[extropy-chat] Onan's disgraceful sin

[Damien Broderick]

> > Is Onan really that obscure a word?  Surely most people have
> > heard of "the sin of Onan" at the very least.
>
> http://www.libidomag.com/reviews/professionals/selfpleasure.html

Without looking beyond the suffix of that url, I can tell that it's about
masturbation--which is exactly NOT what God struck Onan dead for doing.

Onan was killed by Yahveh for withdrawing `prematurely' and `spilling his
seed upon the ground'.

But wait, there's more.

The naughty man wasn't punished fatally just for coitus interruptus, but due
to his *motive* for withdrawing.

Onan's strict religious duty was to have sex with his dead brother's widow
and get her pregnant. Without marrying her, as I recall. It was his dynastic
duty. Onan was deeply pissed off at this, not because he was some sort of
puritan averse to screwing his brother's widow (no, he was surely a
religious kind of guy, like the other fundamentalists today who like to
quote this verse, and the sensitive ones about killing faggots and like
that). What he chafed at was the prospect that any child of this dutiful
fuck would bear his brother's name, and not his own.

So that's why God hated Onan and killed him (as He had every right to do,
after all). Not for wanking. Not for coitus interruptus. Certainly not for
screwing his brother's wife, which is what he was *expected* to do.

Bet they didn't tell you that in Sunday School or the Yeshiva. Well, maybe
in Utah.

Damien Broderick