it was an accident. Or they are full of lust, guys like Steve Hsu, for example, who also dabbles in IVF.
To quote Harold Blake Walker, Pastor Emeritus of the First Presbyterian Church of Evanston (IL), former columnist for the Chicago Tribune, former president of the Board of Trustees of the McCormick Theological Seminary (article written most likely between the late seventies to mid-eighties): Right to life is great, but not for the unwanted.
God forces me to live, otherwise I would have killed myself long ago.
Gómez Dávila was fed up with theology—and modern theologians especially—as well:
We live because we do not view ourselves with the same eyes with which everybody else views us.
The modern Christian feels professionally obligated to act jovially and jokingly , to show his teeth in a cheerful grin, to profess a slavering friendliness, in order to prove to the unbeliever that Christianity is not a “somber” religion, a “pessimistic” doctrine, an “ascetic” morality.
The progressive Christian shakes our hand with the wide grin of a politician running for office.God invented tools, the devil machines.
Man’s three enemies are: the devil, the state, and technology.
The religious problem grows worse each day because the faithful are not theologians and the theologians are not faithful.
When the theologian explains the reason for some act of God, the listener wavers between indignation and laughter.
We should not believe in the theologian’s God except when He resembles the God called on in distress.
The heart does not rebel against the will of God, but against the “reasons” they dare attribute to it.
