Yes, it was and yes it was my interpretation. That's all I got when I read ****, my interpretation.
But your interpretation didn't really go anywhere. It produced no meaningful contribution to the discussion, so perhaps you should read back and consider some other possible interpretation?
No, it's democracy.
Sheer blatant relativism. I am really appalled that I have to side with the ****ing pope Francis and even Benedict on this one. No, you don't get to define concepts and words like you please, there is an inherent "contract" in our society where the meaning of words is sufficiently universal and stable so as we are able to communicate properly between us, let alone devise laws, mores, moralities and so on. This "contract" is more conservative than not.
Conservatism is not a bad thing. Revisionism is not a bad thing. They're not good either. The good or bad of some Policy X or Tradition Y depend on how they work and what their consequences are to people.
Concepts change between cultures and times. Moral relativism is not something I fully agree with; there ARE certain moral standards that are objectively better than others: Basic human rights, freedoms, liberties, but also the responsibilities associated to them. Moral relativism does not apply to these - as an example, in some cultures freedom of speech and political expression is not respected. In some cultures freedom of religion is not respected.
This makes these cultures OBJECTIVELY WORSE than a culture that respects these freedoms.
However when you go into specific things and compare a culture that considers marriage only as an union of a man and a woman, and a culture that accepts polygamy or same-sex marriages, then moral relativism actually applies: You cannot objectively state that monogamous heterosexual marriage is superior to same-sex or polygamous marriage.
What you have to do is show some mechanism that makes same-sex or polygamous marriages somehow worse.
If you cannot do this, then the conclusion is that same-sex and polygamous marriages do not have an effect on the importance of marriage as a social and legal contract, and they don't make it worse.
Some people think marriage by definition excludes same-sex couples or polygamous relationships. Some people think marriage can inlude same-sex couples but not polygamy. Some people think polygamy is ok but same-sex marriages aren't.
Considering the deep personal effect of these definitions on people, I don't think it's a good idea to insist that there should only be one type of marriage in a society and the other types of relationships would have no way at all to officiate that relationship. Socially, marriage is just an agreement with people to live together in a relationship. No one can prevent people from agreeing that they're married, it's just up to them.
The legal benefits and obligations, however, should be EQUALLY AVAILABLE for all relationships.
Sophistry. Polygamy should never have the same "benefits" and is impossible to even guarantee the same "obligations" than monogamous relationships. Same-sex marriages are even incompatible with many heterossexual marital laws, since they are not gender equal in many details.
So the heterosexual marital laws need to be changed to be not only gender-neutral, but so that they apply to any persons in a relationship they want to call marriage. What's the problem?
And why should polygamy never have the same benefits and why would it be impossible to guarantee same obligations that apply in monogamous marriage?
You're saying things, and not backing them up with any actual argumentation to support them.
Religious affirmation of marriage should be available to relationships who desire it, with the discretion of the church of choice. But it should be completely separate from the social and legal aspects and it should NOT make the marriage valid in the eyes of law.
This crap again?
Yes - because you're continually attributing my opinions to me having something against marriage, when in fact I just want religious organizations to back away from the legal and social definitions of marriage. Since you fail to comprehend what I'm saying, I find myself forced to regurgitate "this crap" again and again until you get it. I shall now break my argument into smaller paragraphs and hope it is easier to understand:
I don't have anything against marriage as such.
I think marriage needs to change with the world as required by the world, and I don't think there's anything inherently good in the current monogamous, heterosexual format of marriage as opposed to other forms of marriage in the past or future.
I oppose the equalization of marriage as a religious institution.
I think marriage should be just as valid without any religious commitment or affirmation, which means I think "marriage" should just be the sum of its social and legal components.
The religious component of marriage should be
entirely optional.
Therefore, any religious arguments used to oppose same-sex marriages should be null and void against the social and legal definition of marriage. Churches should be free to discriminate against religious marriage between undesireable couples, if they think they are obliged to do so by their gods.
This is why I find it incredibly offensive when people use religious arguments to oppose same-sex couples from being married.
I'm not saying you're basing your argument on the religious aspects of marriage; your argumentation seems to stem from the social and legal aspects, but I find your argumentation flawed on many levels.
The only way to solve this, I think, is to separate the religious meaning of marriage from the social and legal meanings. This way, religious arguments would only affect those people who think the religious aspect of marriage has some importance, and the rest of us grown-ups could continue the discussion about the aspects of marriage that are actually tangible; what social benefits and obligations a marriage should entail, and what legal benefits and obligations should it entail.
People could get married socially and legally, and then they could separately acquire the blessings of their gods if they so wanted.
