A thread about monogamy, relationships, and other stuff like that
 

NOTE: spun off from a thread about morality in general.

Agreed. So if you want to specifically talk about sexuality, do you think promiscuous lifestyles have had an adverse effect on our culture? STDs, unwanted pregnancies, adulterey, divorce, jealousy, disrespect for the opposite gender. Can a large percentage of these things be traced back to the "sex positive" lifestyle our culture promotes?

yes, i think a few of them can (STDs, unwanted pregnancies specifically) to a degree. which is why sex education and access to birth control are so imperative.

the other stuff - jealousy and adultery - can be avoided if people are open and honest about the relationships they are having, obviously.

Obviously these things are never a 1:1 ratio and I am sure we both could bring in tons of anecdotes from people we know to try to disprove the others theory. I would say that a large number of people I know that have had problems in these areas, you can trace it back to some sort of sexual issue.

I also think you underestimate how living a promiscuous lifestyle carries on with you. It is not something you can turn off like a faucet. Our actions have consequences and effect who we are. In theory you can tell your significant other, all done now it is just me and you. In practice I think your past has more effect than you think.

what are you talking about, specifically? are you talking about STDs? pregnancy? something else? it's hard to respond when i'm not sure what you're referring to.

are you speaking in the context of going behind your partners back, though? cause i wasn't talking about that.

Re: How do you know the difference between right and wrong?
 

I'll let him answer himself, but I think he's saying that previous relationships inevitably involve emotional baggage, invite comparisons, and other things that probably make eventual monogamous relationships more challenging and less exclusively intimate.

I agree that this should probably be spun off soon, though, if you guys are interested in continuing.

Here I was talking about you saying that if your just honest with your parner then jealousy won't be an issue.



Not necessarily. Do you think your sex life before a commited relationship only effects that relationship if your not honest about it?

ok.

except i'm not making a thread titled 'PROMISCUITY' so i'll leave it up to him if he wants to :p

On the whole no, I'd say that religious repression has had a much more adverse affect on our culture. You're also greatly exaggerating the problem seeing as the average person is is not extremely promiscuous regardless of what you might see on TV.

The media is to blame for creating an overly negative and misanthropic perception of the average American - similar to how on every news site each day you'll hear a new story about "someone killing someone", when in reality this rarely happens, and you won't hear about all the people who didn't kill someone that day.

Sure you can complain that less people have their relationships blessed by the Church today- but ignore the fact that in the early 1900s religious child marriages occurred in rural parts of the US, with girls as young as 10 years old

You're more likely to die in a car wreck than you are to of an STD - the "STD" fear is one which is manufactured rather than realistic, as the risks are comparable to many other things which people engage in daily, yet disproportionately talked about.

Plus one day all STDs will be cured anyway by science.

See above. Not to mention a person who absolutely wanted to avoid said risk could just avoid the act of intercourse altogether - but of course a lot of religious fundamentalists would be against any recreational sexual activity, since preventing unwanted pregnancies isn't their real agenda.

Jimmy Swaggart? Ted Haggart?

Apparently having "found Jesus" didn't help them much. lol

I'd say the increased divorce rate is a positive thing, since what it means in practice is the ending of a lot of sham marriages which are "marriages" in name only but in practice dead relationships.

Famous author Dale Carnegie for example stayed in a horrible marriage for 8 years simply because it was less acceptable at the time to divorce.

And of course according to studies, Christians actually have higher divorce rates than other demographics, such as atheists.

Marriage and divorce were treated more seriously back in a day in age when a woman was much more dependent on the husband for support, and in which producing heirs for her father was considered a much more important "role".

Since the industrial age has made it easier for a woman to support herself without a man, and since we recognize women today individuals rather than "property" of her father, it's natural that long term, monogamous relationships are less of a pragmatic priority in this day and age.

If you want to return to a simpler, more puritanical time, then you'll need to undo all of the industrialization that's taken place over the past 70 years since WWII, which one one hand brought about a lot of the social changes which you're objecting to, yet at the same time made possible modern conveniences like the internet which people take for granted.

Jealousy's caused by emotionally immature individuals. If a person can't control their own emotions it's their problem.

None of Solomon's wives had much of a problem with jealousy apparently ;)

Whether people like it or not, monogamy isn't a "natural" institution within the human species - religious monogamy was invented by the early Catholic church and was done for practical reasons at the time, not because people "naturally" monogamous, because they aren't. it never even existed in the Bible at all - the ancient Israelites were polygamous.

