A while ago, we had a medium-sized crisis involving one of our kids. One of the first thoughts that raced across my mind was “Just when I finally thought I had my act together — now this!!” Then I immediately caught myself. Would I rather it happen while I’m drowning in three other crises? Or when I feel like I’m in a position to let everything else slide for a bit while I focus on my child’s problem?
Meanwhile, my husband jumped up to the plate as well, and we both found solace and emotional replenishment in each other’s arms while dealing with the problem.
This incident came to mind when I read the following comment:
Excuses like the kids would want me to be happy that adults use to justify their divorce (news flash your kids dont give a damn if youre happy. Kind of like how you dont give a damn what they think about the divorce. Funny how that works).
Sure, most kids (being, by definition, immature) don’t consciously care much about other people’s happiness. But having the emotional and physical energy to deal with crises (as well as with day-to-day parenting) is not something you can fake or simply conjure up by force of will. It’s the parents’ responsibility to provide a safe and healthy environment for their kids, and it’s the adults’ responsibility to figure out what they need to do to create that environment. It is the couple that knows whether their marriage is a source of comfort and solace or whether it is a source of additional stress, hindering the parents’ efforts to focus on their kids’ needs.
When people say that no-fault divorce is destroying the family, I take issue with that personally — because if it weren’t for no-fault divorce, I probably wouldn’t have the happy family that I have today. I remember thinking that if the point of restricting divorce is for the sake of the kids, I shouldn’t have even had the six-month waiting period for my no-fault divorce. If a childless couple has already decided to call it quits, the last thing you want to do is insist on giving them another opportunity to bring a child into this picture. Of course, even for couples with kids, if they’ve decided to split amicably, it’s not necessarily in the kids’ interest to insist on turning it into a fight.
Now, I know that the defenders of traditional marriage will say that the point is that if they create more obstacles to divorce, maybe the couple will choose not to divorce. Because that’s what a stress family needs: more obstacles. (Aside: A historian studying Victorian-era illegitimacy told me that there was a high rate of cohabitation and illegitimacy due to one or both partners being unable to obtain a divorce from an earlier union.)
Studies on kids’ “outcomes” have shown that kids whose parents stayed married do better than kids whose parents are divorced. But if these studies are used to tell people that they need to stay together “for the kids” (and they are used for that, consistently), then the fact that some of families in the “married” category actually didn’t even want to split up is a major factor that should not be glossed over. The only relevant studies are the ones that specifically compare outcomes of families where the parents wanted a divorce (but decided to stay together for the kids) to the outcomes of families where the parents divorced and cooperated in child rearing. And, to be credible, such studies should be free of major funding conflicts of interest.
Sometimes I get the impression that people who want to “defend” (heterosexual-only) marriage don’t really think very highly of marriage, even straight marriage (see this recent critique of straight marriages where the spouses are in love with each other). Personally, I think marriage is a commitment rather than a prison, and — even though it represents some amount of work — on balance it is a comfort and joy rather than a punishment.
Yes Holly, between the two of us, it’s certainly clear that I’m the angry one.
If that sounded patronizing, I’m sure it was just your imagination.
Thanks! That’s the sort of amusing attempt I was looking for.
I guess we are all waiting. Holly is waiting for Seth to name alternatives to marriage, and I’m waiting for Seth to give me the same kind of insights into Dan Petersen that he has for John Dehlin, and Seth is waiting for Dehlin to provide “names and proof” that he spoke to a general authority, otherwise he refuses to believe that he did (#7, Two Interesting . . .). Well, it isn’t exactly the same as Waiting for Godot, but I have an idea that Godot will show up before Holly and I get answers. And D.P. is still fired regardless of whether or not Seth gets the proof he wants.
Actually, Parker, I’ve given up waiting, at least in this round. Christ will come through before Seth does.
