So when I came out as polyamorous in February, the godless Slymepit blew a gasket. But so did Christians. Their freakout was quaint. And hardly substantive. So I just filed it as something to amuse over when I had time. Now as I sit for hours in the Raleigh-Durham airport awaiting my flight home, drinking a lovely bottle of Carolina wine from the Old North State Winery, what better fun than to survey the Christian panic over poly?
First I’ll summarize a sample of some of what happened, then delve into a long treatment of the most thoughtful (albeit still totally wrong) example…
(1) Commonly, of course, there were calls to pray for my ex-wife. Because she must be so downtrodden. Divorce between equals that is to the best of both is not conceivable to conservo Christians. They cannot imagine a strong financially independent woman who gets to do her own thing when she wants.
They also think prayer can make someone they never have any contact with feel better about personally sad changes in their life. Because they believe in sorcery. And third-party mind control. These are, after all, superstitious magical thinkers who believe superbeings in outer space not only listen to them, but also cast mind-altering emotion spells on random people they don’t know.
(2) There have also been a slurry of ad hominem / well-poisoning fallacies, of the general form “Carrier is polyamorous, therefore his arguments about history and theology are all bollocks,” which just demonstrates Christians don’t do logic well. (That’s why they’re Christians.) Likewise the “this proves you are only atheists because y’all just wanna sin” argument, which is funny, because Christians frequently use that argument in defense of evil (e.g. attacking homosexuality or women’s autonomy or even the freedom of speech and conscience).
To call polyamory, which is about honesty and love and the assurance of consent, “sin” is just to expose how immoral Christianity has become as an ideology. What Christians call “sin” is all too often “being a decent, well adjusted human being minimizing harm in the world.” In any event, either way, Matt Dillahunty already scorched the earth on this one, responding to an example of such irrationality from Robert Martin. Watch that. I couldn’t say it better myself.
All I would add is that this is exactly the same as saying I’m only an atheist because I’m gay (if such I were) and “just want to sin.” Or saying I’m only an atheist because I’m a woman who wants to wear pants (Deuteronomy 22:5), and teach classes and manage male employees (1 Timothy 2:11-15), and therefore “just want to sin.” And the only reason Jews ever convert to Christianity is because they just want to sin—by eating shrimp and bacon.
Note to Christians: Learn how logic works. Please. By all you think is holy. Because this shit is just embarrassing you.
(3) Then there was also some laughably extreme bigotry, such as an article by Ken Ammi (who?) for the Examiner online that was eventually pulled, but the Internet Never Forgets (it also came to be re-hosted at various other sites), titled “Richard Carrier Is a Polyamorous Dog,” in which he says polyamory is just code for “perverted sexual deviant” and that we atheists are all just governed by our erections (somehow I don’t think he was including engorged clitorises in that remark; yet nearly half of atheists are women now).
Ammi also repeatedly and confusedly thinks polyamory means having “temporary sexual parterns de jour” (never mind the redundancy; he’s fond of the phrase). He didn’t get that from anything I wrote. In fact, one of the things I am enjoying now is the opposite of that: building multiple lasting relationships with my loves. And that is in fact a major credo of polyamory: having many non-temporary sexual partners. So, bigotwhocantgooglesayswhat?
Ammi also thinks this means atheists should just conclude “any orifice will do.” Evidently forgetting the existence of, you know, people.
(4) I’ll just briefly mention the amusing entry on me at Conservapedia, which is a menagerie of the fears and terrors of ultra reactionary conservative wingnuts. It ironically documents with moral terror my love of alcohol (why yes, after all, in five hours I finished that bottle of wine!); the existence of orgies in the world; my adulteries, and polyamory as solution to them; my Soviet-style (no shit) doubting of the historicity of Jesus; my abandoning of Atheism Plus (which they don’t describe) within one month (which is weird because they even quote an article of mine defending Atheism Plus one year later, illustrating that conservatives can’t do math); and my providing evidence that Antony Flew was abused and manipulated by Christians for propaganda purposes when in a state of declining senility (an accusation that really gets their dander up). Random. All, of course, slanders and bullshit. Except when it’s true, then it’s just funny.
(5) I heard some folks at Triablogue were faux raising money to fund my prostitution habits (because poly is prostitution, ergo my girlfriends are whores), but I don’t know where that went on. I also heard some stuff was said by Jason Engwer, Lenny Esposito, and Frank Turek (but not William Lane Craig?), but I couldn’t find it, or recall where I saw any of that myself. So if you know of Christian handwringing over this event online, feel free to add links in comments (note comments on my blog close after six days).
(6) But most thoughtful was Nick Peters. And here his remarks deserve a lengthy analysis and response, in the service of education…
Carrying Deep Water for Monogamy
Nick Peters, son-in-law of renowned Christian apologist Mike Licona, blogs at Deeper Waters. He reacted. Not surprisingly, as Licona and I have debated twice, hung out a few times, and communicate occasionally. Maybe that Kevin Bacon number was too small not to try and intervene before the floods of relationship chaos spread too far to crush Christian control.
Peters also fell for the lies and bubble of bullshit promulgated by the Slymepit trolls Yeti and Shermertron. But I already covered that. Note this means Christians don’t know who the fringe atheist wingnuts are. But we can just laugh at that. And return to his more serious article…
Amusingly, Peters begins the substantive part of Along Came Poly with, “prominent internet blogger Richard Carrier, who seems to be the answer to all conservative NT scholarship in the eyes of internet atheists everywhere, wrote a post about” coming out poly. So, a well published Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University with numerous peer reviewed books and articles in major journals and presses is just an internet blogger. Whom Christians are evidently annoyed everyone keeps citing and quoting at them online. Okay.
He then quotes a good definition of polyamory from a legit organization [“Polyamory is the nonpossessive, honest, responsible and ethical philosophy and practice of loving multiple people simultaneously,” etc.], and responds immediately with, “Now if you want to say as I seem to take it that this entails a desire to have sex with many people other than one’s own spouse, then I will tell you that there are many many people who I think are really polyamorous. Namely, every male on the planet, including myself.”
He missed the egalitarian part (um, your wife or girlfriend also gets to do this…and nearly as many women as men want to, BTW; and many men actually aren’t interested, either—and not just asexuals, who are in fact a thing; plus, not all of us poly folk are married, but conservo Christians balk at sex without marriage anyway, so maybe unmarried free lovers aren’t readily conceivable to them). He also missed the loving or caring about your partners part (sex isn’t just fucking; compassionate persons regard their sexual partners as friends…and as people…and have room to be in love with more than one of them). And the honesty and negotiating what you want part (this is with the consent and approval of all involved, not on the sly or against their wishes).
So, does that describe “every male on the planet”? Nope. If only it did. The world would be a far better place. But if you obsess over just the sex part and miss all the rest, you won’t even be able to start getting why the world would be better if all of it were poly. By which I mean, all accepting poly as the baseline, and monogamy or celibacy as the rare personal choices that just suit certain people and not most of people.
People should get to negotiate the relationships they want. Period. Autonomy demands no less. There is no basis, rational or scientific, for forcing on anyone a given model of monogamy. And certainly none for stigmatizing, slut shaming, belittling, or treating with bias and bigotry anyone who chooses not to use that outdated and limiting model of relationshipping. Trying to culturally manipulate people into following and norming that model is just one more way Christianity fucks up people’s lives.
But as with taking away abortion rights, women’s rights, gay rights, free speech rights, denigrating or punishing alternative sexuality, warmongering, pushing for theocracy and forcing religion on people, feigning or even denigrating actual concern for the welfare of the poor rather than preferencing the rich, bigotry against immigrants and anyone who looks even remotely maybe Muslim, and dozens of other ways Christians in actual practice fuck up the world in the name of Christ, it’s vitally necessary to defend the obsolete and damaging institution of socially compelled monogamy. So Peters has to. He has no choice.
As one Christian apologetics clearinghouse says (see CARM on Polyamory), poly is just “another form of wife-swapping” (except that it often doesn’t involve married people, often not even at all, and not all marriages include wives, but whatever). “So,” they ask, “how is this ‘ethical nonmonogamy’?” After all, “adding the word ‘ethical’ to something doesn’t make it so.” Although adding honest and consensual and respectful does. And guess what? That’s the ethical part. So when CARM asks “Why not have such things as ethical adultery, ethical bank robbing, or ethical embezzling?” they obviously don’t know what polyamory is. Or why it is called ethical non-monogamy. And like their irrational terror of homosexuality, they think polyamory will lead to “necrophilia or bestiality.” Because, you know, reasons. Or something.
