[geeks] Socialized medicine

[Phil Stracchino]

Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
> Arno Kletzander wrote:
>> And the Jewish and Christian religions regard it as such or at least
>> did until very recently. This came from the medieval belief that the
>> male semen is "human seed" which grows in the womb like plant seeds
>> grow in the ground. If you look at it from a modern point of view and
>> count in the female contribution, it becomes even worse: it would be
>> morally wrong to "waste" an egg by not having it fertilized! (It is
>> flushed out with the next menstrual cycle then.)
> 
> Um, you are off by quite a number of years.
> 
> Onan, from whom the word onanism was derived, was a character in the Old 
> Testament and thus would have lived in the Middle East at least 400 
> years before the birth of Jesus. That is, you are off by at least 1600 
> years.

And at that, it's been badly misunderstood for probably at least a
thousand years.  "The sin of Onan" wasn't "spilling his seed".  When
Onan's brother died leaving his wife childless, it was Onan's duty -
under the customs of the time and place - to give his brother's wife the
child her husband, his brother, could not.  His sin was that he pulled
out and denied her the child.



-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.