Ph’nglui mglw’nafh C’thulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,”

Seriously, the Talmud teachers “The righteous of any faith will be saved in the world to come.”

As long as they’re not blowing others up, should I really care waht someone believes? If they believe in Fuzzy the love bug (or Scientology) and they’re wrong, well I’ve done my duty as a Christian (albiet a heritic) to tell them about the way through Christ. Free will means making stupid decisions sometimes.

Sorry, V the K, now you’re making arguments of mine that I didn’t make. 1) I personally never said they were equivalent. However, I did say that others might view their religion better than Christianity, and they take it as seriously as you. 2) Maybe we were talking about different Pagan religions. But some Pagan religions have been around longer than Christianity. 3) Even if 2 is true, as I believe, I’m still not making the argument that they are equivalent. 4) Speaking for myself, I don’t regard religion as a hobby at all. I have thought seriously about it for years, just like you apparently have. However, I’m all for questioning religion just like any other topic, and not insulted when someone questions my beliefs. 5) Even if I did personally see religion as a meaningless hobby, how does this concede your point that the left does?

So, if anything anyone believes in is equally valid to what anyone else believes then, then I guess the Heaven’s Gate people really did go to a giant spaceship hidden behind a comet. Right?

Sure, why not? Actually, again, I don’t believe it. But since you mentioned it, just about any religion contains certain beliefs that an outsider looking in would say, “Um, yeah, right. Next thing you’re going to tell me there is a giant spaghetti monster deity.” So, it’s all about faith.

His other problem is you can’t condemn others such as Bill Clinton for the same thing and then be caught at it and no less admitting during his marriage he has been engaged in some form of sexual content with other women.

In my humble opinion, Sanford can’t then say well I am against same sex marriage since its against God’s laws when he is violating his own religious faith and marital vows, which he received a state civil license to receive that right to marriage and if he had a religious marriage ceremony, then violate his faith’s laws in the process.

Hypocrisy is bipartisan and has no party affiliation. The old saying of beware those who pray loudest in church and then they engage in hypocrisy in their behavior holds true here. We are all sinners but I leave to his God and his family as to what occurs next. Engage in such conduct during the people’s time and people’s taxpayer dollars in his official duties as Governor is another issue between him and the law and the citizens of SC.

That also held true with Clinton and every other elected official who use taxpayer dollars to engage conduct on the taxpayer’s dime (ala Gov. Elliot Spitzer who used state troopers to stand watch while he engaged in sexual activities with a prostitute while on his official duties as Governor of NY, etc.)

Discerning God’s will is not immaturely turning over my decision making power to God

Right… and does God seriously never tell you, “Come on, you decide; surprise Me”? (I’m told that. I tell Him “OK, I was just checkin’.” Not kidding.)

but being a Henotheist

Good one TL – made me look it up!

When my wiccan friends pray for intervention they’re calling on a higher power. Now I know ‘My God can beat up you god’, but being a Henotheist, I accept there are other powers out there, and they may have an interest in their followers afterlives.

Yes, a religion created by a ‘woman’s study major’ (Or a science fiction writer) as a hobby has little power, but there are faiths as old as ours, and the bible’s pretty adamant that there are other gods, why else would the commandment exist?

Discerning God’s will is not immaturely turning over my decision making power to God. God and I are in a relationship. We make decisions together. Because I want our relationship to work, I don’t want to make a decision which would cause problems in the relationship. Therefore, I want to discern God’s opinion on any decision I make, the same as He wants mine on His decisions. As far as I can tell, the only means God has set up for this relationship is through Jesus. So, I look to Jesus as a way of understanding what God wants from our relationship, and He looks to Jesus to see what I want from Him. (This works because Jesus if fully human/fully God.)

I’m not a vehicle for Selfish Genes. I’m one of God’s friends, and as friends, we work together to make the kind of decisions which help our relationship to grow. God and I do this in a community of our other friends. So, decisions about who to have sex with involve discerning the thoughts of God and the community. Sex is not a private decision–or there wouldn’t be weddings. Gay marriage means that gays now want to bring God and the community in on their sexual relationships because that’s what a marriage does. (I still prefer to call it “same-sex covenant.” But it’s the same principle.)

Again, if there is no God, what difference does it make what you do to each other?

