I think I may have been too...angry? To be posting here, tonight? I don't know. I didn't think I was angry when I started. I still don't feel angry...Apologies if I offend/insult anyone, or come off too hostilely. I'll try to monitor myself better on this in the future. People have made good points. I probably missed several. Sorry if I missed yours.
Nah you're legit calm
Also, guys? Marriage thing worked because of STDs. It's not even about what it was meant to do; "it's tradition and culture and blah and that's why we put it in our book". The reason it happened to be part of the most successful religion ("Be fruitful and multiply"; infant mortality rates were massive, nobody was concerned with population control in an agricultural society) is because it meant fewer people got gonorrhea and died. Not, none, but fewer.
I disagree on your STD argument, though there's not much of substance to disagree on. Which is the most successful religion? Also if you read the OT the focus is clearly not on avoiding gonorrhea (though you should you filthy degenerates), but on rearing at least two kids and then raising them well, heck one of the big exceptions I was talking about earlier with concubinage was to do with infertile wives and moral loopholing
Plus some advantages to do with blahblahblah childrearing it kinda pales in the face of anything that cuts down on disease, which is the biggest cause of mortality for humans in general, back then or now.
The Devil that you Know...
Hahahah, only if you have a death based morality, all the things you blahblahblah over are the most important in all three of the Abrahams
And anyone who makes deals with the devil they know don't even have the excuse of ignorance to explain their retardation
Being a parent is hard.
You can be a parent or take the easy route, die a childless hedonist or else abandon the offspring you have to end your days pleasurable, relaxed in excess wealth. If virtue wasn't hard, then the apathetic would be the paragons of virtue. I do not like people who hold
trying to do something as immoral in any regard. It still grated me around 2010 when pretending you cared about nothing and did nothing got back in vogue.
I kinda hate it when people go 'well you deserve what you get'. From either side. Whether it's 'you got pregnant, woman up and deal with having a kid, abortion is wrong', or 'you had a kid, parent up and deal with the next 18-20 years of expenses and stress'. Especially since if you don't give 'em up for adoption in the first couple months or so, good luck living with the guilt. Oh, and those hormones won't make it easy. So you know, if you fuck up at it, at making sure that your kid grows up to be pretty alright, when you probably had less than great parents because they were dealing with much of the same shit, in a world that's as fucked up as it is - and don't get me wrong, it's a pretty nice place, relative to what it could be and has been, but I hate it for the same reason I hate the idea of 'don't be proud that you aren't [type of bigot]; sure, the default is bigot, but non-bigot is the absolute minimum to be considered a ('decent') human being and thus worthy of respect'. Right. Cuz' it totally isn't difficult or a massive effort at all times or incredibly stressful to constantly second-guess yourself and your own motivations and thoughts when you see someone of a different [X]. And there certainly isn't any feedback mechanism where the worry that comes up there means your mind associates [X] with negative thoughts and feelings, such that you have to work harder and harder just to keep up with 'decent'. No, if you want to be a good person, you need to do that for everything, and then you need to go become an advocate. Like us! Yay us! Yayyyyy
The fuck is this lol
I may have gotten off on a tangent. Point was, kids don't grow up well on their own. It takes hard fucking work, and telling anyone who doesn't manage it to go fuck themselves is a shitty thing to do. People are people, even when they suck. That's why you call them terrible human beings. Still human beings, still deserve some modicum of respect.
Though there are people for whom I would feel very satisfied to point out that I'm better at the core tenets of their religion than they are. Which probably means I'm not, after all, but that's why I don't actually point it out.
Religion is better as trade school than faith school, if you practice their core tenets of their religion well (I won't say better because I don't think it's healthy to have moral highground competitions, in the words of some guy who worked with Jun Seba, "I'm not better than you, I just think different"), then you probably are. Anyone who doesn't manage it because they never even tried have already fucked all those who were dependent upon them and should face the consequences of their wilful failure; failure is rarely a personal thing but for parents this is truer even moreso. No shame in failing, everyone must fail every now and then, but there's shame in not trying because you'd end up fucking kids up with neglect, and you can't unfuck that even if you learn from your mistakes. This shit be important yo
It takes a village to raise a child. Not two parents, an extended family. If it's just a nuclear family, that's a sign of desperation.