Oh also, of course, it will lead to pedophilia. I shouldn’t forget to mention the pedophilia. (Even though abundant evidence sooner suggests Catholicism leads to that.) So, “the necessary consequence is the attack and breakdown of the family” (read: it will end women’s subordination to men) and “an increase of immorality in subsequent areas” (the reader has to fill in the blanks here, because they can’t come up with anything), “and ultimately the demise of society itself.” Somehow. How? I don’t know. Neither do they. It just must, I guess. They are right that “moral integrity is the glue that holds society together” and that “without it, we can have no society.” They just don’t seem to have any clue what morality is. Honesty, compassion, respect, and reasonableness don’t seem to be moral virtues in their scheme of things. Just what objects you fuck.
Thus, sexual desire has to be bad. It therefore, as Peters says, requires “self-control” to deny yourself what is obviously a natural and normal inborn desire. Because, for some unintelligible reason, “sex is meant to be between two people who make a covenant together,” even though, if that were the case, we would have been designed to only sexually desire our covenented partner. That we were built to desire many partners, as even he admits, seems to falsify his entire thesis.
Bible Study Interlude
It’s also weird that he thinks “two people,” when even if he is ignoring science and relying on that antiquated prescientific hodgpodge of random superstitious tracts called “the Bible,” the entire Bible is 100% pro polygamy for the rank and file: God-sanctioned covenants with many partners are normal throughout it. (Only for men, of course. Because the Bible is sexist. But then, so is Peters. Since he thinks only “every male” wants multiple sexual partners.) His God was once also 100% pro-sex slavery, BTW, but presumably Peters is a cafeteria Christian and ignores the uncomfortable commandments in his own Book. Or the fact that the God he worships was once totally cool with them.
Jesus never commanded monogamy. He only is reputed to have said, quite explicitly, that a man cannot take another wife after divorcing a wife. He said nothing about taking several wives, divorcing none (Mark 10:1-12). Similarly Paul says a woman must have a husband all to herself (idion), but explicitly did not say that of men, but rather only that men should not fool around with someone else’s wife (but only a wife who was his own, heauton: 1 Cor. 7:1-16).
Even when in the second century someone forged the letters Titus (1:6) and 1 Timothy (3:2, 3:12) in the name of the then long-dead Paul, they explicitly only mandated monogamy for church leadership. Not for the rank and file Christian. Probably because polygamy was against pagan law at the time, for anyone who wanted Roman citizenship, and so thus needed for anyone who required respectability among the pagan authorities. Like the church leaders who had to deal with them. By then Christianity was distancing itself from polygamous Judaism and seeking respectability within pagan culture.
In other words, a century after it started, Christians started adopting monogamy not to be more biblical, but to be more pagan. They chose popular culture over the Bible. (Hmm. I wonder what Nick Peters thinks about Christians choosing pop culture over the Bible?)
Back to the Water
Next Peters then lays out a standard sexist case for monogamy: polyamory is “going to a woman and saying ‘You’re not enough for me. I need more than you’,” and “That hits at the core of a woman’s identity very often.” Except when it doesn’t. Because just as often it’s the other way around: a woman going to a man and saying the same thing. Does that “hit to the core of a man’s identity?” Not evidently according to Peters, since he thinks all men want many partners. Yet these same men have to want to be the only one a woman desires? Nick Peters, meet sexism. Also, meet pseudoscience. Our identity should not be based on totally possessing another human being.
Quite a lot of women want multiple partners. Quite a lot of men do. So why can’t they get together and negotiate what works for them? Indeed, shouldn’t those very people do exactly that, and not remain attached unfairly to monogamous partners? Ineed, if monogamy is the woman’s thing, and not her man’s thing, or vice versa, doesn’t that entail they shouldn’t be married? Relationships must be based on mutual consent and compatibility, not sex slavery. Right?
Of course in all this I’m only speaking within the context of heterosexuality. Because I know Peters would not recognize the existence of loving sexual relationships between women and women, or men and men, polyamorous or monogamous. And bisexuality? That would probably blow a spring out of his head.
Is Marriage Supposed to Be Hard?
Peters then goes on about monogamy being hard. Note: if you think “relationships are hard,” you are doing them wrong.
Parenting is hard. Coping with debt is hard. Being stuck in a job you hate is hard. Relationships should actually in fact be the one thing that isn’t hard. Does anyone say “gosh, friendship is hard”? No. Ask yourself why. Because if you are a mature person, adding sex to a friendship shouldn’t suddenly add a ton of hardship. It shouldn’t add even an ounce. So why do people like Peters think “marriage is hard”? What on earth are they doing wrong?
Maybe charitably one can assume he is confusing non-relationship things (raising kids, servicing debt, struggling with career) with being in love with, finding comfort in, spending time with, sharing life with, and having sex with your friend. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. He clearly seems to be saying it’s hard solely because it requires constant laborious struggle to keep your natural non-monogamous desires in check and thus compel yourself to remain loyal to what is essentially a sexual property contract. A sexual property contract that serves no purpose. At all.
Welcome to Christianity.
That many atheists have yet to realize how Christian this is is a testament to how pervasively Christianity has dominated and constructed our culture and social system.
The sad irony is that Peters tries to use “people … did monogamy for centuries and found … it seems to work pretty well” as an argument in favor of it, knowing full well that that is false: cheating has been universal and rampant throughout all those centuries. As has marital misery, so common in fact it became a universal trope. Evidently, people can’t do monogamy. Centuries and centuries of evidence proves this. So why are we still recommending it? Why are we still trying to force ourselves to fit a mold that isn’t in fact human? It’s a system that has never worked. (But for at best a relative few.) We just pretend it works for everyone by ignoring its vast quantity of fails. But any product that failed this routinely we’d have stopped using by now. Think about that.
Divorce is a Fundamental Human Good
Peters does make a strange foray into why you should put up with the things you don’t like about a spouse, although that can’t have anything to do with the case he is talking about. We didn’t divorce because my wife was too keen on collecting cats and I kept stealing the covers. We divorced each other because, given the reality (and not the lie) of who we are, we couldn’t be as happy together as apart. This wasn’t about minor annoyances of living together. This was about the fundamentals of our happiness.
Peters doesn’t get that, because he thinks divorce should only be allowed in cases of adultery or abuse. Everyone else should just put up with being miserable and “make it work,” when in fact they both could be not miserable with someone else. So Peters’ recommendation is fundamentally irrational. And fundamentally destructive of human happiness on a wide social scale.
Similarly, because Peters is a superstitious magical thinker, he thinks contracts should be eternal—to hell with happiness (almost literally). Secular folk know better. Any contract can be dissolved. It’s not a promise “forever.” It’s a conditional arrangement: if x, then y. Which means when no longer x, no longer y. Divorce is fundamentally built into the state contract for marriage. When you vow to marry someone, and sign on the dotted line, you are vowing also to allow them to divorce you whenever they want. That’s the law. The law Christians fought so damned hard in defense of just to prevent gay people from joining in. If Christians don’t like that unilateral divorce is also being promised to in secular marriage contracts, they shouldn’t be getting state marriage licenses.
In light of this complete disregard for human happiness, typical of Christianity, it’s particularly interesting that Peters says “Divorce … becomes a way of saying ‘I can’t love you the way you are’,” confusing not having your needs met with “not loving someone.” This may be key to a really harmful notion of love infecting Christianity. Imagine Peters saying the same of a mere friend who insisted he have no other friends but only them: that you had better do what they say, and abandon all your other friends, because otherwise you don’t love them. Or imagine a brother who insisted Peters love none other of his siblings, and not even his parents, but only him. Either scenario explodes the whole idea of love he is trying to sell.
I suspect even Peters would say in such a case, “Hey, I love you, you are a great friend, but I can’t be happy with only one friend in my life, and in fact your asking that I love only one friend and have no others is disrespectful to and controlling of me—in fact, it suggests you don’t love me, because you are acting out of your own selfish possessiveness rather than in concern for my happiness.” And that isn’t the only thing that can be the reason. They can still love you and be hopelessly insecure or burdened with envy. But those aren’t good either. Even then Peters would admit, if they can’t work through that, they can’t be his friend. No matter how much he loves them or they love him. The quantity of love either way is irrelevant.
A New Understanding
And so it is. Just because our culture has so molded the minds of so many people that they can’t be happy unless their “spouse” can be their “only x” does not mean that’s a good thing we should be defending. Any more than we would allow this if it were mono-friendship we were talking about. Or mono-familial love. Obviously we think those are ridiculous. We readily and easily love many friends and many family members, without controversy or difficulty. So why does sex change any of that? Objectively, it doesn’t.