If you can acknowledge that you have read and comprehended what I just wrote, then I don't need to repeat it again.
Why? I don't see any reason to give respect to an institution just because it's old.
JFC. Marriage isn't just "old", it's probably the most important institution that got us where we are today.
I'm not disagreeing with that, although you could say that of just about any massive distribution.
I could say that the Pharaos of Egypt were probably the most important institution that got the world to where we are today. And I would be correct because if you remove some important institution from the history, you don't have the same history any more.
That doesn't mean we should have any intrinsic respect toward any of those insititutions.
I really don't follow your logic here. Earlier you said that the fact that polygamy has been an institution is not an argument for it, and I agree with you.
But now you're saying that because marriage has been an institution, I should "respect" it for that.
So why is it that you expect me to respect monogamous heterosexual marriage, but you don't need to respect other forms of marriage?
Slavery was an institution for thousands of years so presumably it did a good job... but we don't approve of it any more because it conflicts with our values and world view.
See? That's where you go awfully wrong. I know, that fairy tale has been spoonfed to us since we were born, but alas it isn't exactly true. What is true is that once technology reached a point where we could "outsource" slave work to machinery, we reached the epiphany that it is morally wrong. Until then it was something we deemed "necessary", and we rationalized it by dehumanizing slaves (they aren't really human like us anyway...).
You shouldn't make assumptions of my personal educational history, it just makes you look worse.
Nothing you said there contradicts with what I said. I said that slavery was an institution but we don't approve of the practice any more.
You went into details on why that shift occurred, feel free to do so but it doesn't change the facts I laid out. First it was approved, now it isn't any more.
Further on I'm pretty sure that even the ancient people - not to mention the slaves themselves - probably had a lot of moral problems with slavery as a concept, but - like you said - they invented moral justifications for it because they couldn't see any alternatives.
Sadly those moral justifications soon became moral facts to at least some of them. But none of this holds any relevance to the discussion at hand.
The slippery slope argument isn't fallacious. You have to show that you haven't stripped the meaning of the concept so much that it becomes meaningless. Recognizing polygamous marriages will be the final punch to it.
Sorry to say but the slippery slope fallacy is exactly that, a fallacy. It's not an argument.
Slippery slope argument occurs when you link an arbitrary amount of events together and use them as evidence that A leads to B, B leads to C, and eventually Y leads to Z; therefore A leads to Z.
It's a fallacy because of the probabilistic nature of these events. To show that A always leads to B, you need to show that there is 100% probability that B will occur if A occurs.
To show that B will always lead to C, you need to show that there is 100% probability that C will always occur if B occurs.
And you need to do this to all the steps all the way to your goal, to prove that A will inevitably lead to Z.
If you consider how unlikely it is for anything to have 100% probability, you should immediately see how the slippery slope argument is fallacious.
Let's say every event has a 90% chance to lead to the next event (I'm being generous with probabilities here).
For A to lead to B there is 90% chance.
B to C, 90 % chance.
But for A to lead to C there's only 81% chance.
The chances for a chain of events leading from A to Z are only about 12 %.
I hope that clarifies why the slippery slope is a fallacious argument: When you can't know the probabilities of each step is 100%, you cannot make an argument that A will inevitably lead to Z.
The reason why I think it would be better to separate the religious aspect of marriage from legal and social aspects is that now we got this crazy situation where religious arguments are used to deny the social and legal aspects of marriage from people who might or might not give a **** about the religious aspect. I don't have anything against religious people practicing their religion and valuing marriage as a religious institution. I have a problem when the religious aspects of marriage start influencing people who don't particularly agree with religion. That's why I think it would be a good thing if marriage did not automatically have religious connotations - it's already different in all the different religions but the same in the eyes of the law, isn't it?
Again, I haven't mentioned religion at all in this thread and you keep bringing it up.
I keep bringing it up until you recognize my reasoning for why I think religion should not matter for the social and legal components of marriage. You don't even have to agree with me, just recognize you've read and understood it.
As far as non-monogamous marriages go, you're again using a slippery slope argument that allowing polygamous marriage between three people will lead to allowing it between four people which will allow marriage up to N people. It's the same argument that if you start reducing the voting age, you'll eventually allow infants to vote.
****ing ridiculous. There is ZERO arguments you can make where you go from "3 people can marry now" to "4 people can marry now", etc., that will have allowed you to get to "3 people can marry now" in the first place.
Incorrect. There would be some arbitrary limit to how many people can be married in legal sense. That's necessitated by having some sort of sensible legislation on the matter. Socially, people could obviously do what they like but legally, it would be necessary to have some limit.