Lol I doubt you can call it a sign of desperation when it's a product of deliberate social engineering
That's a calculated attempt at creating an easily dividable unit for political and economic exploitation, running off of the bare minimum that should be feasibly possible to run a functional family on
Requoting because very relevant:
Loyalties are no longer to fathers, uncles, and the other "patriarchs" of the family who once formed a veritable safety net for then eedy of the family: the ill and the infirm, and orphans, and divorcees and their children. Each family unit was hence-forth "on its own," the unit having become the parents, their children and grandchildren, and their fathers and mothers, whenever all these coexisted. It is this unit that reflects the "model family" promoted by the modern state, not only because this is the predominant European model - the exporter of this state - but also because the new "Islamic" nation-state could more easily secure the loyalty of such a nuclear family as the defined and articulated site of the good citizen. The loyalties within clans and tribes, being quasi-political, can hardly be divided. Thus, the modern nation-state, which also was fundamentally engaged in, and intertwined with, the new forms of capitalism and new economic modes of production, had a profound interest in refashioning the modern family into a family that is distinctly nuclear.
An Introduction to Islamic Law, by Wael B. Hallaq
The West is too aversed to Patriarchal families though so maybe they could be sold a different model? Can't go back to the old agrarian ones, they're too far long gone. The nuclear model would just be back to square one of dysfunction, don't know why American traditionalists look back on a piece of shit with nostalgia but hey, maybe it worked for them. I like the Hakka, Han and Hebrew models (not just because they're H&H&H. Though that does factor :
D). In reverse order the Hebrews have very nice legalistic interpretations of marriage as a functional family building (with the linguistic connotations of house building) that grows the family without breaking the clan into smaller clans or requiring all families to live under one roof and one patriarch, with the sons and daughters moving out of their parents' abode whilst still remaining in their parents' families (leaving a respectful distance between married couples and their in-laws). Also funny stuff like giving engaged men exemption from the military whilst they set up their family, countries with the draft really should consider that, funny as it is it is notable what WWI and WWII did to Europe. Also to quote the Jewish library:
Perhaps in nothing was the strength of the family bond more seen than in the paradox that whereas in theory divorce among Jews is the easiest of all processes, in practice it was, until recent times, a comparative and even absolute rarity. The powerful bond which united parents and children in one bond with mutual responsibilities and mutual consideration made it a bulwark of Judaism able to withstand all stresses from without and from within.
Where mutual responsibilities and mutual consideration cement families in foundations incredibly hard to break, whilst with Western families of disloyalty and self-serving units have divorce rates of 1/2 and kids who grow up retarded with blue hair, no roots and no value. Han family units rather specially worked in cyclical fashions. You started off with something that resembles a nuclear family, with a patriarch, wife and kids - but once the sons grow up, even after marrying they were subservient to the family's patriarch. Upon death of the patriarch the land would be split between them and their families and the nuclear stem would all branch off and start again, with the obvious problem being inter-familial rivalries could and would get intense with sons chafing under the absolute authority of their fathers vs their filial duties and obligations, and Freud would probably get a boner reading how many times mothers and daughters in law competed over the loyalty of their sons and husbands. The great benefit is everyone is fervently loyal to one another and the ties can create networks of supporting families all a part of one greater family, once or if you get past the stifling social control which can go to harmful extremes rather quickly (I do recall the anecdote where some bloke actually went to his job interview with his mother talking for him). The Hakka one is very similar to the Hebrew and Han ones with patrilinieal family units making up segments of a larger family unit, alongside the same expectations of filial duty and so on. The big difference would probably be in how they deal with social advancement, labour and the sexes, with the Hakka notably having not practiced footbinding because it would've rendered their women incapable of working in the fields, being one of the few family units that did not see domestic affairs as such a vast sphere of labour that it required making women useless elsewhere. Instead of a rigid hierarchy, it's more dynamic, changing as people are born and die; for example a family of one father, mother, two sons and three daughters may have the mother managing the properties the father earns, but if the father dies then the sons would quit education to support their sisters' education so they could advance themselves e.t.c.
And that's not a rule mind you, just an expression of the family coherence and mutual support which is pretty damn neat
You need people who care. Guardians/what have you. Yeah, it's nice to have parents. Studies also find that shared environment, aka the way you get parented? Basically no influence on life outcome. At least for twins. Maybe it's different for everyone else, but it's hard to do studies on that when people's genes vary even by that much.
Studies have also shown my lovemaking skills to be supreme in the universe towards achieving the best outcome
Shared environment is not even the way you get parented, and the way children are parented is fundamental to how they develop as adults. This flies in the way against all the scientific models we have constructed and I have not yet seen evidence to the contrary.
There have been some studies related to the researchers work on parenting and self-esteem. In a recent work done by Hetherington (2003), children in divorced and remarried families show an increased risk for internalizing problems, including higher levels of depression and anxiety, and lower levels of self-esteem compared to children in nondivorced families.