Just as people differ in their hobby and other interests, so people differ in their libidos and sexual interests. With every other domain, good spouses allow their partners to explore such things with others. If they aren’t into sports but you are, they let you enjoy sports with friends who share your enthusiasm. If they are into gardening and you aren’t, you let them enjoy gardening with friends who share their enthusiasm. And even when you share interests, you are still allowed to also share them with others. So why suddenly does this generosity end when it’s sex? There isn’t any valid reason.
And yet I know many people, even atheists, are trapped in thinking there must be. Because their upbringing has programmed them to think that. I know. I was one of them. For a very long time. And it’s really hard to break your programming. I don’t expect everyone can. This is yet one more truth of moral and human progress in which, as Thomas Paine said, time will make more converts than reason. I count myself fortunate that I broke my programming before time erased me.
I am happier now. I love several women now. Just as I love several friends. And a whole slew of family. Peters does not seem to understand that. Love is not limited to one person. Some of the women I have sexual relationships with I love dearly; some are only my friends, and yet I love them too, in the way I love all friends. And all of them have many lovers as well, male and female. And they, too, are in love with some of them, and loving friends to others. The sky does not fall.
Peters does say one correct thing in the end: “Carrier’s embracing of polyamory should be a reminder to Christians that this stuff is becoming more and more acceptable. It’s not going to go away.” Indeed. And while Peters says the way to combat it is for Christians to double down in obedience to their sexual property contracts (which Peters admits is so “hard” to do, but for some inadequately explained reason Christians should just tough it out), I will suggest an alternative: Christian polyamory.
I asked Steve Hays if he was interested in a date with you, but it seems he wasn’t: http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2015/05/josephus-on-portents-and-prodigies.html?showComment=1430927549023&m=1#c1302657928631210786
Aw.
Richard, polyamory is wrong. I would think you, with your degree in Ancient History and knowledge of Greek and Latin culture and language, would understand that better than most. Why do you use the word polyamory as opposed to polyphilia or multiamory? Does it cause you no shame, sir, to mix Greek and Latin roots?
OK, joking aside, when I was composing this response in my head, I initially wanted to say, “I don’t really care what you or anyone else does in a sexual realm, so long as it’s all done between consenting adults.” But that isn’t really fair of me. I am a cisgendered bisexual man, but I’m married to a woman so the only way that people know about my bisexuality is if I go out of my way to tell them. And Dan Savage and others have long written of the wonderful effects that simply knowing LGBT persons has on helping others not in the community love and accept and advocate for them. I can understand how that same visibility would help people in the poly community find greater acceptance, so on that basis I understand the need to “come out,” as it were.
Oh, ummm, eeesh, I don’t know how to break this to you, but…
Homosexuality
Sociology
Television
…
The disease is spreading!
But yes, joking aside, your serious remark is apt, IMO.
Richard, at the end you make it seem a little as if being non-polyamorous is the same as being unable to set yourself free from social programming. This is not correct.
In my non-expert understanding, monogamy developed for two obvious reasons:
1) men wanted to invest only in their genetic children and needed a way to control procreation of females in question,
2) diseases.
Nowadays these issues are not that significant, thanks to technological progress, which gives some of us freedom to be polyamorous.
But there are other limitations and conditions for relationships we have as human beings, most notably,
a) time (attention potential),
b) emotional intensity, and
c) difficulty to find desirable people.
To know and love our partners deeply, we often need to spend lots of time, communicating with them, preferably tete-a-tete for intimacy, and to keep the continuity and solid memories (our brains are far from ideal for this tasks, multiplied). To achieve the highest pleasure, some of us (or sometimes) need an exclusively intense emotion (love or passion). And for some of us, even to meet one person who could potentially satisfy us is far from easy.
PS: more like “no longer x, not necessarily y.”
All true.
Especially the PS, since contracts can be renegotiated! So that’s a useful expansion of the point.
For the rest, also true.
Note that at several points I do mention monogamy does work best for some people.
Also, you may be over restricting in your mind how poly works. You can have a deep high-time bond with a primary partner, while having sex with friends, just as you play board games or go bowling with them. You can be mono with a poly partner. You can have a deep bond with two people in a live-in triad. And so on. So really, it’s only couples who both aren’t that interested in extracurricular sex, or who just haven’t found a good third for a triad, who would prefer actual monogamy.
Likewise, I should note, that if “even to meet one person who could potentially satisfy us is far from easy” then one might consider finding two or three people who together satisfy all your needs, rather than expecting one single perfect person to. Odds go way up then. We already do this non-sexually (we have very close friends and family we rely on as well as sexual partners). So it’s unlikely that you literally have love room for only one deep bond. At least, if I found myself in your position, I’d seriously explore whether maybe I actually do have room for more. You might be surprised.
But more importantly, I think what should be taken away with my closing point is not so much that we must all break free of programming to be poly, but that we must all break free of programming to be genuinely accepting of poly as a normal thing in society in general, and thus no longer do what the Nick Peters of the world do: continually try to reinforce the monogamy model on others, even inadvertently, such as by engaging in monogamy apologetics (i.e. not for yourself, which is fine, but in defense of it being the norm, and poly deviant) or outright bigotry (slut shaming, derogation, mockery, distancing, and all the ways society uses pressure to compel people to conform to something). In short, if someone thinks poly is icky or weird, then that’s the programming they need to break from. Just as they may need to break from all the guilt-based baloney a religion may have foisted on them about sex stuff in general, even for stuff they aren’t into but still “judge” as icky and weird because of that programming (e.g. BDSM or group or what have you). This is an overall point of Darrel Ray’s book Sex & God.
I don’t think I made that clear in the text, so it’s handy to have the chance to clarify here. Thanks!
I am amused by the realization that monogamous Christians (by doing so) are rejecting the polygamous teachings of the bible. It makes me suspect that religious “philosophies” have very little to say that is practical regarding relationships.
The other amusing point here for me is the claim that doubting the historicity of Jesus is somehow a Soviet style thing. Maybe some Soviets did do some bible research, but I’ve never heard anyone cite it. If nobody, pro or con, is making any such connections, then it can’t really be Soviet style. Clearly, it’s just raised as an attack, but one with no evidence. It is a Potmpkin insult, which looks superficially real, but actually has no substance.
The fact that they reach so quickly for baseless points just highlights their lack of substantial points.
Yep. They have also in the past tried to make Nazi connections (through Arthur Drews, who was never a Nazi but the Nazis tried to claim him).
I think the inability to “do” logic is a problem that precedes logic.
I have encountered a slew of very vocal Christians recently, and they simply cannot, CANNOT, use the word ‘lie’ (or any of its derivations correctly). They will say, for example, that I don’t know what I’m talking about, whatever it may be, and then accuse me of lying. When I point out that in order to lie, I need to know the truth and be intentionally obscuring it, and that if I don’t know what I’m talking about that this is not possible, they change the subject. I recently had a guy do it to me a half dozen times in the space of 12-15 posts on YouTube.
(I think Theramin Trees’ recent video explains why theists don’t understand what lying is, but I do think that the correct use of other words is beyond a surprising number of these people.)
… pedophilia. (Even though abundant evidence sooner suggests Catholicism leads to that.)
Lots of other evidence implicates Protestantism to at least the same degree.
I’d say you should replace “Catholicism” with “Christianism” in the above sentence, except that would exempt other components within the rest of the Abrahamic tradition.
Which in turn would leave off the hook various polytheistic sects.
So far as I know, the atheistic side of society has no pedophilia scandals (yet), merely serial harassments and rapes of adult women. Yay, us. [/s]
Oh, yes, of course. I was telling a joke, based on popular tropes. The joke doesn’t work if you obscure it with technical details.
But yes, absolutely, you are correct on the details. And well worth footnoting as you have.
(Except maybe with regard to pedophilia or at least pederasty scandals within atheism—and I assume you mean organized atheism, as obviously there must be atheist pedophiles, just as a statistical inevitability. Just Google James Randi and young boys and make your own judgment call.)
Dr. Carrier: Do you have a link to reliable evidence that James Randi is a pedophile? The Google search I made makes it look like homeopaths, psychics , and other phonies that have an ax to grind are the ones making these allegations. How would “statistical inevitability” enter into this? Are you echoing Xtian propaganda that links gay men to pedophilia?
As I said, use your own judgment.
I almost took your advice, running the recommended search on DuckDuckGo (a better search engine, imho, returning very few duplicate results).
Nearly all the hits came from sites of various blatant woo-meisters and similar low-credibility hustlers (and did not agree with each other that well). The most reliable-looking info came from a 2003 Straight Dope message board thread (see comments by “RealityChuck” & “Reader99” in particular), claiming that Randi had cooperated with police in a sting to catch a genuine pedophile, and that Randi’s enemies used tapes from that episode out of context to smear him.
Even a 2014 attack on Randi in The Telegraph doesn’t mention such accusations. The Wikiwacky has nothing on this, though it does describe the 2011-12 identity theft case involving Randi’s partner (now husband).
Right. The sitch is vague. Randi has vouched the tapes are real (the only evidence any of the woo folk had). But what evidence has been produced to back Randi’s explanation? Not that it doesn’t exist. It does seem strange it’s not online by now, even though Randi claims to have said evidence in a folder. But that’s not conclusive either. It can be troubling without being damning. It’s certainly not comparable to other cases. But I wouldn’t declare it impossible either, as if atheists are immune to the crimes of priests.
… I wouldn’t declare it impossible either…
The information available doesn’t add up to much – but if you ran it through the Bayesian analysis you promote for similar problems in history, would these accusations even reach the “merits discussion” level?
Everything for which there is evidence merits discussion. Even if the discussion ends in “there is also enough evidence to dismiss it.”
In fact, that just describes the entire history of the Skeptics movement.
One thing to think about with regard to polyamory (“thing to think about,” not criticism) is that in a society where it’s mainstream it might lead to a measurable decrease in that society’s child replacement rate. This assumes that polyamorous women tend to have fewer children than married women (this is anecdotally true to me, but falsifiable, so data on this would be welcome). And it depends also on there being a lower reproductive rate among polyamorous women not just in a society in which polyamory is marginal, as it is now in the USA, but in which it’s mainstream (I don’t know if there is reliable existing data on this, or how to predict it). And that even if world population is increasing, a negative birth rate within a given society can be bad for that society, as when it becomes difficult for the society’s working population to financially support its retirees.
Yet even granting all this, I don’t see it as having any obvious concrete repercussions for polyamory in the real world we live in. It’s not like someone shouldn’t be poly just because their being poly might advance the spread of polyamory which might decrease the birth rate, much less like anyone should feel compelled to reproduce more than they are. True, there are dire scenarios where reproducing would likely be the right thing to do (last man, last woman alive thought experiments), or where curbing practices that decrease reproduction and supporting practices that increase it are good. It’s just that insofar as declining birth rate is a problem for society, the members of a society that is embracing practices that accelerate that decline would be prudent to consider how to meet the challenges it raises.
I realize how alarmist this sounds — “Go poly and there won’t be any humans in a century!” — but I mean it to be much more measured and tentative than that. It’s a general point about the several causes of declining birth rates that I don’t at all mean to level squarely at polyamory. It’s just that there are ripple effects that will be brought about by the brave new world of sexuality we’re moving into, and it’d be good to be ready to accommodate those rather than be caught unawares by them. If the solutions turn out to be easy (e.g. raising taxes on the rich), all the better.
Even monogamous people are under-producing now. So adding poly probably makes little difference. And I know and date a lot of poly mothers. So it’s not a zero product system.
In fact, we actually need to reduce the population. Earth sustainability is better in the hundreds of millions, not billions. The economic effects would be a difficult transition period of a lopsided aging population, but with increased focus on robotics and automation to compensate, we could manage that. And the output state after that transition would be a vast improvement of sustainable population, which at that level we could maintain by incentivizing child raising (such as state subsidies for full time parenting by persons who meet state qualifications).
Ultimately, of course, children in the sense you mean will be obsolete. Eventually we will just be printing out babies on 3D printers.
Just a small point of correction and clarification, in an attempt to avoid inaccurate hyperbole and malicious and intentional misrepresentation.
Richard said:
In point of fact, no one from the godless Slyempit, a group of disparate folks who never do anything as a group, blew a gasket — according to all current and past usage, denotative and connotative, of that phrase. Here are just a few of the common definitions of “blow a gasket”.
In point of fact, what some folks from the godless Slymepit actually did was to laugh at you, and to point out the many and various ways that your “coming out” and how you describe it and your concurrent actions, contradicts many of the, admittedly daily-changing dogmas, ideologies, rules, and so forth, of most of FTB, Skepchick, and the SJW wing of contemporary feminism.
This is not a troll; this is an attempt to set the record straight … polyamorously, of course.
Nice try. But we all know what happened, John.
Love that phrase “cafeteria Christian” ! Pick the menu (the bible) a la carte, ignore what’s not to your taste. Most religionists I’ve met are like this ,with no awareness of it. If they are kind and gentle, they believe their holy book tells them to be so. If they are aggressive and egotistic, they believe their book demands proselytizing , and denigration of non-followers. And so on.
Richard, thanks.
I doubt that programming is that strong, especially for men. It might be that people stick with their beliefs of this sort because opposition to free love publicly justify their psychological needs, e.g. reducing fear, increasing certainty. Human sexual behavior has a huge power component, so for some, freedom of others can mean less chances for themselves to gain control or succeed otherwise (in terms of access to limited resources, including human). Many people have or wish to have multiple partners during the same time period anyway (overlapping monogamy? :), so honesty is the most important element of polyamory.
About triads: the level of complexity of human connection drastically increases by introducing even one additional person, so I am curious how people manage their love teams. Why hippie culture did not flourish for long, any thoughts? One guy who lived in a commune in 60-s told us (in a secular group discussion), that it was hard: conflicts, jealousy.
That’s why. They had no vocabulary or philosophical preparation to manage those things. In fact hippie culture was still pretty sexist. That’s why poly works today far more than then: we are much less naive, much more squared away on how to handle jealousy, and much more genuinely feminist and egalitarian in our attitudes. Those folks in the 60s thought you could just switch off all their sexist, monogamous, patriarchal cultural programming on a whim. That’s not how psychology, culture, or society works. The fact that we know that now puts us lightyears beyond them.
I know several working triads now (and some larger live-in arrangements). They are actually impressive. And I know a lot of large non-live-in polycules, some even governed by principles of relationship anarchy (the closest to what the “hippies” thought they could just magically conjure without purging their demons). They work swimmingly.
As for doubting programming in men, oh, trust me, there is programming. And it’s bad. A lot of men are bigoted against poly or desperate monogamy apologists, for a variety of reasons, from insecurity to just lock-in (it’s simply what the culture has burned into them). I used to be one of the latter, so I know of what I speak, and I have met countless men in the same place I used to be. So it’s common. Most men are still in the “I’m supposed to just make this work” because “monogamy is the best thing” mode. Also, many men are still stuck in the sexist patriarchal dynamic of thinking many partners is great, but “hell no” for their female partners; often because of immaturity (they still think sex without friendship is the coolest, and/or still have sexist hangups about “their women” taking other partners being a threat to their masculinity).
Lots of cultural programming to debug there.
Richard said:
Well, yes it was; accurate too.
Shermertron does not represent the Pit in any way whatsoever. In fact, there is no member named Shermertron (nor Yeti’s Roar) listed on the Pit membership list.
Also, of the three (whew! only three; not exactly a blown gasket) comments on Shermertron’s post, none are, so far as I know, Pit people.
Lastly, Shermertron didn’t exactly blow a gasket, at least, not according to current and past usage of that phrase. He/she’s just pointing out your narrative conflicts and the various contradictions and hypocrisies present in your claims, statement, and so on.
Richard, as an academic, I would have thought you would know this: citing and linking to your own subjective analysis and deeply biased opinion of someone else’s claims and narrative is by no means any kind of authoritive support for your claims; it just reinforces your own subjective opinion, self-confirmation bias, and so on. To support your misrepresentations, et al., you need some kind of external link / citation / etc. Seriously, you don’t know that yet?
There was no difference between Shermertron and Yeti and your behavior or the comments there than anything on the Pit. In fact they were cheered on at the Pit, thumbs up, no objection, and even piled on. And, of course, many Pit comments looked eerily similar in wording and sentiments to everything they said.
So I literally do not believe you that neither they nor you are Pit trolls. Indeed to suggest they use the same usernames everywhere is laughable.
You are, after all, a proven liar. And lying is what the Slymepit does. This is modus operandi.
And that just makes your continued attempt to hyperdefine gasket blowing to avoid admitting the truth pure comedy.
We have all seen the evidence. We have all seen the behavior. We have all followed all the links above. Stop trying to pretend you’re the good guy. You are an awful, sexist, lying, waxed moustache. Own it. And stop trying to tell anyone the Slymepit isn’t a bastion of indignant, harassment endorsing, anti-feminist, anti-sex outrage and lying trollery. Because that ship has sailed. Everyone has seen the evidence now. They aren’t going to be fooled anymore. So give it up. You’re just wasting everyone’s time and making yourself look foolish.
Classic Slymetrolling!
Step 1: Blatant dishonesty. “Slymepit trolls? What Slymepit trolls? I have no idea what you’re talking about. It’s just coincidence that they regurgitate ignorant Slymepit ‘gotcha’ arguments.”
