A New York Escort writes about Christianity and Masturbation and notes how the Biblical story of Onan is the key link for many folks that leads to the belief that masturbation is a sin.

This is true . . . this is the story many idjits refer to . . . but they are wrong. Big time. The story has nothing to do with masturbation.

A lot of conservative Christians, Catholics, Mormons, and the like have that same misinterpretation. So, the word onanism now is used commonly to mean masturbation (the Japanese have borrowed the word as well in onaru).

However, that really isn’t Onan’s sin. He "spilled his seed upon the ground" . . . yes . . . but you will note that it was during intercourse. Onanism is coitus interruptus.

Onan’s sin was a failure to fulfill his obligations in terms of levirate, the practice that when a man’s brother dies with no children, he is obliged to marry the widow and sire a son by that wife and then to designate that child as his brother’s heir. This is a very serious obligation, particularly as it is practiced when an elder son has no heir.

Onan was considered selfish in that he did not wish to fulfill his duties and so avoided impregnating his new wife, his brother’s widow, through one of the age-old birth control methods of withdrawal prior to ejaculation. This is hardly masturbation.

The story of Judah and Tamar is another example of the levirate. Tamar’s husband dies and she is given to the next son who also dies, eventually the father of the brothers refuses to give her on to the last son as he sees her as bad luck but the tradition mandates that he should do so as a widow needs a son to take care of her in her old age. Tamar poses as a temple prostitute and has sex with Judah to get the seed planted so to speak. Note that Judah did not sin by going to a prostitute but Tamar sinned by pretending to be one and having sex with someone who was not her husband (adultery in this age only applied to married women).