Point is, the number being greater than two would prove more inclusive, providing the option of marriage to relationships that have slightly more than two members in it.
However, aside from bad fan fiction I don't really see a reason why arbitrarily large number of people in a relationship could be counted as a marriage. There would be some arbitrary limit enforced at some point, at least in legal sense.
Allowing polygamy does not mean there can't be any limits to it. It would be up to legislators to come up with some arbitrary non-two number that a polygamous relationship could contain as far as the legal aspects of marriage go. And no, defining an arbitrary limit is not any more discrimination than saying that the age of majority if 18. Legislation is full of such arbitrary limits.
If the argument for polygamy is that it is discriminatory to limit marriage to 2 people, then you can *always* make that same argument for *N* people, and you will always fail to oppose it in court, because unlike majority age there is no actual "natural limit" to these things: while it is obvious 4 year olds are not "adults", it is not obvious 6 people should marry and 7 shouldn't.
Read before. There's no real risk that this would cause an Infinite Hotel scenario of mathematical induction in real life. The legislation would have some element of restriction to it - that is the nature of legislation, is it not?
It's also not obvious why an 18-year-old would be an adult but 17-year-old is not. Hell, it's not always obvious why a 25-year-old should be an adult. Perhaps instead of an age limit there should be some sort of maturity test to be taken to qualify as an adult citizen.
The importance here is to consider how many people would be likely to be willing to call their relationship a marriage. The number of relationships with two people is vastly larger than the number of relationships with three people, which is vastly larger than the number of relationships with four people.
Every increment would affect less people. For example, bumping the number from 2 to 3 would have the biggest effect - it would allow three people to register a marriage and there would be a finite number of people to use this option.
Bumping the number from 3 to 4 would affect much less people and therefore it would have much less pressure to add it to legislation.
Bumping the number from 4 to 5 would affect even less people, and thus there would be even less reason to add it to legislation.
As you can see, it's pretty obvious that every increment of your slippery slope argument is increasingly unlikely to happen.
The fact that you don't see isn't an argument either... lack of imagination isn't an argument. The ****fest that a divorce would be, who would get the children, the possibilities of endless kinds of abuses, the cults that would arise, the harems... this is about the destruction of the marriage institution, and I for one am deeply conservative about **** that has the possibility to ruin the social fabric of our society. The levity to which many people discuss these things astonishes me.
So you're afraid of change and would rather keep social and legal injustices in place and justify it by "risks" supported by bad argumentation.
And the double standards you use are sort of funny to see; apparently when I can't imagine a risk, it's not evidence that the risk doesn't exist - but when you IMAGINE a risk, it suddenly exists!
Your proposed imaginary risks to marriage as an institution are worth more than my imagined lack of them? Do I need to bring up Russell's Teapot and the Invisible Pink Unicorn again? I didn't expect to need them in a discussion that isn't about theism!
You mention problems with the implementation of polygamy - divorce procedure, guardianship of children, etc. etc. All of this can be addressed in legislation, and you didn't specify any of the "endless amounts of abuse" so I'm not even distinguishing that with a reply - as if regular marriage didn't offer loopholes to abuse. And as far as cults are concerned, I would like to point out that there already are cults that practice undocumented polygamy in their closed social and religious circles. They are utilizing the social and legal aspects of marriage, without any legal weight.
Asserting that allowing polygamy would lead to polygamous cults is ridiculous, when in fact only thing it would do is to offer polygamous relationships to register as a marriage, with whatever that would entail in legislative sense.
In full honesty, the problems you brought up are things that need to be considered in the legislative process for defining how the polygamous marriage would work. I am not a legal expert, but I think many of those problems are the exact same kind of problems that have already been considered for monogamous heterosexual marriage. The only difference would be the number of people involved.
Look. This is all getting very convoluted so I'll summarize the discussion so far:
As a response to the original topic about gay marriage, I posted my view that the separation of the religious, social and legal components of marriage would be a good thing; namely, it would remove all religious argumentation against gay marriage. You haven't disputed my argumentation so far and that makes me believe you don't have any good counter-arguments.
You were the one who alleged that same-sex marriages could be the pathway to allowing "stranger" marriages such as polygamy. To which I responded by showing that even if that happened (which is not guaranteed), allowing polygamy would not necessarily be a bad thing because the concept of polygamy itself has nothing objectionable to it.
You responded by saying that allowing polygamy would NECESSARILY lead to complete destruction of marriage as an institution, and I have pointed why your argumentation fails.
If you wish to continue this discussion, please review your argumentation on why polygamy would necessarily lead to unraveling of marriage as a concept.
Also review my argumentation as to why I think religious component of marriage should be separate from social and legal components.