Step 2: Pointless derail. “I don’t like your definition of the phrase ‘blow a gasket’. Let me waste your time arguing about it even though it has no bearing on any of the points made in your post.”
You sure expend a lot of effort trying to avoid an honest discussion of the post.
A thousand points to Gryffindor.
(Or would this be Ravenclaw?)
RE: Bible Study Interlude
I was under the impression that polygyny had fallen out of style in Judaism thanks in large part to the stories of the excesses of King Solomon. Is that a mistaken assumption on my part? What’s the non-apologetic version of that cultural transition? Jews aren’t into it today. Did Christianity retroactively do that or something? Seems you’re leaving some key explanation out.
I know of no man in the New Testament that is recorded as having more than one wife. It seems to have been a non-issue.
It seems to me that when Jesus reprimands divorce even though its part of Mosaic law, Jesus would also have reprimanded polygyny with a similar retcon especially if it was culturally taken for granted by that time that polygyny wasn’t right. “It was not that way from the beginning.” Even though technically that argument wouldn’t have meant anything to ancient Jews who were into polygyny and more readily accepted the convention of divorce.
Jesus isn’t that keen on marriage, *period* as it is only being tolerated as a second class provisional convention until his afterlife (the earth has to be filled, right?). So one would infer additionally that having even more wives would constitute an even larger distraction from the proper spiritual life he expected people to engage in.
I was under the impression that polygyny had fallen out of style in Judaism thanks in large part to the stories of the excesses of King Solomon.
That may be an amusing modern myth Rabbis tell themselves today, but I am not aware of any evidence to back such a thing being the case in antiquity.
There are almost no wives ever mentioned in the NT, monogamous or otherwise. So we can’t judge by that. The institution of marriage is in fact almost invisible throughout. Presumably because Christianity was ascetic. As Paul said, it was better to have no wives at all; hence Jesus is made to recommend cutting your balls off. The Dead Sea sect was similarly anti-sex, but notably also explicitly attacked mainstream Jews for being polygamous, exemplifying the sort of things Jesus would have been made to say if he was imagined to have shared their view. Instead Jesus is made to use polygamy as a metaphor for Jesus (the bridegroom) taking many wives at once (the Christians who repent in time). Just as other parables have him tacitly endorsing slavery and royally decreed murder. Likewise both Jesus and Paul conspicuously word their rare commandments about marriage so as not to exclude polygamy (the statements of Jesus in fact seem gerrymandered to suit both polygamists and monogamists, as if the author were trying to appease both factions within the Church, the Gentile and Jewish, as well as any pro- and anti-polygamy Jews).
When we look at the Mishnah and the Talmud, polygamy is ubiquitous and normal, although not universal because it was expensive (having more than one wife was a luxury). And here the Mishnah would represent the first two centuries, the Talmud the next three centuries after that. So Jews remained polygamous for a very long time. It only fell out of favor around 1000 AD due to centuries of anti-Semitic prejudice and the need to construct a veneer of respectability to survive in a pervasively anti-Semitic culture (same link).
But back in antiquity, Josephus plain out says, of Herod, “Now those wives of his were not a few; it being of old permitted to the Jews to marry many wives, and this king delighting in many” (War 1.477; cf. Antiquities 17.19). And even Justin Martyr says, “if it were allowable to take any wife, or as many wives as one chooses, and how he chooses, which the men of your nation do over all the earth, wherever they sojourn, or wherever they have been sent, taking women under the name of marriage” (Dialogue 141) and “your imprudent and blind masters even till this time permit each man to have four or five wives; and if any one see a beautiful woman and desire to have her, they quote the doings of Jacob-cum-Israel, and of the other patriarchs, and maintain that it is not wrong to do such things” (ibid. 134). We also have records of polygamous marriages directly (e.g. the Babatha Contracts).
But you are right. Since we know polygamy was everywhere in Palestine in the 30s AD (even if as the perk of the reasonably well off), a real Jesus would have denounced it had he thought it wrong. Although given that Jesus is a construct of decades-later Greek-speaking Jews and Gentiles nowhere near Palestine but living ensconced among pagan neighbors (and in need of pagan citizenships that would require abandoning polygamy), really the words in his mouth are theirs, not those of any actual man walking around Palestine.
Thank you for the information. This has been a very helpful update for me. Presumably another instance of benign sounding Jewish/Christian memes throwing off a better secular understanding. I would have never thought to challenge it.
“So Jews remained polygamous for a very long time. It only fell out of favor around 1000 AD…”
So…that’s like seriously scandalous if the common dating the decline of Jewish polygyny is off by 1,500 – 2,000 years. I’m a bit baffled that such a thing is so easily misplaced in history. Even by religious thinkers. I’ve never even seen the debate so I don’t know what might be said in defense of the “Solomon ruined it for us” meme.
” Jesus is made to recommend cutting your balls off.”
+
“Jesus is made to use polygamy as a metaphor for Jesus (the bridegroom) taking many wives at once (the Christians who repent in time)”
=
That’s one wild honeymoon of prayer orgies. Those poor virgins.
Note that it’s easy to sloppily stumble into these claims by bad thinking.
P1. “The OT shows polygamy is legal, ergo it was once universal” = false. If polygamy was always expensive, it was always the perk of the better off, not universal.
P2. “We have evidence many Jews had only one wife after the OT, ergo support for polygamy was declining” = false. Because it requires assuming P1. It also mistakes having a better documented era as evidence of change (a fallacy, similar to availability bias).
As for the “Solomon ruined it for us” thing, I’ve never heard of that, and know of no ancient text that says it. Not even the Dead Sea Scrolls (which were anti-polygamy, being an anti-mainstream sect). Nor the Talmud or Mishnah. Nor any of the Jewish apocrypha from the era. You get lots of “having many wives is annoying” stuff, and “marrying non-Jews is bad” stuff (which Solomon, to ill result, did do), etc. But not that. So far as I know.
Regarding polygyny in Judaism – Jews usually followed the customs of the surrounding culture. Thus in the Middle Ages Jews living among Christians were monogamous whereas Jews living among Muslims were Polygamous if they could afford it. The reason for an official ban on Polygyny specifically in the Rheinland around 1000 AD was that Jews in that area were becoming more involved in international trade. The ban is part of a list of regulations regarding interactions between Jews from distant communities. (The other famous ban on the list is a ban against reading another person’s mail, but there were more, less famous ones.) The change that happened regarding marriage was that Jews from Germany who had business in Spain or other Islamic countries were taking second wives that they were keeping in those countries, and the intent of the ban was to stop that custom.
In support of my previous post see here.
Perhaps the most bizarre idea to come out of Christianity is that sexual repression is self-control. Granted this is just a subset of the narrative that human nature itself is inherently bad, but so many of their resources have been invested solely in their war on human sexuality. I tend to think that Christianity’s greatest victory wasn’t even securing world power but turning basic human physiology and physiologically-based preference into sociocultural minefields across countless countries. Should their influence wane and their status decline they’ve still guaranteed their relevance to society through the seeds they’ve sown; black-and-white thinking enshrined in tradition and readily accepted even by secularists informs us so.
Ray has argued that controlling sexuality has been an effective way to maintain guilt that maintains a need for the church (Sex and God, cited and linked upthread).
No it doesn’t, but that doesn’t undermine the rest of your point.
Right. Renegotiated contracts are a thing. Already noted upthread.
A bit cryptic. I’ll take it to mean that “it would be wrong to believe a lot of stuff you see on the internet regarding sex abuse allegations unless you carefully and objectively determine the facts”.
I’m not telling you what to believe. I’m telling you what’s to consider.
Richard, first, you are bringing me back to my concern about your questioning freedom of mind of people who choose monogamy – when you say things like: “Most men are still in the “I’m supposed to just make this work” because “monogamy is the best thing” mode.”, or earlier, In short, if someone thinks poly is icky or weird, then that’s the programming they need to break from.
If you respect your readers, you need to give us the freedom to hold a different from yours opinions. If somebody thinks it is weird (for themselves, especially), it does not mean that they are brainwashed, and thus on a lower stage of development, compared to polyamorists. They might dislike it for various reasons, and be in their right, as long as they respect the rights of others. If a person thinks that a particular partnership structure in their life is the best thing for them (maybe for the reasons I listed in my first comment) and they work on it, it does not mean this person has not yet achieved the “true” freedom.
Second, you told me: “you may be over restricting in your mind how poly works. You can have a deep high-time bond with a primary partner, while having sex with friends, just as you play board games or go bowling with them.” I thought (and even confirmed with polyamorous people), that loving romantic relationships is what distinguishes polyamory from swinging. Please, explain, why casual sex with friends is a part of polyamory, or whether you see swinging or honestly disclosed to all partners multiple sexual relationships without being in love are variations of polyamory.