Though that’s a good point about Seth’s relationship to evidence. According to Seth on the Maxwell institute thread, we don’t really need evidence that the Book of Mormon is indeed an ancient history engraven on gold plates in order to accept that it is and to completely reorder our lives because of that acceptance.
but to believe that John Dehlin, who has all sorts of contacts all over the church, might have talked to a GA? Even though there are GA’s who actively seek dialogue with people on the fringes of the church for the insight that provides? WE MUST HAVE NAMES AND WE MUST HAVE PROOF OR NO ONE WITH ANY RESPECT FOR EVIDENCE AND TRUTH WILL PLACE ANY CONFIDENCE IN THIS OUTLANDISH CLAIM!
http://mainstreetplaza.com/2012/06/22/two-interesting-news-items-mormons-secret-and-maxwell-institute-shake-up/
I already expressed problems I had with Daniel Peterson Parker. Not sure what else you want.
Incidentally, Jack posted this summary:
http://www.clobberblog.com/?p=4481
I happen to know Jack pretty well and trust that she wouldn’t make the assertion that the Dehlin paper had GA involvement without more information on the subject than I have. So my position on this has changed since a few days ago. We still have no indication that anyone above Bradford was involved in Peterson’s demotion (he wasn’t technically fired – he was demoted).
Jack has posted a conclusion sort of post as well:
http://www.clobberblog.com/?p=4532
An interesting article discussing cohabitation as a reality we have to learn to deal with (partly because it’s not as detrimental as some people say) and the misplaced belief in marriage as a cure of a variety of social ills: http://www.alternet.org/story/156162/5_states_where_%22living_in_sin%22_is_illegal_america's_irrational_love_affair_with_the_institution_of_marriage_?page=entire
Actually the article just says that more Americans are doing cohabitation, and less Americans disapprove of it, and that there’s legal problems cohabitating couples face that need to be overcome. I could have told you that already.
The article briefly promised at actually tackling the question of whether cohabitation is inferior to marriage with it’s mention of the New York Times article. But the interviewee simply hemmed and hawed, and ultimately didn’t say much about it. It basically boiled down to “we need more data.”
Well, OK….
Guess I’ll wait for that then.
Actually it states
Yes, Seth. There are many things you could have told people already, but for some strange reason, you often refuse to provide information you claim to have.
Why? Just take it on faith, the way you do with the Book of Mormon and the rest of Mormonism’s claims. After all the stakes are much lower, and “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” as you yourself said, and you don’t want to be guilty of “demanding a degree of evidence that is not reasonable or warranted for the subject.”
If you can believe that a 14-year-old boy saw an angel in his bedroom and dug up a box with gold plates in it near his home and translated an ancient text by peering into the darkness of his hat at a stone he’d dropped into the bottom of it and was visited by God and Jesus and told that he was their favorite latter-day special prophet, all just because the guy said so, then surely you can believe that cohabitation isn’t really all that bad.
Unless, of course, it boils down to the fact that you want to believe the claims of Mormonism and don’t want to believe that cohabitation might not be as ruinously evil as you like to assert.
Uh huh.
Is “change the subject” a standard operating procedure you have taped to your computer monitor or something Holly? Last I checked, we weren’t talking about faith claims at all.
I’m interested in the larger context, Seth. You wrote @85:
I can remember multiple strands of various conversations, all at once. You have espoused a particular approach to evidence and belief, and I want to see if you apply it consistently.
So, no, I don’t have “change the subject” taped my monitor as an instruction. To me, I’m not changing the subject; I’m just aware of the larger subject, which is how things relate back to Mormonism and its effects on those who discuss it.
That wouldn’t be such a strange or difficult thing to pay attention to, would it?
But it does seem at times that “Dodge the question!” might be a command you have taped to your monitor. Certainly you seem to find some questions extremely discomfiting, and work very hard to avoid answering them. As I mentioned, I find it interesting and amusing.
No Holly, I just consider a lot of what you write to be not worth bothering with. Especially since so much of it is merely a transparent attempt at heckling.
