Tag Archives: Polyamory

News

Atheist Richard Carrier, who divorced his wife to go polyamorous, seeks new sex partner

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Goodness Without God: is it possible?
Goodness Without God: is it possible?

Is atheism a rational worldview, or is it just rationalizing sexual misbehavior?

A while back, prominent atheist Dr. Richard Carrier explained how he was divorcing his wife – who supported him financially – in order to go polyamorous full-time.

The Yeti’s Roar, a libertarian atheist blog reacted to the news: (link removed)

In a recent blog post, entitled “Coming Out Poly + A Change of Life Venue”, the esteemed Dr. Richard Carrier PhD, discusses his “coming out” as polyamorous, an “orientation” that he just discovered at the young age of 47.

[…]Carrier claims that after 17 years of marriage, he cheated on his wife multiple times, for reasons that he won’t disclose.  In the midst of his infidelity, he suddenly “discovered” (as a middle aged man) that he was polyamorous.  Even though his wife attempted to make the marriage work by allowing him to see other women under the guise of an “open marriage”, Carrier still decided to kick her to the curb.   So in Carrier’s view, his affairs were not a mistake, but rather a fun new “lifestyle choice” that he will pursue, regardless of the past commitment to his wife.

What is even more despicable about Carrier’s behavior toward his wife is the fact that she supported him financially.

[…] The only reason he has been able to live a comfortable lifestyle while blogging and writing obscure books is due to his wife’s financial support.  The reason that he could afford to invest his time in getting graduate degrees from Columbia in subjects that will never land him a decent paying job is due to the support of his wife.  The reason he was able to travel around the country for low paying speaking engagements instead of having to get a real job is due to his wife’s financial support.  And how does he repay his wife for the support she has given him?  He cheats on her, waits until he is making enough money where he no longer needs her income, and kicks her to the curb.

So, whenever Richard Carrier was talking about morality without God, now we know what he meant. He even dedicated his book on morality without God to his now ex-wife. How ironic.

But the new polyamoratheism news is that Carrier is actually searching for a new “date”.

I am not linking to his blog post, but it says: (H/T The Yeti’s Roar)

I’ll start by making sure anyone considering this is up to speed. I am polyamorous. I currently have many girlfriends. All I consider my friends. Some are just occasional lovers. Some I am more involved with. They are also polyamorous, or near enough (not all of them identify that way, but all of them enjoy open relationships). And I will always have relationships with them, as long as they’ll have me in their life.

Many different things can be meant by the following terms, but just for the present purpose, if by a primary relationship is meant someone you live with or just about as good as live with, a secondary as someone you date regularly, and a tertiary as someone you date occasionally, all my relationships are tertiary, but only because of geography. I live just below Sacramento, California, where the rents are cheap, which means, where no one wants to live. And I’m unlikely to move anytime soon. So relationships with me, at best, are likely to be tertiary—long distance chatting with occasional being together throughout the year. Even so, I always take such friendships seriously.

[…]I’m 0.5 on the Kinsey scale. Not heavy into kink (but get along well with people who are). I have an unusual fetish or two but don’t expect any of my partners to share them. I’m pro sex worker, and though I personally find strip clubs and brothels uninteresting at best (uncomfortable at worst), I like partners who are or who have been sex workers. I also like women who have or pursue a lot of partners or who love to boast of their sexual exploits, especially over wine or whiskey or equivalent. I’m not going to get all butt-hurt or angsty over how high Your Number is. It very much has the opposite effect on me.

[…]I am also planning to have a hotel room, and am comfortable sharing it platonically. Certainly I would enjoy sharing it non-platonically, but I don’t expect it. I can’t believe (even though I know) there are still guys who assume the other sh*t buys them sex, thus necessitating I say this: if you are going to have sex with me, it has to be because it’s fun and you want to, not because it’s something you owe me. On the same understanding, if you have a place for me to crash in town (platonically or not), and are happy to have me over to spare me the cost of hiring a room, that would be lovely. And yes, if you are poly or open and live with a partner or two, I’m comfortable with that as well.

This also means you don’t have to live in the LA area to join me for this. If you can get to LA, and don’t mind sharing a room (at my expense), the opportunity remains.

This is Richard Carrier’s book on morality without God:

Goodness Without God: Now we know what it looks like
Goodness without God: Now we know what he was talking about

And the book is dedicated to his wife, now ex-wife:

For Jen…

My buxom brunette
My wellspring of joy
My north star of sanity

Indeed.

I trust that everyone now understands what I was saying about the reasons why atheists jettison God and objective morality. Sexual freedom is definitely a big one, and probably the biggest. This is not a worldview, people, it’s not something that is derived from logic and evidence. It starts and ends with getting rid of moral accountability to the Creator. Period. End of issue.

Not that all atheists are as immoral as Carrier, and not all atheists are motivated by sexual perversion. But the primary motivation is always to be able to get God out of the morality business. There’s no denying that atheists look pretty normal in a society that is still running on the fumes of a declining Judeo -Christian value system. But if you look at how they vote, e.g. – for abortion, for gay marriage, against religious liberty, etc., it’s very clear that they want the society to move away from Judeo-Christian values. And it is this desire that more and more human beings not respect the moral oughts that God prescribes that is the real rebellion.

Romans 1:18-21 nails this:

18The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness,

19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

20For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

21For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.

What is expected in the Christian worldview is not to pick and choose a few moral behaviors here and there. Individual moral values are not the issue. When Christ calls a man, he call him to die to himself and his own self-interest, and to take up his moral positions and champion them. Have you ever tried to champion the pro-life cause in an increasingly secular society? How about championing the pro-marriage cause? In order to be a Christian, you don’t just accept the sacrifice of Jesus as atonement for sin, but you also let him lead. And one of those areas of letting him lead is in defining what is and is not moral. It’s very easy for a man to not murder unborn children himself, and to marry someone of the opposite sex, and congratulate himself on how moral he is. Personal morality is not the issue. Inventing your own arbitrary  moral code and then following it might make you feel good, but that is not what God requires. The real challenge of Christianity has to do with standing up for the truth claims, including the moral values, in the face of a society that will not approve of you.

What is required of a man on the Christian worldview is total abandonment to God’s calling and a 100% re-prioritization of his life. It’s not about doing X and Y, but not A and B, and getting a passing grade. It’s about putting Jesus Christ in as your commanding officer in every area of your life.

News

New study: open relationships in the gay community

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Young people seem to like gay marriage more than they like individual liberties
Young people seem to like gay marriage more than they like individual liberties

Story from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Excerpt:

A new study released this week by the Center for Research on Gender & Sexuality at San Francisco State University put statistics around what gay men already know: Many Bay Area boyfriends negotiate open relationships that allow for sex with outsiders.

[…]”I think it’s quite natural for men to want to continue to have an active and varied sex life,” said 50-year-old technology consultant Dean Allemang from Oakland, who just ended a 13-year-open relationship and has begun another with a new boyfriend.

“I don’t own my lover, and I don’t own his body,” he said. “I think it’s weird to ask someone you love to give up that part of their life. I would never do it.”

Hoff, who just received a $3.5 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to continue the study for five more years, initially started her research based on findings that HIV infection is on the rise among male couples.

“So much of the HIV prevention effort is aimed at a different set – men in dance clubs or bathhouses having anonymous sex,” she said. “HIV prevention might want to expand its message to address relationships; we have to look at risk in a greater context.”

In her study of gay couples, 47 percent reported open relationships. Forty-five percent were monogamous, and the remaining 8 percent disagreed about what they were.

Another researcher quoted in the story explains how same-sex marriage is compatible with an “open relationship”, and that this interpretation of marriage would be a redefinition of traditional marriage.

Related to that, there is this radio interview with a gay activist.

Excerpt:

“It’s a no-brainer that (homosexual activists) should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist. …(F)ighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there — because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie.

The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change. And again, I don’t think it should exist. And I don’t like taking part in creating fictions about my life. That’s sort of not what I had in mind when I came out thirty years ago.

I have three kids who have five parents, more or less, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t have five parents legally… I met my new partner, and she had just had a baby, and that baby’s biological father is my brother, and my daughter’s biological father is a man who lives in Russia, and my adopted son also considers him his father. So the five parents break down into two groups of three… And really, I would like to live in a legal system that is capable of reflecting that reality, and I don’t think that’s compatible with the institution of marriage.”

To me, making a relationship “open” puts an emphasis on each person feeling good, rather than each person committing to love the other self-sacrificially. I wonder if young people understand that. What would be interesting, I think, would be to ask all the young people – especially young women – how they would feel if their partner’s idea of marriage involved having an open relationship. How do they feel about non-exclusivity incorporated into the new definition of the word “marriage”.

It seems to me that it’s one thing to say that marriage is a man and a woman committing to love each other through to old age, regardless of changing feelings and unmet desires. A relationship based on the natural definition of marriage is focused on commitment, and not fulfillment of desires. And that works well for children, who need stability, even if the desires of adults are not met. If marriage is about people abandoning exclusivity and permanence in order to get what they need to be happy “in the moment”, then neither person will be able to depend on the other when they are old, ugly and sickly.

Here’s a video that explains the basics of why people like me support natural marriage:

The word marriage means, one man, one woman, for life. And both parents sacrifice to raise the children they create. And no frivolous divorce, either. And if you ask me, it should also mean no sex before marriage, formal courtship, approval of both sets of parents, and the wife stays home when the children under five.

News

Polygamy is next: Montana throuple applies for wedding license

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Marriage and family
Marriage and family

The Supreme Court redefined marriage so that it no longer means one man, one woman, for life. What follows from attaching the word “marriage” to people who have temporary feelings of love for other people?

Here’s the story from MSN.com.

Excerpt:

A Montana man said Wednesday that he was inspired by last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage to apply for a marriage license so that he can legally wed his second wife.

Nathan Collier and his wives Victoria and Christine applied at the Yellowstone County Courthouse in Billings on Tuesday in an attempt to legitimize their polygamous marriage. Montana, like all 50 states, outlaws bigamy — holding multiple marriage licenses — but Collier said he plans to sue if the application is denied.

“It’s about marriage equality,” Collier told The Associated Press Wednesday. “You can’t have this without polygamy.”

[…]The Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday made gay marriages legal nationwide. Chief Justice John Roberts said in his dissent that people in polygamous relationships could make the same legal argument that not having the opportunity to marry disrespects and subordinates them.

Meanwhile, this lady writing in The Federalist explains how she wants polyamory to come next after the gay marriage. Why? Because she and partner don’t always feel “in love”. Her solution is that she be able to add people to her current relationship so that she can have those “in love” feelings.

She writes:

The problem is, fires don’t burn indefinitely unless you keep adding more wood. They start with a spark, work their way up to a roar, then calm back down to a crackle. When the crackling gets too quiet, someone throws another log on, and the flames flare back up. The cycle repeats over and over again, as long as there are more logs, more fuel.

Our fuel is running out. Brad and I have tried all the tricks. We’ve fanned the flames. We need more logs—new energy, a fresh perspective. It doesn’t mean we don’t love each other, or that we are done with each other. It just means we need something new.

[…]Four years into our relationship, we found ourselves in the typical rut of co-dependence, resentment, boredom, and fighting over the grocery bill. We’d had an unplanned baby, I’d quit my job to do attachment parenting full-time, and Brad was working long hours in a dungeon of a warehouse. I was stuck at home washing dishes, folding laundry and talking to a two-year-old, bored out of my mind. If we didn’t have anything to fight about, we’d find something, just to make life a little more interesting.

Now for the part that’s interesting to me. I have heard this same reasoning from so many formerly Christian women:

I had freed myself from the grips of government, religion, and parents. The only chains left to throw off were those on my sexuality—particularly the chains of monogamy.

The first authority I came to see as illegitimate was government, shortly after discovering Ron Paul in 2008. I stumbled upon his campaign like a rabbit hole that led me to question all of society’s rules. Soon after, I started to question my religion—Christianity. How much of it had been made up, twisted, and contrived—in collusion with the government—to support the powers that be?

Along with the fear of God, I cast off any respect for parental authority I once had. Since the punitive, authoritarian man in the clouds was no longer real to me, who was to say children should obey their parents?

[…]Then, one day, I came across an article about polyamory. One article led to another, and soon I was watching documentaries about polyamorous triads and quads. I became obsessed with the reality TV show “Polyamory: Married and Dating,” and ordered the book “Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What it Means for Modern Relationships.”

“This is it!” I thought. I’d finally found what seemed like a desirable alternative to the wedded misery I saw all around me.

She exchanged the God of the Bible for a reality TV show about polyamory. And do you think it was because she worked through all the arguments for Christian theism? No – it was because she wanted to throw off the authority of God and her parents.

This focus on self-centeredness and personal autonomy will work for her for a while, too. It will work until she hits 40 and loses the only thing that gives her value to the men she prefers – her youth and beauty. She has not used her youth to take responsibility, accept obligations and develop the skills, work experience, assets and character traits that will make her a good wife and mother. She is headed for a disaster once her youth and beauty fades. When she is cast off for being too old, it will be too late for her to turn back and rebuild the character traits that a marriage-minded man values no matter how old a woman is. A typical man is willing to put up with self-centeredness for a beautiful, young woman, but not for one who loses that beauty and youth.

That’s why we had marriage, so that a woman learned to love a man with more than just looks and youth, and a man learned to look beyond looks and  youth, because he knew he was committing to a woman for life. Marriage (prior to no-fault divorce) was society’s answer to the fading of a woman’s youth and beauty. Since marriage was for life, men looked for more than just fun and thrills from a woman, they looked for character and ability as a wife and mother. And women responded to men by minimizing youth and beauty, and trying to cultivate skills, work experience, assets and character traits that would help her support and encourage a man in his life plan.