[extropy-chat] Onan's disgraceful sin

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

Damien Broderick wrote:
> 
> 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.

Actually, Damien, they do tell you that in the Yeshiva.  Google 
levirate+halacha or onan+halacha.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence