Took the survey.
ChrisPine
Don’t any of you have children?? Newborn babies are one thing, but there’s a cuteness of seeing small, perfect little versions of yourself or your mate… I don’t think a bunny could really compete.
No, other people’s babies aren’t that cute, but mine sure as hell are.
And in any case, I don’t really see how this relates to… whatever it is you are saying about ev-psych (or the deeper mystery of cuteness). Why would you expect evolution to make us only find human babies cute? Evolution only has to work hard enough to keep us from abandoning our babies, and to hell with the (bunny-related) side-effects. Why would evolution care how cute you think bunnies are, as long as it’s not so much that you start eating your babies and raising rabbits?
Which got even more upvotes… [sigh]
Please don’t become reddit!
Just took the survey. It was odd how only the word “Other” was translated into the Norwegian “Andre”… and everything else was in English.
While “acquire” and “harem” are words quite conflicting with the spirit of polyamory (and I know you were kidding), it’s a good point.
Though, as a flirty poly nerdy guy, I have no personal interest in this message getting out. :-)
It doesn’t seem that it would make her any richer, happier, more successful...
Sounds like you weren’t raised Mormon. :)
I was, so naturally what I’m about to say is extremely personal and important to me, and likely to be subject to the “what’s true for me must be true for all Mormons”, which is absurd, as most Mormons do not go one to become atheists as I have, but still...
...I cannot imagine how one could embrace the beauty and magnificence of this big world if one is stuck in the much smaller world of Mormonism. The contradictions mount and mount, until one of the following must happen:
one gives up on Mormonism,
one gives up on Worldly Things,
one learns to not be bothered by contradictions. (am I missing any possiblilities?)
I claim that giving up on the Extra-Mormon world does make one much less happy, and I just can’t imagine being happy in a life of contradictions… but maybe that’s just me?
Anyway, for the sake of their happiness, I want my children to have the whole world open to them, and I hope Wednesday will have the same.
Because seeing my partner being emotionally or physically intimate with someone else (or knowing they were, even without seeing it) = immediate non-specialness.
I don’t know why you would say this, and I strongly disagree.
I have three children. Does loving one mean that the other two are not special to me?? Does a parent only have enough love for one child? Why should it be so different for lovers?
I apologize for rocking the boat, if I have.
Interesting benefit of polyamory: there’s a lot less that can rock the boat (or sink it)! We enjoy a stability we did not have before.
I’m not really sure how much I should reply to any of this… I’m not trying to convince you that your religion is wrong. Most of my family is still Mormon, so I’m quite good at hanging out with Mormons and not trying to convince them that they are wrong. (In fact, my deeply-ingrained strategy is to avoid conversations just like the one we are having right now.)
Perhaps I should start at the end:
For someone convinced of contradictions you haven’t provided any. Remember you have to find the contradictions internally, so within the belief structure of the religion
No, I really don’t have to find them internally… I just have to find them within myself. I was not attempting to debunk Mormonism. (There are plenty of sites out there that do that, though, if you are really interested...) This was originally about Wednesday, and what I was saying (or trying to say) was that I could not live with the contradictions between what I believed and what Mormons are “supposed to” believe.
Perhaps this is all revolving around the word “contradiction”… and perhaps I should have used a different word.
And with that, I’m not sure I should even address your points. “Animals are for the benefit and use of man,” for example… well, yeah, I just don’t believe that. You state it like it’s fact.
In general, on morality: if it doesn’t hurt someone, it isn’t wrong. I didn’t think I needed to say that, but I haven’t talked to religious people about “right and wrong” in a long, long time. I haven’t met anyone who honestly thought masturbation was wrong in a long time… guess I’m out of practice. :-) Obviously “fun” is neither necessary nor sufficient for something to be “not wrong”. My point: if it doesn’t hurt anyone, then it isn’t wrong. And if it’s also fun, then Mormonism hurts you by making your life less wonderful than it could have been (at least in that instance).
As for contradictions in fact: there were no horses in America. There was no Flood, and no Adam and Eve. I know Mormons have that “as far as it is translated correctly” clause for the Bible, but even so: if a book is the word of God, it shouldn’t be factually incorrect, should it? (And it shouldn’t contain spelling errors.)
And you glossed right over the “there is no God” part. Well, do what you need to do, but for many of us: the absence of God is as much a fact as the existence of the Sun. So a book that says “there is a God” is contradicting the facts.
This is not a logic game to me: this is about what is really right and wrong, and how best to live in this short life we get (since it’s the only one we get). And for dear Wednesday’s sake, I hope she gets as much joy and beauty and excitement and fun that life has to offer!
And some of that involves alcohol (taken responsibly (which is not the same as “in moderation” in all cases)). And some of that (well, kind of a lot at some points) involves masturbation. And, if she plays her cards right, some of that might even involve polyamory or bisexuality or any of the billions of ways to love people. It’s what I want for my own children, and it’s what I want for Wednesday.
But in the Mormon church… I just don’t think she’s going to find that.
This is why I’ve always felt vaguely guilty about not being bisexual, since immortal superbeings clearly would be.
I’d be very interested in hearing about that hack. I haven’t been able to pull it off, myself, and also feel vaguely guilty about it. (Especially after seeing the grace and ease with which my wife pulled it off.)
Paul Graham also wrote on this.
You have to like to learn how to be a wizard.
Have you ever felt jealousy? Romantic or otherwise?
Yes, both. But I don’t see jealousy as this big emotional dead-end. “If you see jealousy, run the other way! Only evil will you find here!” Jealousy is a response. Like a rash or something. It’s an indication that something needs to be dealt with. It could be the emotional equivalent of skin cancer… but it’s more likely that it’s the equivalent of a need to use a different brand of soap. Upon further inspection, it’s often not that big of a deal.
Having multiple children doesn’t threaten the loss of your previous children. That’s why.
See, I think we are just looking at this from very different perspectives. Why would your partner need to leave you for another if they could just have you both?? It seems to me that monogamy and its “all or nothing” treatment of partners is what causes people to leave. Monogamy is not immune to partners leaving, to which divorce statistics attest. No, I would say that monogamy encourages leaving! Sometimes even demands it.
if you’re more secure in your primary relationship than I would be in a poly scenario, I feel like you may not be updating sufficiently given available information about human relationships.
I’m guessing we are updating on very different data. Monogamy is a disaster, contributing to tremendous misery and pain (not to mention waste of resources). And the polyamory I’ve seen has been largely positive. Not universally, but largely. On more than one occasion, I’ve even seen it save what monogamy threatened to destroy, with its insistence upon jealous, fear, and punishment.
I have no idea what you are talking about with Tortuga, so cannot reply to that (sorry).
But yes, it seems we have very different experiences with polyamory, and in both cases mostly anecdotal evidence. (Perhaps I have just been lucky!) But before you write off polyamory altogether, I would suggest that you take a harder look at monogamy and what it has left in its path.
About vegetarianism: you seem to be confusing two different positions:
it is ok to not eat animals
it is not ok to eat animals
One is the Mormon position, and the other is the vegan position. I understand that the Mormon church would be ok with something living a vegan lifestyle. No problem.
I am talking about being able to coherently hold the Mormon position and the vegan position. I’m talking about having the freedom to decided for myself that I believe it is wrong to eat animals. This is different from the freedom to just not eat animals. One is about actions you do or don’t do, and the other is about ethics.
If I were still Mormon, I could not give a talk in church about how it’s wrong to eat animals. If I were to tell others that I thought it was wrong (I’m really not the preachy sort at all, BTW, and most of my friends are carnivores, but if I were to tell others), I would be told by someone in authority in the church that I was incorrect. That animals are here for us to use, and God said so, and I am wrong if I think that’s not how it is. Because an old book said so.
