(January 24, 2015 at 3:44 pm)Lek Wrote: You've identified a problem where couples stay together and fight all the time and it's worse for the kids than if they separated. This is where christian teaching comes in. They have fallen out of romantic love for each other. But if they had the "real" love for each other and the children, which is the love we're supposed to have for all people, they would refrain from fighting and instead demonstrate "true" love. This love is shown by giving up their desires to "get back" at each other and instead live in harmony for the good of the family. We do this in other life situations all the time. This is what we're called upon by God to do. Often relationships are healed in this way, but again we must act counter to our own desires for our own immediate gratification.
This all sounds very good, but it doesn't work in most real-life situations. In order for a couple to determine to do the loving thing and stay together in order to raise their kids (the only situation in which I agree that couples have a moral obligation to try to work things out), both people in that couple have to be relatively self-aware, emotionally healthy individuals. Unfortunately, most people are not very self-aware, and lots of people were raised in such a shitty situation that they are deeply emotionally scarred.
People who cannot see themselves clearly - as in, admit to themselves what their faults are as well as allowing themselves an occasional pat on the back - are not going to be capable of making a relationship work. Even Christian couples counselors are aware of this, and will often suggest a 'trial separation' during which both partners are going to therapy individually. If that doesn't work, the next step is to remain "married" but live separately. This, of course, is merely a hypocritical "keep the letter of the law but not the spirit" dodge, implemented so that the counselor won't have to admit that the couple needs a divorce.
Christianity says that the solution is for Jesus to change the people, which is a great idea. If you could just pray and have God heal people's neuroses and pathologies, we'd be in business. Unfortunately, the exact opposite seems to happen in far too many cases: Christianity discourages people from getting the help they need, especially if that help involves psych meds. Not that you can't use them, just that you're making baby Jesus cry by not having enough faith to pray the crazy away. Go ahead if you have to, we won't judge. You monster.
Quote:Morality seems to most often occur when we act against what our natural tendencies push us to do.This strikes me as a concise, accurate definition of morality. We use our minds to make decisions that go against our instincts. It's a necessity for living in community, which turns out to be an evolutionarily advantageous setup. Tribes and herds are far better off than loners. Loners have to be physically intimidating, nasty critters in order to fend off all the physically intimidating, nasty critters trying to eat them.
The thing is, these moral decisions are not unique to human beings. They can be found in most social animals. Wikipedia has a pretty decent entry under Evolution of morality that's worth a read.
The social insistence that married couples with kids stay together is hardly unique to Christianity. This is common to societies and religions around the world. And of course it made perfect sense from an evolutionary standpoint until the invention of the Pill.
In fact, I would argue that the invention of modern medicine very suddenly created a situation in which the old religiously-sanctioned view of reproductive relationships no longer made any sense. First, by reducing infant mortality, we shifted from a world in which having 8 to 12 kids made sense (because so few of them would live to see adulthood) to a world in which the human population is zooming out of control. This is a threat to those religions which insist that we should breed like rabbits.
Then, by giving women control over their reproductive systems, we made it possible for women to have sex just because it feels good, without having to worry about getting pregnant. Women have the freedom to be just as casual about sex as men are, and to reproduce or not reproduce as they choose. This is a threat to those religions which insist that a woman cannot fuck anyone but her husband.
In the past 200 years, we have decoupled prodigious procreation from survival. We don't need to have 8-10 kids in order to continue as a species. In fact, many of us don't need to have any kids at all. But the old religious and social imperatives die hard.
In the past 50 years, we have decoupled reproduction from sex. Sex is no longer a serious survival decision. But the old moral rules still persist, even though they're irrelevant.
Sex decoupled from procreation; procreation decoupled from survival. Sex decoupled from survival. All the sexual morality embedded in us for thousands of generations was designed to reference a situation which no longer exists. It's obsolete.
