Yes, of course, but read back what I wrote in my first post: I never said a healthy society is or should be 'static' (that would be as sick as a society that knows no boundaries, which is what we are leaning toward these days). What I claim is that virtue is in the middle.

There is no good to be found in burning someone at the stake, be it a woman or a man. In fact, there is no good in killing another human being, even if/unless it absolutely cannot be avoided and failure to act would cause serious harm to others (i.e.; self-defense, etc...). However, the death penalty (which is nothing but mob revenge and barbaric from an European's point of view) is still widely supported in the US.

My point is not to start a debate on the death penalty, just to state the obvious and what I have been pointing out all along: what is considered uncivilized or barbaric for one society might be regarded as perfectly normal and justified in another. This means the definition of 'normal behavior' is NEVER static, but always relative to what that society or group of people accepts as 'normal behavior' at a specific point in time.

Since we were talking about children, the Masai tribe in Africa, for instance, have this costume where when a young woman reaches puberty (11-12 years) she is usually married immediately to an older man. Until this time, however, she may live and have sex with the youthful warriors. For us, this is shocking and considered child abuse. For them, it's perfectly normal.

This is the problem, because, as you can see, there is almost no limit to what can be *eventually* considered normal. However, I believe that 'good and bad', unlike the relative 'accepted behavior' and 'normal' notions, are actually *absolute* values.

The killing another human being is *always* wrong, even in self-defense. At most, you have 'mitigating circumstances' to justify/tolerate such an act, but the act of killing itself is *still* wrong and always to be avoided whenever possible.

So, a society's moral compass should always be based on these absolute 'good and bad' values. And what are those? You need not look any further than the Bible's 10 commandments: though shall not kill, though shall not steal, though shall not present false witness, though shall love your neighbor as thy self, etc...

Regardless on one's personal opinion on the existence of God or not, one has to agree that those simple 10 rules are the recipe for a healthy, happy and truly free society.

Anyway, a lot more to be said about the relation between the absolute 'good and bad' values vs. 'extremely permissive behavior', but my fingers are tired for now.

Not going to debate on that, because we would be debating on matters of faith (i.e.; things that cannot be scientifically proven) and thus we would not get anywhere.

Anyway, even though I personally believe those first two are as important as the others (and by the way, different religions divide the ten commandments in different manners) and the corner stone of the whole thing, I didn't mention them because the idea was to highlight those which pertain just to the relationship between ourselves as human beings.

Truly sorry to hear that, but that doesn't mean that the 'honor thy parents' commandment is wrong, only that your husband's dad was abusive.

The 'thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, etc...' is impossible to follow in a Capitalistic society? I actually think it can be interpreted as the personification of the 'American Dream' (the promise of the possibility of prosperity and success): work hard for the things you want and you too can have them... in opposition to spending all your time sitting on your butt coveting the things your neighbor has.

Desire for something is not the same thing as coveting something. Covetousness is when desire becomes inordinate and unlawful, when you actually resent your neighbor for the things he has instead of being happy for him and working hard to get them yourself and being happy for what you achieved so far.

Anyway, lets get God out of this discussion and focus only on 'good and bad'. Surely these absolutes exist whether you believe in God or not, no?

My apologies for the late reply. I ended up sleeping quite a lot yesterday due to feeling ill and not being able to sleep properly over the last few days because it's been so warm (read humid). Anyhoo...

Given that I'm a misanthrope, there's quite a lot I find to be abhorrent about my species. But I guess violence is something I consider abhorrent behaviour, especially when it comes to something like war. I'm not going to turn this into a war thread, but simply state that while acceptance of war as something necessary is declining, it still doesn't change the fact that we allow our governments to join in or take us to war.

K10w3 seems to have said what I was going to say re; marriage and consent. I guess a fundamentally greater reason would be love. It's dubious as to whether an animal has any concept of love. Certainly their behaviour can seem like they love us, but maybe that's nothing more than anthropomorphism on our part. A child may understand love, but they don't understand it on the same level as an adult. Marriage is the greatest sign of your love and devotion to your partner. It is possible to have a relationship with your partner for decades, or indeed the rest of your life, and procreate with them in that time, but not be married to them. Marriage is a way for you to show just how much you love them. It's considered the ultimate sign of commitment.