Your standard of "respect" sounds like it's based more on the mentality that a woman is "property" and that one is "obligated" to marry her and produce heirs for her father (with little individual say in the matter) - than on actual principles of respect in the context of human interaction.

By that logic, then two people having consensual recreational sex are "disrespecting" each other, since "respect" is simply being re-defined to mean something other than what it actually does in the context of real human interactions.
No not at all. If anything the things you're talking about are a slightly excessive backlash against Puritanical repression of past eras.

As far as disrespect for example, talk a look - or how they were treated in the Old Testament - you'll see far more antisocial behavior occurring toward women in more ascetic cultures than you will in ours, with little exception.

But in in fact, countries which are the most ascetic are pretty much without exception the most barbaric, repressive, and deviant. From Iron Age Israel, to modern day Saudi Arabia - where a woman wearing jeans or showing her face in public is a bigger sin than stoning children or forcing girls to marry their rapists.

What aspect of "our culture" promotes it? Are you talking about the marketing industry?

While I believe that people do have to a degree and innate desire for modesty, I'd say the majority of is simply jealousy and a desire to control, as well as the simple creaton of a false dilemma. Bertrand Russell had a good understanding of this even back in 1936.

If you object to the excessive marketing of sexual content via the internet and the media, then ironically if you need to lay a blame anywhere - it would be excessive capitalism, and the execs who know that selling skimpy clothes or racy music is a great cash cow for marketing to rebellious teens who want to piss off daddy.

Hey, why not just marry off 9 year old girls to 50 year old men, and institute the death penalty if they ever get caught being an adulterous.

Take a look at the divorce rate in Saudi Arabia compared to ours. It works! lol :cool:

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Though it begs the question of why said trouble is being gone through to begin with to ensure that other people remain "monogamous" just for the sake of being "monogamous".

What would be the benefit in persuading two people who hate each other to remain in a miserable relationship for 10 years as opposed to just 5 years, especially when the only reason they're in the relationship to begin with is a fear of God's wrath, or a fear of their Church's disapproval, etc? Rather than any actual desire for the relationship itself.

Nothing I said remotely implies any of this.

Well, then it's a good thing nobody suggested that people should be monogamous just for the sake of being monogamous, then.

Nobody said this either. In fact, they explicitly gave other reasons entirely.

It's becoming abundantly clear that, if you don't get an argument that's easy to argue with, you just pretend people advanced one that is, anyway.

Re: How do you know the difference between right and wrong?
 

I don't have the time right now to go through everything you said one by one but I will say in every instance your argument is but hey I found something worse. Or the classic this guys believes the same as you and look at what he did. That is all deflection from the questions I asked.

The only thing you addressed head on was jealousy and your take away from that is just don't be jealous. Monogomy is not about "owning" one another. It is about two people commiting themselves to one another with their entire being. You always want to talk about things that are hard wired in us and that commitment is one of those things. You don't have to get to know people very well to figure that out. You can of course excuse it away or ignore it but it is in fact there. Yes, I bet even in Solomon and his wives. Once again pointing out that someone else did it wrong doesn't make your way right.

That's essentially what doing it just for the sake of religion is - it has nothing to do with the actual context of the relationship.

That's why we think that miserable couples who married just for money, religious reasons, etc divorcing is actually a "bad thing".

The other reasons were incorrect in many counts, and were also irrelevant, since even if none of them existed people would still support monogamy for religious reasons alone.

Just like the religious people who oppose homosexuality and claim it's because of the high rate of AIDs that gay men have - when in reality even if AIDs was cured they'd still oppose it just because "the Bible says so".

No it's not - the Bible says women should be submissive to their husbands, and that men may marry women they've violated if they pay her father pieces of silver.

Marriage in the Biblical, religious sense - is not about commitment or modern, egalitarian Western concepts - it's about producing heirs and owning women as property, nothing more.

Modern egalitarian marriage has nothing in common with "marriage" as practiced in the Bible or by Biblical literalists. It has nothing to do with commitment, but everything to do with control.

You're falsely equating monogamy with commitment, and no religious monogamy was not hardwired into us - it was invented by the early Catholic Church and did not exist anywhere in the Bible.

It's there with siblings too - no matter how equal a parent treats siblings they're inevitably going to have more in common with one child than the other, and the other child will feel a little jealous

That doesn't mean a person should "never have more than one kid though" just to avoid said potential jealousy.

And nope, I'd never bother with a woman who's so entitled and insecure that she has the nerve to be "jealous" of some ex of mine from years before I met her - the only thing I'd give a woman like that is the phone number to the local psych ward - lol

False dichotomy

To die sure, but you're very likely to get one as more than 110 million Americans have, what is that like 1/3?

Re: A thread about monogamy, relationships, and other stuff like that
 

Let's agree that you think my views on monogamy are dated and that I think yours is an excuse to do as you please. That way we can stop this from being a debate about OT law where you pretend that is where modern Christianity begins and ends. I will ask two questions to try and move us forward.

Do you draw a line in the sand anywhere when it comes to your sexuality? Number of partners, limited partners at one time. Just anything that would imply a limitation.

Would you hope future partner in a commited relationship has some sort of sexual standards for themselves?

you're right, we both could pull in anecdotal evidence to support what we're saying, and i for a fact could bring in anecdotal evidence to support my own claim as well as yours. what i mean is i know couples who have been happily monogamous (my grandparents are about to celebrate 60 years of marriage in October), and i also know a few poly-amorous couples who seem to have their s**t together and seem quite happy with that situation, too. i'm not trying to endorse 'poly-amorous relationships for all or gtfo.' what i am endorsing is that i think it's okay, not sinful, not immoral, if one wants to continue having sexual relationships with other people even if they are in a committed relationship, as long as they have their SO's consent.

i think it's safe to say that it's more of a case-by-case thing and not universal across the board for every relationship ever.

i think when it comes to committed relationships, it's a matter of taking a good, hard look at what you want out of it and what you want out of your partner, and making sure you're with someone who wants those same things as you do.

sorry, i'm not quite sure what you mean? i didn't realize we were talking about one's sex lives before they were in a committed relationship. i don't actually think it should matter to my fiance, for example, what kind of sex life i had before he knew me. all that should matter to him is who i'm having sex with now, depending upon what our agreements and expectations are in our relationship.

Hey, if you're just going to drop that child bride straw man nonsense the moment I push back on it, it might be better if you just invested a minute before you replied to see if you're saying anything obviously ridiculous. That way, you can avoid posting it at all.

And who said anything about staying together for the sake of religion? Nobody. Literally nobody. You're not replying to anything anyone has said.

Oh.

Er, first, this isn't true, for reasons I've pointed out before (without response). You're assuming no causation, as if religious reasons exist independent of other reasons. They don't. People practice religion because they think it's true, sure, but also because it has valuable things to teach them about human nature, which--check this out--is one of the reasons they think it's true. They wouldn't go on following it if you just flipped every edict to say the opposite.

Second, in what context would the motivation of monogamous people be "irrelevant"? Not in the context of the discussion we were, you know, actually having, which was about the relative benefits or detriments of promiscuity. What you really mean is that it's irrelevant for your own purposes, which appears to be finding excuses to talk about how much you hate religion. Nevermind if it has anything to do with what was being discussed.

Most STDs are easily treatable, and similar health risks arise from:

Eating fast food

Drinking alcohol or smoking

Not exercising enough

Video game addiction

Caffeine addiction

Thinking negatively too much

Social isolation

Sexual repression (studies show that it can be linked to developing paraphilias or dysfunctional sexual desires)

etc

Not to mention the risk of getting an STD from a partner who you know has tested negative for STDs is quite a different matter.

Yet the fixation specifically on STDs is highly disproportionate to the the actual statistics, because it's about religious reasons with "statistics" just being used retroactively to attempt to justify it.

Do you really think for example that if simple vaccination for all STDs was discovered, that Fred Phelps would just turn around and say "Okay I've changed my mind now, there's nothing wrong with homosexuality".? C'mon.

Says the guy who just implied that saying nice things about monogamy means marrying 9 year olds off to old men.

Nope - I just used it as an example of why using generic statistics such as "divorce" rates to make a point is a poor argument, since it's a fact that Saudi Arabia and Iran have lower divorce rates.

Sure some people may just divorce because they're too immature to make a relationship work; on the other hand back in the early 1900s it's not like a battered wife could just go visit a lawyer and being filing for divorce.

This is why I say that marriage and relationships are private matter between the couple, their marriage counselor, etc, and that people shouldn't be expected to be "monogamous" for religious reasons.

People who have a successful relationship are naturally more monogamous; they shouldn't feel pressured to stay in a bad relationship just to avoid the "sin" of divorce.