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Felicity · 10-11-05, 05:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FutureIncoming

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THERE ARE ONLY TWO passages in the Bible that speak directly to the issue of abortion, and both indicate unequivocally that abortion is not murder:

The best answer to this was given on another forum I visit called Catholic Answers. It was provided by a poster called Bible Reader and I found it VERY interesting.

Quote:

Posted by BibleReader:

Most think, "How could the Bible possibly condemn contraceptive use, if it was written thousands of years ago, and contraceptives weren't invented until our era?"

In fact, around 500 B.C., North Africans discovered silphium. It is not the same "silphium" commercially available today. The silphium of North Africa was a fennel-like plant, which grew wild in North Africa -- nobody ever figured out how to cultivate it. Orally imbibed as a tea, it completely disrupted the girl's reproductive tract. It was a very successful contraceptive. Around 400 A.D., the last silphium plant was picked, and the species became extinct.

Remember "Simon of Cyrene" who helped Christ carry the cross in the gospels? Well, Cyrene, Libya, was the main point of export for silphium. In the centuries before Christ, Cyrene even minted a coin featuring a naked girl holding up a fennel plant and pointing to her genital region.

Other popular and somewhat successful contraceptive herbs used before and after Christ were asafoetida, and what we today refer to as Queen Anne's Lace, and pennyroyal. Asafoetida is still sometimes used as an ingredient in Worcestershire saurce. (Please do not go out and brew your own contraceptive teas or drink a bottle of Worcestershire sauce. You don't know enough about quantity.)

All of these contraceptive preparations game to be referred to with the euphemism pharmakeia in the Greek-speaking Roman Empire -- "drugs."

All of this is well-discussed in the March/April, 1994 issue of Archaeology magazine.

The main retailers of pharmakeia in the Roman Empire were sorcerers! -- palm readers, tea leaf readers, and so on.

The local teaveling sorcerer would come into town. The local promiscuous girls would go running to the sorcerer to ask about his or her latest love prospects. The reader would give the usual vague optimistic answer, and then after charging for her reading would open up her box of contraceptive teas, and make some more money selling these.

As a consequence, contraceptives also came to be referred to with the appellation "sorcery," meaning "sorcerer's stuff." Contraceptive curses -- incantations meant to avert conception -- were referred to with the word magiae, "magic."

The reason why you had to read all of that is to understand the exact meaning of a catechetical summary employed in the early Church -- very shgortly after the time of the Apostles -- called the Didache.

Didache 2:2 condemns (1) magiae; (2) pharmakeia; (3) abortion; and (4) infanticide.

Do you see what is going on there? Progressively-invasive anti-reproductive measuresare being condemned -- reproductive curses, contraceptive chemicals, post-contraceptive abortions, and post-birth child killing.

So, the Didache, essentially written in the same era as Paul's letter to the Galatians and as the Book of Revelation, is a reliable benchmark assuring us that when pharmakeia were condemned by Early Church Christians, use of contraceptives was being condemned.

Continued next post...