Third, you said: “Those folks in the 60s thought you could just switch off all their sexist, monogamous, patriarchal cultural programming on a whim. That’s not how psychology, culture, or society works. The fact that we know that now puts us lightyears beyond them.”
Why did you put “monogamous” in the same line with “sexist” and “patriarchal” – it is another hint that makes me think that you hold people who love and sexually interact with only one partner at a time for less “enlightened.”
Also, simply understanding specificity of possible sociobiological conditioning (e.g. of hierarchical sexist subordination) does not put you too far ahead, not before the involved individuals are truly happy in the new settings in a long run. I hope you are and will be.
And last, you said: “one might consider finding two or three people who together satisfy all your needs, rather than expecting one single perfect person to. Odds go way up then. We already do this non-sexually (we have very close friends and family we rely on as well as sexual partners).”
If you would consider matters of trust, understanding, affection, risks, group dynamic, life events, etc. – not only functional use of personal abilities for your satisfaction, you might calculate the odds differently.
How can one love somebody and feel unsatisfied? One is never fully content then? I afraid, I am more able to understand group love (when everybody expresses love to each other in the same time and space) than this.
It’s one thing to dislike it for yourself. It’s another thing to think less of someone else for it (or avoid them, or belittle them, or think they are deviants, etc.). Indeed, that’s your point: there isn’t anything weird about some people not being interested in multiple partners. Just so, there isn’t anything weird about some people having multiple partners. Bigotry and wrong belief does not exist solely in how you behave. It exists in how you think. Which can even then subtly affect your behavior in ways you are not even aware, which then create privileges to the “approved” groups, and biases against the “othered” group. Just as with unconscious sexism or racism.
Thus, as I noted several times in my article, I am certain there are people who aren’t interested and wouldn’t be even if raised in a totally free culture. But that doesn’t mean we are living in that culture. Because we are not, it remains a fact that a very large number of people are not thinking freely, and do have bigoted or mistaken attitudes, and do try to rationalize conforming to the culture molded and pressured on them, even when they are one of those who should escape from it. That not everyone is such a person, is not relevant to that observation.
This is a mistaken view, and it seems to me born largely from an attempt by some poly communities to mimic mainstream respectability by trying to “model” monogamous activities like common meals while downgrading other people’s relationships as less respectable than theirs. This is just another form of bigotry, ironically forming the same way all bigotry does: by out-groups trying to act like in-groups by creating another out-group from among their number to denigrate in common with the desired in-group they want respect from.
In reality, I know only a few polyamorous people who do not incorporate casual sex into their lives as well as partners of varying degrees of intimacy. Indeed, I know some polyamorists who say they don’t, do. They just don’t talk about it much, because their bigoted poly peers would think less of them if they admitted it. Thus exposing the perniciousness of bigotry.
In reality, even swingers love each other the same way many self-identified poly people love their tertiary partners. Love is not either/or. It’s a spectrum, from love for your fellow human beings (you cannot have sex with someone and not have feelings for them as a person—if you don’t, you are behaving like a sociopath), to love of your friends (which is not trivial, whether you have a sexual relationship with them or not), to love of your best friends (which even when platonic has historically included very deep and intimate bonds), to love of even greater selection than that.
In fact there is no such thing as “swinging” as a categorically different behavior. Swinging is just another example of what polyamorists actually call dating. Where dating goes from there can be it ends (from inadequate mutual interest), or it becomes an occasional relationship, a tertiary relationship, a secondary relationship, or a primary relationship (whether dual or triadic, etc.), depending on how your mutual feelings go and your circumstances allow. And most polyamorists I know have all of these kinds of relationship, or several at least.
Polyamorists shouldn’t be trying to create more out-groups to denigrate. Least of all in a desperate attempt to gain respectability. Polyamory should be founded on the basic fact of everyone being allowed to negotiate the kind of relationships they want and their choices in that negotiation being as respected as any (as long as honesty and care and and consent and respect are maintained, and self-destructive behavior isn’t being cloaked in this).
So any time you hear polyamorists looking down their noses at “swingers,” call that out for what it is: bigotry, of which they should be ashamed. It’s no different than men looking down at a certain category of man and saying they aren’t “real men.”
Because those were all cultural programs they were not adequately able to unload or hack. If you try to be poly and are still operating on monogamous assumptions, it’s not going to work. You have to purge it all. Meanwhile those who genuinely should be monogamous, shouldn’t be in free love hippy communes.
Thus the common element is not “all these things are evil.” The common element is “all these things will tank any free love community.” And as a matter of historical fact, did.
It disturbs me that you seem to think loving someone is supposed to provide you all possible fulfillment and satisfactions in life. That’s impossible. You need a satisfying occupation or career, for example. You are not going to get that part of your life satisfaction from loving a person. And in countless other respects, what makes you satisfied with yourself and your life is a hundred other things, only a few of which can ever be provided by intimate or sexual partners.
But more to the point, you are the one who said “for some of us, even to meet one person who could potentially satisfy us is far from easy.” Mathematically, therefore, it must necessarily be easier if instead of expecting one person to satisfy you in every conceivable respect, you parcel your needs and seek partners who satisfy each parcel, such that altogether, you are fully satisfied. This does of course require a deep Socratic self-examination to discover just what it is that you are finding so hard to find in others and why it is so hard to find, and whether it maybe isn’t one thing but several, or is something rather that you actually draw from yourself and not as you might mistakenly think from others, or is something that can be explored in parallel relationships for economy of time until it starts to fall in place with one of them, or any of a number of other possible things.
In short, don’t succumb to the folly of assuming you’ve got everything all figured out.
There might be options that will work for you, that you haven’t thought of yet, because you aren’t adequately exploring a certain space of ideas.
“…which just demonstrates Christians don’t do logic well. (That’s why they’re Christians.)”
Well, i guess we can then conclude that Dr. Alexander Pruss does not do logic well. In this case, a brilliant academic like you should not hesitate to write a letter to Baylor University, informing them that their Associate Professor of Philosophy and the Director of Graduate Studies in Philosophy does not do logic well. As evidence for this assertion, you can inform them that, after all, he is a christian. Further tell them, that given this fact, it simply does not matter that he earned a PhD in mathematics and a PhD in philosophy.
I think Baylor University will surely be willing to directly fire him and so, in good SJW-manner, you made another academic lose his job.
But if you do this, dont be mad at me if in the end, you will ,once more, be forced to go to the website of a christian, with your tail between your legs ,as usual, in order to, as you put it, “mend fences”.
Impressedbydegrees Puffshischest.
I am so glad you posted this so we can laugh at the panicked freak outs of the insecure Christian idiots. It seems like the root of all this panic is simply jealousy and insecurity-they fear that you are going to have sex with their wives. It is just like those slimepit bloggers who only talked smack about you because they feared their wives would run off with you at the next atheist conference.
These foolish Christians know that their wives don’t like being trapped in a boring, repressive, monogamous relationship. They know, but don’t want to admit, that at every single debate, Bible conference, or other event.that you attended with them, their wives might have been off in your room with you. I bet you have some great stories about poly moms who are married to repressive Christian prudes. Maybe In a future blog post you can share some of your best stories about that.
I just want to add that I really like the new direction that your blog has taken. Your frank and honest discussions about sexuality are refreshing to see. I wish more bloggers had the courage to be as open and honest as you are.
No, I don’t think so. At least not by any comparable proportion. Most conservo Christians don’t think their wives are interested in sex with other people, because in their worldview women aren’t sexual, unless they’re evil (notice how never once did Peters express any point about wanting to have sex with other people characterizing women, or his wife; he only talked about men, and himself).
I think for Christians it’s the same thing Amanda Marcotte pointed out about gay marriage: it’s really all about maintaining the subordination of women in a hierarchical “they make babies, we support them” 1 Cor. 11:3 system.
Gay marriage entails the state deciding that marriage is about love and between equals and not about making babies and subordinating women to do so. That is why Christians are freaking out about gay marriage: because the state has just repudiated their model of marriage as antiquated, and replaced it with something that recognizes everyone’s equality and autonomy, and hence recognizes the equality and autonomy of women. And that terrifies Christians because they think that once you set women loose as autonomous equals, that will unravel society.
Fear of poly is the same for them. Because polyamory intrinsically acknowledges that relationships are about love among autonomous equals, and not baby-making gender-hierarchies. Therefore it’s just as dangerous to them, and for the same reasons. Although because conservo Christians can barely conceive of good women wanting sexual liberation, to them, in the case of polyamory, the fear of society unraveling comes from the danger of men: if men no longer seek to lock themselves in hierarchical baby-raising sex-contracts, and they know the male libido is such that that is a real danger if society lets them do that, then hierarchical baby-raising sex-contracts will become a thing of the past. And that will unravel society.