I find this unacceptable. I find the idea (that I am not free to try to discover what is right and wrong in this world) to be totally unacceptable. After thinking long and hard about this (for years), and after accruing a great deal of evidence and experience, I have come to believe something, and someone who has never thought much about it at all can just tell me that I’m wrong, and This Is The Mormon Truth, because it’s written in an old book. It’s everything this website is against!! (IMHO)
Now don’t take this the wrong way: I welcome religious people to this website, I value differing points of view, and I think we can all stand to be a bit less wrong. But I have to ask: given your viewpoints (which seem to suggest that the way to be less wrong is to listen to god and read your scriptures)… why are you here?? What are you getting out of this?
Anyway… about the alcohol: did you even read what I originally wrote? I wrote “alcohol (taken responsibly (which is not the same as “in moderation” in all cases))”
Responsibly. Which might (might!), in some cases, be to some degree of excess… but still responsibly. That is what I said. You took that and went straight to every sort of excess and irresponsibility you could think of.
I’m just not sure we’re having the same conversation here, John. I really didn’t want to debate Mormon theology or the existence of God. My main point was that the Mormon church is too restrictive in terms of what is “allowed”, both in terms of behaviors and beliefs. Too restrictive on things that might give Wednesday happiness some day.
However, you started that sentence by saying it wasn’t a logic game. If logic and reason are not to be used in determining what is really right and wrong and divine revelation is out then what are you left with? Are you trying to say you have taken then indefensible but unassailable position of a relativist that also believes logic itself is relative? In which case, you should have let us know this to start out with as any claims of contradiction, if that is what you hold, may as well be saying that 1=1 is a contradiction.
This is EXACTLY what I mean by “playing logic games”. Are you really trying to understand my position here, or just reductio-ad-absurdum everything I say? Because I have a seven-year-old, and I get plenty of that already. :-)
And one of my points is that even with this definition most of what you have posted as being fun can and does hurt people and society.
I suspected you would say this, which is why I mentioned “candles and canned corn” in an attempt to skip over this part: yes, alcohol can hurt people, and it does. So do swimming pools. (I’m not even sure which one is responsible for more deaths per year, but they are both WAY more than for marijuana, in any case.) Yet the Mormon church forbids alcohol, but not pools. I am saying that both are fun, but only if handled responsibly.
Forgive me if I’m mischaracterizing your arguments, but I feel like you are spending more energy trying to point out why I’m wrong and Mormonism is right, than you are in honestly trying to understand my position: hurting people is bad, and having fun is good. Some things can be fun in some contexts and hurtful in others. The fun ones are good, and the hurtful ones are bad. But I didn’t really need to spell that out, did I? I think you knew what I meant.
For alcohol, for instance, Wednesday is less likely to remember what she is doing if she is drunk
Yeah… I don’t mean to ad-hominem you, but, just as a meta-statement: this really sounds like the kind of thing someone without a lot of experience with alcohol would say. Obviously she doesn’t need to get totally drunk every time she drinks… this is certainly not what I had in mind. But the Mormon church also forbids a glass or two of wine with dinner, once a week. And that hurts nobody. And is pretty fun for many people. The kind of fun they will remember.
Myths of the flood exist in almost all cultures so to me it seems arrogant to say it did not exist.
Arrogant?? Do you have any idea how incredibly impossible such a thing would have been?? Run the numbers on this one… (unless, of course, you just say “God did it”). In any case, one can look at the rings of trees, match them up to older trees, match those up to still older trees… there’s been no flood for many MANY thousands of years, on that evidence alone.
Argh! I really don’t want to point-by-point debate you on your beliefs! I am not trying to convince you of anything. But if you are interested, you can look into it: the flood was either allegory, or it was a serious “God just did it, then covered up the evidence” moment (and obviously I can’t argue against that).
Anyway… if you find peace and happiness in the Mormon church, and you don’t feel hindered by all the things you can’t do, and you don’t feel stifled that you can’t decide for yourself what is right and wrong in all cases (I am speaking of coming to a decision that it is unethical to eat animals, for example, which the church would find to be incorrect), then fine.
However, I did not feel that way.
Wow… this was from a long time ago, and I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking at the time, but I can try some guesses:
Contradictions in fact: there’s really no good evidence for god or Jesus or the Book of Mormon or the Bible… these things are (at least to me) clearly false. (This is a site on rationality, not atheism, so I don’t want to get caught up in a discussion on atheism… but if one is honest and rational, the contradictions abound.)