Honour is a two way street. My father showed me no honour for the last nine years of his life. I didn't see or hear from him during that time. Then he decrees from his deathbed that "anyone who hasn't made up with me by the time I die isn't welcome at my funeral." I won't be blackmailed. Especially not by a man who knows death is snapping at his ass. I won't have it made out like I was in the wrong, when both me and my siblings attempted to stay in touch with him by phone, and by going to see him; actions he never reciprocated. When we did phone him or see him, the first thing he would say is "hello stranger." Strangers are what he got in the end. I didn't make up with him, and I didn't go to his funeral. Honour is a two way street, if your father and mother don't honour you, why should you honour them? Because of a commandment? I don't react very well to being commanded.

Absolute BS! How many people are working hard and getting nowhere at the moment? How long has that been the norm? How many people are busting their ass doing a job and doing a degree at the same time just to try and give themselves a chance to get a slice of the 'American Dream' pie, and ultimately finding out that there is a limited amount of jobs in that vocation, or better yet, that they don't have any actual experience (that good old catch 22). So they're just going to have be content to flip burgers or some other soul-destroying, mind-numbing job. They have the same goal oriented view in Japan, where the teenagers/young adults are studying up to and beyond fourteen hours a day, just so they can get a job that will give them the things that they want. The problem is that there are so many of them doing this, that employers only want the best of the best. After all the hard work and all that they've sacrificed to achieve their goal, so many of them are being left to feel that their life is over, and that it was all for nought. Some are snapping like twigs under the pressure to succeed.

Yes, I agree that they exist, and thanks for saying good and bad, not good and evil. Not only do I agree that they exist, but I believe that one can not exist without the other. They are inextricably bound; bad comes out of good, and good comes out of bad.

what was this thread about again?

Nimbin, you may have stepped on your tongue but that doesn't make you a racist/insensitive.

My grandmother (z"l) said precisely the same thing (although in Yiddish), "Zu viel ist nicht gesundt." (Too much of anything is unhealthy). Of course, she was neither the first nor the last to say it.

Jorge, I do agree with pretty much all you've written and it was well said. Kudos. 

Hey Jorge, check this out! LINK

In fact, screw it, everyone check that out! Responses please!

... or in this sexually liberated day and age, just have a sordid affair and go home to the missus when he's done down the paddock.

Marriage is an institution....

...and you don't want to live in an institution.....

Haven't seen a civil one yet.

How true.... I'll be writing to Terry shortly. 

That's a very good question, a difficult and complex one to answer. However, not getting religion into it, and besides the obvious biological reasons for propagation of the species, marriage exists essentially because the institution has a very definite purpose which has served its function well throughout the ages.

Marriage enabled and supported the concept of a family: without it, what would stop men from creating several families and then caring for none, leaving women and children unprotected? Also, marriage and the exclusive sexual access it implies is a way to ensure paternity of the children that union generates.

Marriage probably originated in a time were women heavily depended on men to survive: it's a binding contract enforced by society where, in its basic form, the woman promises to give the man sex, offspring and sexual exclusivity, and the man, in return, promises to take care of, and protect, the woman and their offspring.

Anyway, seen from the reproductive point of view, marriage between people of the same sex serves no purpose because they cannot generate offspring.

The ancient Greeks, for instance, commonly had same sex relationships, usually between adult men and adolescent boys (over 12), the boy always taking the passive role. This, however, never resulted in marriage, nor, I believe, would such a thing ever cross their minds. In fact, there was a social stigma for adult to adult same sex relationships, the stigma, however, being reserved for whomever took the passive/feminine role.

But marriage goes far beyond the purpose of offspring, as it does not end when the two partners can no longer procreate: it is also an institution in which the two partners promise to take care of each other until the end of their lives.

From this last point of view, marriage between people of the same sex does make some sense, but only if you chose to ignore for a while that homosexuality is a deviation from the true objective of matting, which is propagation of the species.

However, you cannot dissociate the other purposes from marriage and still call it a marriage.

Gay people have barely acquired the right to marry each other in some countries and they are already demanding the right to adopt children due to their inability to procreate. Isn't this odd in and by itself, even before considering what such behavior might do to the very fabric of our society? Are those in same sex relationships considering those potential effects and consequences even for a second? No, they only care about satisfying their own needs and wants. So where will it stop?

Men and women are different, each with different strengths and weaknesses, and therefore complement each other. This is not sexism, it's a fact. It starts with the fact that women can get pregnant and men can't. Even the brains are wired differently (the corpus callossum is thicker in women, which allows their right and left hemispheres to communicate better, for instance). Men are not superior to women, but neither are women superior to men - they are just different and complementary.

To succeed, men and women have to work as a team, each with a very specific role. When you start blurring or deliberately ignoring these differences, you end up with two people trying to play the same role, and that never works. Confusion and belligerence ensues - instead of being allies, men and women become 'enemies'.

Children learn to categorize themselves by gender very early on in life. A part of this is learning how to display and perform gendered identities as masculine or feminine, and this implies that masculine and feminine roles should be well defined within the family. It is bad enough that this is no longer clear cut in traditional families - how can then those roles be well defined in a gay relationship if both partners are of the same sex?! They can't, and they aren't.

Are we really willing to sacrifice a whole generation to find out what happens when we no longer have separate and well defined masculine and feminine roles? And, assuming the results are not so good, will we be willing - or even able - to backtrack then?

You said it yourself, you love your brother but you have no desire to marry him. So, marriage is not a requirement to demonstrate love. Why then demand something from society which, by definition, is reserved for people of opposite sexes? Why not be satisfied with the fact that society already tolerates same sex unions?

As for sex being used for purposes other than procreation, this has, in fact, always been the case. However, there were also social controls and restrictions in place to counteract this and balance things out - controls which mostly don't exist anymore.

Is this good? From a selfish point of view, it's great! Never has it been this easy to get free sex! But what price are we paying for this? Lets see:

Sex obeys the rules of supply and demand. When sex is scarce, men are more willing to go the extra mile in order to get it. Here is the basic argument by social psychologist Roy Baumeister: men like sex more than women and so, in the market for sex, they represent the 'demand'. Women like sex less than men, so in this market they are the 'supply'. In short, men have to compensate women in order to entice them into having sex.

In this market the women collude with each other by agreeing to reduce the supply of sex which has the effect of driving up the price. On a market for sex where women are colluding to keep prices high there is always an incentive for one woman to deviate: she can always offer sex at a lower price and capture a large share of the market. However, this would also result in the other women calling her a slut and in her being ostracized (the social control).

Men had their own set social controls, although very different from those applied to women: it was very common for men to have sex or even a mistress outside the marriage. Even if the wife found out about it, she would generally tolerate this and pretend not to know. Why? Because the alternative - divorce - was unthinkable at the time. BUT wow to the man who abandoned his family in order to live with his mistress - such a man would be despised by all! Wow to the man who did not provide for his family!

This is how that cliche of the love triangle where the mistress is eternally waiting for the man to leave his wife and marry her instead came about. Men promised they would but never actually did because they were bound to their families. As Elizabeth Abbott wrote, 'Mistressdom, in fact, has everything to do with marriage. It's an institution parallel and complementary to marriage, and it evolved to accommodate the sexual double standard that tolerates adultery in husbands but condemns it in wives'.

And so there was a balance, and things were kept in check. Not that I condone what is at the base of this balance (the double standard), but, in the end, men got what they wanted and so did women.

Then women became financially independent from men and this changed everything. Because women no longer needed men’s resources, they began to increase their supply of sex on the market. Little by little, sex became cheap. So cheap, in fact, that men no longer have the need to commit or stick to a relationship in order to get sex.

The irony of this is that by giving sex away, women also lost the leverage they had on men, i.e.; the 'power' they once had. And now they complain that men put off commitment and keep things casual for as long as possible.

Anyway, in part because of this new found financial independence, divorce became common and socially accepted, almost the norm (in America 50% percent of first marriages, 67% of second and 74% of third marriages end in divorce, according to Jennifer Baker of the Forest Institute of Professional Psychology in Springfield, Missouri).

Most people will defend divorce on the basis that nobody should be stuck in an unhappy marriage. True, but this is in part based on the big *lie* that most marriages of old were unhappy (not true!), and, furthermore, the long term side effect (remember in my previous post where I mentioned you have immediate consequences - which might be good - and then long term consequences - which might be bad?) is that now almost nobody is willing to go the extra mile to maintain a marriage, and just quit at the first sign of real trouble. Remember the 'for better and for worse' vow? With divorce being so easy and so common... when the going gets tough, the tough get going. This makes a mockery of marriage, which is a *contract* between two people for life. If there is no price to pay for breaking a contract, then it's obvious that the contract is pretty much useless. It's no longer a contract but a vague promise.

So what do we have now? Single parents trying to juggle their careers and their children, leaving little time for the latter. Worse, people used to live in small communities where the whole community (or at least the immediate family which normally lived in the same household) shared the burden of educating and taking care of the children, and this is no longer true. The education of small children is a full time job and we are now neglecting them because, with both parents working, we simply don't have enough available time.

As a result, our children feel lost and abandoned, and then we have unthinkable things such as the Columbine High School massacre, children as young as 12 murdering and robbing people, or joining gangs so they have a sense of 'belonging' and 'protection', etc...

Furthermore, women these days are as promiscuous, if not more promiscuous, than men ever were: infidelity is *everywhere* and is essentially considered 'to be expected' - if not even considered to be 'normal' - even though it's effects remain as devastating as they always were. I can't help but remember what one woman I knew once said to me when she was justifying herself for having been unfaithful to her boyfriend: 'hey, if men do it, why shouldn't we?!'.

Since when is it ok to correct one wrong with another wrong? Unfortunately this 'an eye for an eye' mentality seems to be prevalent in feminism these days.

The implicit trust that was once in the institution of marriage is gone, and nothing is 'forever' anymore. Most people go into new relationships with both eyes wide open, already expecting it to fail, simply because nearly everybody has already been bitten before. The Apple tree is rotten to the core. Very few people are able to walk into a new relationship without carrying with them severe emotional baggage and distrust caused by previous failed relationships - and that is half way to make the new relationship fail as well.

People are more alone now than ever before.

Anyway, apparently good things (women's independence, the freedom from sexual repression, the economic boom that occurred because suddenly both parents were producing, etc...) ended up giving fruit to some really bad things, either because we took those good things too far or because we were unable - or didn't care - to come up with alternate mechanisms to restore the balance.

For instance, by reaching key places of power and then making sure only those who agree with them are able to do the same. All in a very hidden but legal way, of course.

Goes without saying. But what is happening now is that things that do not make sense to the majority are also being acted upon, with those who resist them being called bigots, close minded, etc...

Being altruistic is a good thing, so be true to yourself and don't let others destroy it. But learn to defend yourself too (i.e.; do not throw your pearls at swine, they will not know how to appreciate them). If someone takes advantage of your altruism, it's not your fault - the person who took advantage is in the wrong, not you.

Ahah. Didn't know that one about the rabbit. Btw, you do know that my name is 'Jorge Coelho', and that 'Coelho' means rabbit in Portuguese, no? lol

Anyway, I noticed other replies since I started writing this, but I'll tackle them in another post.

Portuguese, didn't know that Jorge, thought you were American. Not only are our views different but we bring much different life experiences to the table when discussing them. Makes the mix a little more interesting.

and we come full circle to the OP: if you were gay you might feel very different about that.

Some of the best skinners/people involved in skinning aren't American.

Skinning is global ....