The benevolent sexism of “won’t someone think of the poor cuckolded women whose identities will be crushed thereby” is a different kind of sexism than the Slymepit-style “oh shit no one better fuck my property I better keep my wife away from you” malevolent sexism. The latter is selfish and male dominant and acknowledges the existence of female libido but more explicitly treats women as property to be locked up and controlled. Whereas the former is a naive and misplaced altruism that leads to a perceived need to control men.
“Of course in all this I’m only speaking within the context of heterosexuality. Because I know Peters would not recognize the existence of loving sexual relationships between women and women, or men and men, polyamorous or monogamous. And bisexuality? That would probably blow a spring out of his head.”
Ugh, SERIOUSLY. My mother is a tea party wingnut, who is falling deeper and deeper into conservative Christianist ideas of everything, and I tried to come out to her last year as bisexual. She flipped the hell out, thinking that I was saying I’m gay, and yelling and tearing up as if I killed someone or something. Of course after an hour of calmly explaining to her that sexuality isn’t a binary switch, that I’m typically more attracted to women than men, etc. she seemed to have a moment where she tried to get it: “So, are you going to have a girlfriend, and a boyfriend on the side, or something?” Blarghhhhhh!!!
It seems to me that bisexuality is non-existent to these people. To them, apparently, it’s impossible to be bisexual unless it involves an open relationship, because I guess I’m no longer bisexual if I date a woman, and I magically turn gay if I date a man, or something. So, to people like her, bisexuality = polyamory. Which I am NOT interested in (I have enough issues with anxiety and body image, so it’s not for me right now, personally).
I’m not sure how big of an impact this would have, but I feel like a lot of the confusion about all this could easily be solved by stopping our assumptions of what someone’s sexuality is simply by who they are dating. Bi people don’t magically switch between hetero- and homosexual simply by who they are with at the time (though my attractions are very fluid at times!). Also, being bisexual doesn’t automatically mean polyamory applies as well.
What do you think? Am I too hastily jumping to conclusions based on my experience with being bisexual?
All true.
But what’s happening with consrvo Christians is that, remember, they think being gay is a choice. Thus, in fact, they think all gay people are bisexual. In fact, they think all people are bisexual. In other words, they cannot conceive of a non-bisexual person.
Which is sound reasoning. If “being gay” actually is a choice, in the sense that everyone has to resist urges to have sex with the same gender (and thus be constantly harangued and policed so they do, and thus keep them away from gay images and gay propaganda and so on), then indeed everyone is bisexual.
It’s just that that isn’t how reality works. But Christians have never been good at building reality-based worldviews.
We know that sexual attraction is a spectrum, and different people have different set points and margins on that spectrum, based on brain structure, most of which constructed in the womb. So we know most people do not have any sexual attraction to the same sex; while some people only do; and some have more or less attraction to both. (And some have no attraction to any.) But that’s not the understanding of reality conservo Christians live in.
Thank you for the clarification on definition of polyamory, Richard. It made me think, why really the few polyamorous people I talked with stated that it is about love and they are not swingers. Maybe it is because they try to avoid misjudgment, or truly want love, or for some reason they see sex for its own sake as an inferior activity. I don’t think it is bigotry, you might be stretching the meaning of this word too far.
It is regretful, that you jumped to a conclusion that I “think loving someone is supposed to provide you all possible fulfillment and satisfactions in life” – my question was in a context of intimate satisfaction in times spent with one of the suggested multiple partners, who are not experienced as fulfilling on their own. Your telling me about other occupations in life and exploring options is rather disrespectful.
“Mathematically, therefore, it must necessarily be easier…” – there are to many things I would need to type down in disagreement with this, most of it would be off-topic.
You tend to be harsh in assessment of other people’s thoughts and feelings as unacceptable for decent human beings and to use accusations of intolerance instead of solid reasoning, trying to control the way others think. Please be consistent with respecting the freedom of love mentioned in your title. You stand for honest non-exclusivity in intimate relationship (right?). Most Christians seem to advocate for honest exclusivity – nothing majorly different, the issue is how they/you defend their positions.
The same way freedom of religion principle does not dictate a certain number of deities you should believe in – it can be zero, or one, or infinity, freedom of love does not require a certain number of partners.
All true as possibilities, apart or in combination. But the end result is subordinating so-called “swingers” as the “bad people” whom “we shouldn’t want to be like.” That ends in bigotry: thinking others are inferiors and bad and not to be associated with, for reasons that don’t actually make them bad. So it doesn’t matter what good intentions the bigotry comes from. And I’ve seen this bigotry in action. Replace “women” or “black people” for “swingers” in some of their conversations and it would make your skin crawl. So be on your guard about that. They might not even realize this. And like benevolent sexists and benevolent racists they might swear up and down they have no biases and aren’t bigoted. But alas.
I don’t tend to. I do it only when it looks like that’s what’s going on. It’s unclear if you actually agree with “loving someone is supposed to provide you all possible fulfillment and satisfactions in life” or not. My conclusions follow from your agreeing with that proposition. But if you do not agree with that propositions, my conclusions do not follow for you. That’s all there is to it.
This is a false analogy. Gods don’t exist. So yes, we can assign equal rights to believers; but we also are allowed (and in some cases obligated) to say they have false beliefs and why. Often indeed those false beliefs are harmful (religious-based sexism, homophobia, etc.). We get to say so.
This is not comparable to how many sexual partners you are comfortable having at once. Because unlike gods, those partners exist. So there are no false beliefs to criticize. And no harms to quell.
You have got to be kidding me: “It’s unclear if you actually agree with…”. Of course not. Your own contracts about my personal worldview (“It disturbs me that you seem to think loving someone is supposed to provide you all possible fulfillment and satisfactions in life. “) together with the following build up was a “straw man” fallacy.
“Because unlike gods, those partners exist. “ – and that’s why my analogy is false? 🙂
You do not see a similarity between these two:
1. Freedom of activities associated with religious believes – gatherings in any numbers, worshiping in any lawful way, openly advocating, etc. Right to follow or not.
2. Freedom of activities associated with erotic/romantic believes – gatherings in any numbers, achieving sensual pleasures in any lawful way, openly advocating, etc. Right to follow or not.
You are trying to present cultural issues of polyamorists as a secular values defense case, and if only for the sake of being more convincing, you should compare your interpretation of various freedoms to those of others.
I started commenting on your article precisely because you seemed to look down on monogamous people, as some of them looked at you, and also to point out a logical inconsistency. My participation does not seem to bring much 😀
It’s still unclear to me what you agree with or disagree with. I am even perplexed as to what you mean by this last comment. It isn’t entirely intelligible or clear as to its point. There is nothing here I can respond to or work with.
Richard said:
Surely those virgin neckbeard trolls at the Slymepit don’t have wives or girlfriends of the non-inflatable type anyway.
I don’t have any knowledge or assumptions regarding their facial hair or relationship status. Just statistically some I’m sure are clean shaven. Some are women. And of the men some quite certainly have wives, who echo-chamber their views. And yet evidently need to be kept away from me.
I’d like to just come out and say it. My wife is not 100% of everything I need, nor I am 100% of what she needs. Nobody ever is, and it’s an impossible standard people pretend to expect, and a severe burden to try to live up to and can only end in disappointment and resentment. We love each other very much, and have been married for quite a while, and know each other better than anyone else. While a great match, there is no such thing as a “perfect” match. People tend to focus on those areas that they know their parter will not or cannot fulfill, and that’s where so many relationships fail as resentment builds. Most marriages end in divorce, and many that aren’t dissolved still have cheating and other forms of secrecy going on. Normal monogamous relationships clearly are not as good as people pretend them to be.
Poly lifestyle addresses all of this. It allows us to not hold an impossibly high standard for our partner. It allows us to enjoy everything they have to offer, and not resent them for what they don’t. It allows us to talk about what we want, what our real sexual and emotional interests are, and what we’d like to do. And it allows us to find what we need without guilt, without secrecy, without betrayal. It allows us to NOT have to pretend to like things just because our partner wants us to like them. For example, my wife does not like to play video games, but I do. Should I pressure her to play them with me (since afterall she is supposed to be 100% of my perfect partner) or should I find someone else who likes video games to play with me? For us the answer was clear: I’ll be myself, she can be herself, and we can enjoy other people in addition to make our lives more full, more complete, and happier.
My wife has had a “side” boyfriend for almost a year now, and our marriage has never been happier. The we fight less, we argue less, and we laugh more and just have more fun. Isn’t that what life is about?
I will explain it very patiently.