Contradictions in morality: Is alcohol really wrong? Smoking? Coffee?? Not sure what the Mormon positions are on things like oral/anal sex with one’s spouse, but I’m pretty sure that they are not at all into masturbation, threesomes/foursomes/moresomes, bi-/homosexuality, swinging, or just about any form of polyamory. Sorry, but these things are fun!! They are simply not sinful, and not wrong. (Sure, any of these could be abused, but the same could be said of candles or canned corn… “could be abused” is not a sufficient condition for “sinful”.)
And finally… I’m not sure if there are any vegan Mormons (there probably are), but it seems like the Mormon position on such things (I don’t claim to know! only guessing!) is that animals are here for humans to use. As a vegan, I vehemently disagree. I’m guessing that the Mormon church would not have a problem with a member living a vegan lifestyle (would not consider it wrong to so do), but would consider it wrong (at least in the sense of “incorrect”, if not in the sense of “immoral”) to believe that killing animals is wrong.
I don’t think there’s a lot of room for one to make up one’s own mind about morality/ethics in the Mormon church (and probably in many religions). Considering how many things I think are wrong that the church is just fine with, and how many things the church thinks are wrong that I think are tons of fun… I would be far less happy to still be Mormon.
I’m guessing that’s what I was trying to say, almost exactly one year ago.
And one from Oslo.
I read this, and thought of Wednesday: “Among all American religions, Mormonism is the single most sexually guilt ridden. Mormonism scores 37%% higher in sexual guilt than even Catholics.”
from here: http://www.atheismresource.com/2012/sex-god-a-new-and-fascinating-book-by-darrel-ray
I don’t know how many ex-mormons you’ve talked to, but I’ve talked to quite a few, and in nearly every case we were miserable in the church, and much happier outside of it.
I was not, no. :-)
(But if you know that one, too, please share.)
Yes. Of course if you have multiple children they’re individually less special to you!
Hmm… perhaps we don’t mean the same thing when we use the word “special”. If I pretend that you used a word unfamiliar to me instead and had to work only on context, where you continue with:
You have less time and energy for each, less brain-space to store facts about each
...then I’d have to agree with you. Certainly, I have less time and energy to devote to each child.
and you aren’t even culturally allowed to have a favorite!
For the record, I never claimed to love them all equally, or to not have a favorite. (They are all my favorites, in different realms, but even so… it would be absurd to claim that it just happens to all add up to be equal.)
But I don’t see what point you are making here. My point is that my love for the first child was not diminished by the arrival of the second. For some other definition of special (importance in my life), I would say that the first is just as special to me.
The reason this is brought up (perhaps mostly by poly people with more than one child) is that one’s capacity for love, for this “specialness” is not fixed! Another child comes along, and your capacity grows. Another long-term, committed partner, and your capacity grows.
That is the point of the argument: capacity is not fixed in size.
As for why it should be different for lovers, the psychology about lovers and children is very different.
Certainly, but the point about specialness-capacity-increase is fairly general. I would apply it to lovers, to children, to favorite movies, to desserts, to symphonies… the more things we love (or are special or meaningful to us), the more our capacity increases. These things, these experiences make us grow. (Well, maybe not desserts; that’s a different kind of growth.)
And we accept that this is how we work in terms of children, movies, food, music… why make an exception for lovers?
There is no reason in principle why we couldn’t have been hardwired for extreme strict romantic monogamy and still love lots of children.
Ok. I suppose not. I suppose we could have been hardwired for extreme preference for only one flavor of ice-cream… Do you just really not like the comparisons between different categories of things we like/love/enjoy? Of course our feelings for these different categories are all very, very different, but the generalization seems valid enough to me.
And especially: if they feel similar enough to me for the generalization to hold, then I’m really not going to be convinced that I must love only one by the argument “romantic love is different because it’s different”. (Which isn’t what you were saying, but it’s the message this line of argument addresses.)
It’s a cautionary tale about Norwegian food.