A study by Elfhag, Tynelius and Rasmussen et al. (2010) also found out that children have lower self-esteem living with a single parent than those raised by two parents. In 1991 Amato and Keith examined the 92 studies involving 13,000 children ranging from preschool to young adulthood and the overall result of this analysis was that children from divorced families are on "average" somewhat worse off than children who have lived in intact families. These children have more difficulty in school, more behavior problems, more negative self-concepts, more problems with peers, and more trouble getting along with their parents. A more recent update of the findings indicates that this pattern continues in more recent research (Amato, 2001). Naderi et.al (2009) who studied the relationship between achievement of motivation, self-esteem and gender among high school of students found that there is significant relationship between self-esteem and gender. It was found out that male adolescents had higher self-esteem than female adolescents.
Mruk in 1995 also found that children with parents who are absent frequently or for long periods of time display lower levels of self-esteem. Krider (2002) found out that two (2)- three (3) years after the divorce, children were two (2) to four (4) times more likely to be seriously disturbed emotionally and behaviorally than children of intact families. In another study, it was found out that two years after the divorce, children displayed lower levels of social and peer functioning as well as lower self-esteem than they did immediately following the divorce (Krider 2002).
The Effects of Parenting on the Self-Esteem of Adolescents: A study
at Labadi Presbyterian Secondary School (Ghana), Literature Review
The effects on self-esteem are even affected by the power dynamics of the family unit, with the dominant parents having more importance towards the self-esteem of the children.
Social development. Language acquisition. Mental health - how you are raised will most certainly determine your adult behaviour:
Parenting styles
The dominant model in research on parent–child relationships is most loosely associated with the early work of Diana Baumrind in the 1960s (e.g. Baumrind, 1991) and has been elaborated on by several subsequent teams of investigators (Maccoby and Martin, 1983; Steinberg et al., 1994b; Hetherington et al., 1999). Baumrind, in her naturalistic study of interactions between parents and young children, described important dimensions of parenting. These were warmth (as opposed to conflict or neglect) and control strategies. Parenting typologies were, thus, constructed from a cross of warmth, conflict and control: ‘authoritative’ (high warmth, positive/assertive control and in adolescence high expectations), ‘authoritarian’ (low warmth, high conflict and coercive, punitive control attempts), ‘permissive’ (high warmth coupled with low control attempts) and ‘neglectful/disengaged’ (low warmth and low control).
These four typologies have been repeatedly associated with child outcomes. Children and adolescents of authoritative parents are consistently described as most prosocial, academically and socially competent, and least symptomatic. Children whose parents are described as authoritarian, permissive and disengaged show significantly worse outcomes, with children of authoritarian parents showing typically the most disturbed adjustment of the four parenting types
Kings College London, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation
And for that matter,
physical health. Fucking hell, Freud's whole entire work basis is that childhood traumas internalize an form as adult psychoses.
I really hope Western academia has not got us to the point where people are advocating for neglectful parenting because no one wants to take responsibility for their actions anymore and have finally found the dubious justification needed to
Are we really at the point where we reject nature and nurture and leave in its blank void an empty pit of disregard
Because that is a sad thing
Though really, there's more to being part of a family than having kids. If you're a married couple without kids? You're also a family.
Of course there is more, but there's more to family than being a mere partnership. Family is not some innate good, it is a structure from which everyone can support each other and continue the family.
If your kids grow up 'useless', but still have a good life? Oh well. I'm sure Van Gogh seemed pretty useless at the time when he was alive too, what with having only sold one painting ever while alive (I'm also aware he didn't have a good life, hush). People are biological machines, but if your primary concern is output, or some arbitrary definition of functional, because it's functioned enough ways by now that what I thought of as it's functional meaning has been made dysfunctional, then Socrates sounds great for you.
How can they live a good life whilst useless? What irresponsible parent expects a useless child to grow to be a happy adult? How on earth will they ever start a family of their own?
And do not confuse commercial success with being utterly useless, lest we define the Kardashians as the pinnacle of without uselessness (I am translating from a foreign concept into English, being without uselessness is the closest translation, with additional connotations of purpose as in "what's the use" sort of use, in addition to having ability). For example Vincent Van Gogh was a very successful art trader and made a conscious choice to abandon commercial success in the pursuit of his own artistic endeavours - resentful of how art was treated as a commodity, even though he was making more money than his father. His contraction of gonorrhea, syphilis, smoking, his cold childhood, his quarreling with his father, his rejection by his cousin, his developing alcoholism, his self harming and mutilation leading to his eventual death by suicide. A lot of wasted potential, wasted, dying alone in melancholy with no friends or family by his side, at death or before it. He is not a model to be followed, but one to be remembered.