Sounds rather low on self-esteem / sense of personal honor.

But you [Ash] do decide for yourself what is right and wrong[, in the very process of studying the Bible, of deciding which people to listen to or what texts are worthy of study, etc.]… You simply attribute it to God, which is another human decision.

Another excellent point. And Ash: Did it ever occur to you that a decision-making process which tries to pawn all the responsibility off on God, might be a mis-use of God? Sure He loves you and all; but did it ever occur to you that He might **slightly prefer** (let’s say) that you-or-whomever would just grow up and make your own decisions already?

The former is a matter of faith. The latter is a matter of fact

That’s an excellent point, one often forgotten by those who may be overly (i.e., naively or dysfunctionally) religious: the difference between faith and fact, or faith and knowledge. The whole reason we have a separate word for it, “faith”, is that we don’t have factual knowledge about it. When we have factual knowledge about something, then we don’t call it faith anymore; we call it fact / knowledge.

Perhaps to the other person you made a promise to.

If what you experience as personal values is just the result of random molecules coming together and creating the illusion of a conscience, who cares?

I’m not sure what this means, or what relevance it has.

How can the emotions of another person matter when persons, as such, don’t exist but are simply a bunch of random neuron firings?

I don’t know. The brain is a complex thing.

If marriage is something humans create, who needs it?

I would surmise almost all married couples. We do know that atheists marry. Besides, we humans have created a lot of things that we need.

If there’s no God, then everything is permissible.

Before people believed in God that wasn’t true. And if we found out somehow tomorrow that there is no God, it won’t be true.

I keep myself in line, i.e., try to make the best choices for myself, my partner, my family, my friends, my community, my nation, etc. For me, at least, these decisions do not depend on whether my belief in God is true or not, and will not change if I find out or come to realize there is no God.

I just don’t see what the purpose of deciding “for myself” what is right and wrong.

But you do decide for yourself what is right and wrong. To see this, you and others take plenty of time studying the Bible and seeing what God is, and what is right and wrong, etc. And you come to different conclusions as to what is right and wrong. For example, you believe homosexuality is okay, while many other Bible students are convinced that homosexuality (or at least acting on it) is wrong. You also made the decision to recognize the New Testament, but not Book of Mormon. These are human decisions. You simply attribute it to God, which is another human decision.

I’ll say no, Livewire. But I think it’s best for that person to hold his end of the bargain for a period of time, to find out for certain that the other party did, in fact, break the oath; to decide if he wants to accept or excuse the reasons for the other party breaking the oath; and/or wants to forgive the other party for breaking the oath.

I think Jenny Sanford is handling this quite well. She obviously takes her oath seriously, and is still trying to decide if her marriage can be and is worth saving. If and when she reaches the point that the marriage cannot be saved, she is well within her rights to cancel her obligations under the vows of marriage. As far as I’m concerned, that can happen as soon as she files for divorce.

Ashpenaz, what you described above this comment in #35 is fine, except that’s not how all straight people get married. But what you also described is a human decision. There are many times a combination of things that go into making a decision, and that includes when and who to have sex with, who to marry, if and when to no longer become monogamous and/or end a relationship.

If it’s a matter of semantics here, then fine. I’m of the thought that it’s better to own and take responsibility for your own decisions and not pawn it off on others, including God.

It’s not a social construct.

I’m afraid that’s not true either. All our institution’s are social constructs. If you want to say that marriage is inspired by God or something, that’s fine. But it’s still a social construct.

There is only one God. There is only one solution to pi.

The former is a matter of faith. The latter is a matter of fact, within the constructs of the recognized definition of pi (the ratio between the circumference of any circle to its diameter).

I, as a Christian, want the solution which is closest to the truth. Many people are happy with 3.14. I want 3.1416. . . .infinity.

Most people want, or think they want, the truth or the closest thing to the truth. As for pi, 3.14, 3.1416, or 3.14159265358979323846 are the best approximations with the given accuracies. Since it is a known fact that the decimal representation, at no point, ever forms an ever continuing pattern (i.e., is an irrational number), we’ll never know the full decimal representation. With regards to the nature of God, there are many widely recognized “approximations” and they are contradictory.