I said: “The same way freedom of religion principle does not dictate a certain number of deities you should believe in – it can be zero, or one, or infinity, freedom of love does not require a certain number of partners.”
It was an analogy, a comparison between two things, pointing out a partial similarity. I was trying to explain things to you, using a descriptive language.
You said:
“This is a false analogy. Gods don’t exist. So yes, we can assign equal rights to believers; but we also are allowed (and in some cases obligated) to say they have false beliefs and why. Often indeed those false beliefs are harmful (religious-based sexism, homophobia, etc.). We get to say so.
This is not comparable to how many sexual partners you are comfortable having at once. Because unlike gods, those partners exist. So there are no false beliefs to criticize. And no harms to quell.”
No, it is not a false analogy. To create a logical fallacy out of that analogy, I must have offered a conclusion that is not supported by my analogy. You can possibly find one suggestion to a conclusion in my sentence: the freedom of religion and the freedom of love are both describe some set of freedoms for individuals in a society, and those notions of freedom do not contain quantification: no number of gods and no number of partners suggested.
Nothing else.
Existence of gods or people has nothing to do with it. At all. Maybe as little as presence of true love among polyamorous partners.
Yes, you can say that their believes are false (you cannot always prove it), and they can do the same to you: say that your believes are false. They might think that polyamory is harmful for society and criticize you for preaching it.
You criticize not only belief in a most likely non-existent entity, you criticize values that come with specific religions, don’t you? So religious people can do the same: criticize your values and believes, specifically polyamorous. You have not offered any scientific data supporting your belief that “the world would be better if all of it were poly”, your logic is sloppy in several places, and your emotional appeal is overly dramatic, therefore, I can’t even see a serious claim of value or policy here.
I was trying to point out to you two things in one sentence:
1. People have both freedom of religion and freedom of love in this society:
a) People have freedom to advocate for their religious believes or their absence, and also to practice their rituals (or not), worship as many gods they want (atheism, monotheism, polytheism) with as many people they want, as long as it is not against the law.
b) People have freedom to advocate for values of their lifestyle and try to spread it in the society, they can get together freely to please each other in any numbers, or not at all if they don’t feel like it, can choose their partners and not be forced into interaction, they share some believes (e.g. that having multiple sexual partners is good for everybody, that honesty is a virtue, etc.), in a lawful way.
2. “Many” or “poly” is not necessarily better than one or none, “more” in terms of integers does not translate into “more value” for human connections.
I hope it is clear now.
There is one typo in the first line of my previous post: “contracts” should be “construct”. But I will leave alone your disrespectful manner of treating me personally.
I think you don’t understand what I’m saying. We can criticize believers in gods. In precisely the way we can’t criticize people’s sexual preferences as to number of partners. No one here has been talking about outlawing religions or partner choices. Nor have I been saying anything about people’s sexual preferences having to be non-monogamous. All I have said is that far more people think they are supposed to be monogamous, than actually would be if they were free. “Far more” does not mean “all.” To the contrary, it entails some people should be and are better off monogamous even when wholly culturally free to choose without social pressure or enculturated assumptions programmed into them. And I have been very explicit about this, in the article multiple times, and in this discussion multiple times. So I don’t know who you think you are arguing with.
I think linking to the neo-Nazi “Come and Hear” site is a big mistake.
I often see it done by unaware users who only want to quote from the Soncino translation, but linking to “Carol A. Valentine’s” “editorial” is just bad. She promotes the ritual Jewish murder lie, among many other neo-Nazi tropes. I’d suggest removing the link.
True, I was unaware what else is promoted there (and I haven’t looked into it further, but all readers can take your advisement, since that can affect what else people explore there).
But their data on this issue is correct. And I con’t support genetic fallacies here.
Richard, where on Earth did you formulate this bizarre and juvenile fantasy that Slymepit folk are afraid that you will abscond with or sexually violate their wives? Seriously, that is one of the most bizarre fantasies you have yet come up with.
No one, and I repeat, no one at the Pit is at all, not even vaguely or tangentially, concerned (let alone afraid) that you might abscond with their wives/partners et al. You are simply not even close to being that desireable. You are nothing more than a sexuality dilletante and an uninteresting spunky monkey semen fetishist to boot.
Really, you have delved into some really strange and twisted fantasyland with that one.
You appear to have a pathological difficulty differentiating between satire (of you) and fear-based concern (of you).
You are the one trying to deny that Yeti and Shermertron never under any moniker post at or have backslapping allies cheering them on at the Slymepit. That seems closer to a bizarre fantasy to me. And now you are trying to pretend they didn’t mean anything they said. This is becoming a comedy. Because you cited them as an authority when I caught you lying!
But though I know you are a liar (as I caught you at it and documented it), and you repeatedly deny reality and common sense (as here), if you are somehow miraculously correct that no one at the Slymepit is concerned about any of their womenfolk meeting me, then that’s fabulous news!
This may be too off point for you to comment but I’m going to give it a shot.
You made a passing reference to 1 Timothy 2:11-15. This is probably one of the most chauvinistic verses in the New Testament and has been used by some Christians to denounce women as preachers and as leaders in the Church.
I was curious as to your take on the attempt of some female Christians to challenge the translation of those verses and make them seem far less insulting than they appear to be.
https://christianfeminism.wordpress.com/2008/07/04/the-mistranslation-of-1-timothy-211-12
Thanks
They don’t even know it’s a forgery. So already they are off the rails of sound judgment (indeed they make much of how the vocabulary is un-Pauline…uh, yeah, because Paul didn’t write it; it wasn’t even written in the same century as Paul). The rest of the argument there is bullshit. Wikipedia has a whole section on one of its arguments, although it too repeats the mistake of thinking 1 Tim. was written in the 1st century and by Paul, when in fact it was written in the 2nd century in the early Patristic era and reflects early Patristic thinking on the subject (it was written around the same time and by people of the same thinking as the interpolation in 1 Cor. 14 also insisting women shut up; that’s not a coincidence).
In general, the author of 1 Tim. clearly says women may not teach (didaskein ouk), but must only receive teaching (manthanetô). So he is saying this is what he means by remaining submissive (hupotagê) and still (hesuchia) and only receive teaching not give it, and not taking charge of men (authentein): he means women should submit to men and not talk but just listen. Period. That is what the “all” in “all stillness” means: all (pasê hupotagê). Including a still tongue. In fact the people who try to insist the word for quiet just means sitting still ignore the fact that Pseudo-Paul uses the phrase “in quietude” (en hesuchia, twice even, in both verses 11 and 12, so he is very adamant about it!), which routinely meant shutting your mouth.
[P.S. This was not too off point, BTW. In fact this was a good example of a comment that is within my broader inclusion rules for relevance now.]
Richard, you are becoming delusional. Seriously, mate, maybe it’s time to see a therapist or something.
Your reply to my last post is, well, it would be generous and charitable to call it a non sequitor. A more realistic and honest description would be to say it’s orbitting Pluto with semen stains on its sad little face.
Or summat.
You caught no lies; you found no untruths; you “documented” nothing. You simply either fabricated or fantasized such. Mental health issues in the gloaming perhaps?
And, I pretend nothing so far as Shermertron and Yeti are concerned — seriously, what the everloving fuck are you nattering about with that?
As for your meeting Pit folk’s “womenfolk” … snuh? sexist much, Richard … I am quite certain that not only does no one at the Pit give a flying frying frig about such an occurence, but none of the “womenfolk” (where did you get that ludicrous term? the Bible?) therein (or otherwise connected to) would have the slightest interest in a narcissistic, pompous, sexually juvenile and somewhat perverted egoist like yourself.
C’mon Richard. If you are going to make specious and inaccurate, claims about Pit folk, and me, surely the least you can do is allow my defence and clarification to see the light of day.
You know full well the moderation delay rules here. So trying to pretend it’s sinister is just more if your lying. And you’ve run out of arguments at this point. The evidence is linked and accessed.
I do indeed know full well your moderation rules and practices. Please be charitable and excuse my mistake, as my comment to your post about your custom bound books was accepted and posted several hours before the last two comments. I presumed sinister due to that time lag. I now gladly admit my error.
Can anyone at FTB ever, ever admit error?
Richard said:
Nah. You’ve just failed to make your case. You are, to put it simply, simply wrong about your claims and presumptions regarding Pit folks’s reaction to your PUA guidebook and methodology. And, as I noted perviously, citing and linking to your own posts of arguments presumptious and assumptive without grounds to support most certainly does not make your case either.
Can anyone at FTB ever, ever admit error?
Hm. Strange you should miss all the times I have prominently done so.
your PUA guidebook and methodology
I must have missed that one. Where is that?
You’ve just failed to make your case.
No, you did.
But refusing to admit defeat is SOP for pitters and their fans.