To me, it’s far more insulting to say, “Your religion is no better than anyone else’s” than it is to say “Your religion is wrong.” The former removes all meaning from religious faith. (”Jesus Christ, Flying Spaghetti Monster… same thing.”) The latter at least acknowledges that there is a higher power, even though an individual’s attempt to reach it is flawed.

V the K, that’s fine. At some point, we all choose what religion, if any, to belong to. That can either happen by being brought up in a particular religion and being taught that is the best (or only) way to believe what God (or gods) is, and deciding to maintain that belief. Or deciding as an adult to become a member of another religion or a religion (if brought up in a non-religious setting) or no religion at all. In either case, the person probably believes their religion is the best, surpassing all others. Even Pagans.

So I can understand one who is a Christian does not want to equate the God of Abraham with the Pagan Moon Goddess. Or a Pagan who also does not want to equate them either. Perhaps some of them are insulted if they are told that their religion is no better than anyone else’s.

My point is that there are many different faiths out there, and many different opinions of what other faiths might be almost as good as theirs, and which ones don’t quite measure up. Some like Ashpenaz might think that if you don’t worship Jesus, then forget it, you can’t get close to the one and only True God. So even Jewish persons who believe in the same God of Abraham are doomed. And there are Christians who basically think that Mormonism is well below the other Christian religions (I’ve even seen this from a couple of posters on both the left and the right on this blog). So what criteria do we use to decide that certain religions are okay, and which ones don’t pass the muster? It seems to me that would be tough, because there are just as many different beliefs for this as well.

And this lead to my other point. What Ashpenaz suggests for others may not even apply to them, let alone work for them. And that’s fine if Ashpenaz continues to believe it, and I respect it. But I questioned it. I don’t think it was disrepectful to question it anymore than we question anyone’s else’s thoughts on any issue discussed on this blog.

That could be painful for lesbian couples

More seriously, how about it going from this direction. Is an oath you made still valid if the other party breaks their side of it?

On the other hand, maybe God sets fire to a teeny little bush to signal the end of a relationship. Maybe he asks you to sacrifice your Shih tzu instead of your first-born son. Or would he flood your bathroom for forty minutes and … (er) another forty minutes? Turn your salt shaker into an …equally small pillar of salt?

Just to get back to the original question: legally speaking, relations outside of a non-voided marriage are adulterous. Non-formal relationships have been recognized as valid to a degree, if you follow “palimony” cases, but I think the key point here (which GPW touches on in his original post) is the mutual understanding of ground rules for that relationship. Does monogamy start with sex (Iggy)? Does it start after the first sleep-over? Maybe it starts when one begins leaving personal articles (change of clothes, toothbrush, etc.) in your partners’ abode. Or does it start after a certain anniversary? Four weeks? Six? Six months? A year? As any fan of physical comedy (“go LEFT! No, YOUR left!!”) knows, people need to be on the same page to avoid screw-ups.

Returning to the original definition of adultery (sex with anyone NOT your legal spouse), we all have known at least one couple who were separated but not divorced. Yet. On the other hand Pat mentions a “cooling off” period, wherein it is generally understood to mean “separation, but no fooling around.” This could refer to either a legally married couple or a less-formal relationship. In the first case -assuming that divorce has been predetermined- I don’t doubt many Americans would give a pass to someone who engaged in an “illicit” relationship. On the other hand, if the marriage were in theory salvageable (and the partners willing) one could argue that an outside relationship was adultery.

This leads us back to Pat’s “cooling off” scenario where outside relationships might not have been explicitly discussed, much less permitted. In Pat’s case, he made it damned clear they were off limits. End of story.

Which leads us back a bit further to GPW’s original thoughts on monogamy. It should be self-evident by now that the critical component is that both partners are on the same page/same wavelength. If person A (six months into dating) thinks the relationship is “open” (non-monogamous) while person B holds serious expectations of exclusive dating, the lack of communication is clear.

In response to GPW: the monogamy begins when both parties agree this is so. Obviously effective communication is required for a successful relationship. If the two partners do not (or cannot) agree, then either poor communications damage the relationship (was there a sit-down defining honest expectations?) or someone was deliberately dishonest, and deserves to get their chops busted…

P.S. If memory serves, Pat is correct in saying that Sanford has been known to call for the resignation of “unfaithful” politicians; at least until his own situation became known. So in the very specific case of Sanford, there was definable hypocrisy.