Back to the topic though – the area of whether cohabitation is or is not a good thing seems to have a lot of different camps throwing contested data back and forth at each other. Some say it leads to more divorces, others less. Numbers get thrown around without context and you can dig up your favorite decontextualized data blurb and act like it’s relevant.
But it really boils down to this:
Cohabitation basically says “I want to have sex with you, but I don’t want to care about you enough to commit long term.”
That’s pretty-much jerk territory – no matter how you slice it.
As nice as people who cohabitate may or may not be in all other respects.
And as nice or bad as people who marry may be in all other respects.
and yet, here you are, typing away, bothering.
Unless it says, “I consider myself married to you in every important way and don’t need someone else to validate it,” a position you yourself defended @26 in this very conversation.
Yeah. I can TOTALLY see why you wouldn’t find someone pointing that out worth responding to.
Because attacking and defending the very same position in the same conversation is “pretty-much jerk territory no matter how you slice it.”
Unless you are viewing marriage as a synonym for certain social commitments. In that instance, cohabitation indicates a desire not to enter into those same commitments. This isn’t really a difficult point – there is a reason people cohabitate instead of getting married, and it involves not wanting to be bound by those social commitments.
Incidentally, this is also a reason for not extending the same legal benefits (or extending different legal benefits) to cohabitating couples as opposed to married ones.
Those who cohabitate have made a social decision to forego the same level of legal commitment. So it only makes sense that the government can treat their relationship differently than a couple who has made that level of legal commitment.
perhaps. But it does not necessarily that not wanting to make certain commitments to all of society involves an unwillingness to make a long-term commitment to one’s partner in the relationship.
Certainly that’s the thinking in many European countries, where marriage is entirely a legal arrangement, religion doesn’t enter into it, and gay couples can marry.
Here, the concern seems to be more about protecting the abstract concept of “marriage” than the people who enter into it.
I don’t think those two things in your last sentence have to be separate concerns.
For instance, when’s the last time you heard someone say the concern is more about protecting democracy than protecting the people in them?
(OK, maybe I did hear something like that back in some of my undergrad Political Science classes, but it’s not a distinction people always make in regards to every social institution)
Seth, you’re doing a lot of mind reading with this one. The decision to share a household with someone is a complex one; the decision of when/whether to marry also. People approaching their own life choices with a different set of assumptions than yours aren’t necessarily thinking the same things that you project onto them.
It reminds me two sentences that came before the comment I cited in the O.P.:
So, in a nutshell, you’re in everyone’s head, and you know why they choose to marry (or not) when they do; why people used to have kids in the past, why they do today, etc.
Have I mentioned before that people who disapprove of something tend to ascribe frivolous motivations to people who do it?
Yeah. That.
Marriage is an abstract concept. It exists because we say it does. If we declared marriage illegal or impossible as of today, there would still be people who would decide to spend their lives together, or simply find themselves doing it because they like being together.
Yeah. I was thinking about how easy it is to vilify the reasons people get married. There’s always that very Mormon reason:
“I want to have sex, but I’m too afraid and immature to do it until someone from my church tells me it’s OK, so let’s get married right away.”
or
“I really want to have a great big party and get lots of presents from my friends. In fact, that’s more important to me than simply sharing my life with you. I won’t feel like I’m really committed to you until that happens.”
or
“I like you, but what matters most to me in how we structure our relationship are the financial and social benefits I’ll get from making a public commitment to you.”
All of that is “pretty much jerk territory no matter how you slice it.”
Which was YOUR reason for getting married, Seth? It has to be one of those three.
Because in the same way you claim to know why people cohabitate, I claim to know why people marry. The reasons I’ve listed are the reasons why people do it–end of story. I know the primary reason people marry is not love. If it were, they’d just declare their love for each other and be done with it. No, because marriage is about some kind of official religious and legal status, people’s reasons for marrying are NOT about the other person in the marriage but about the institution–what they’ll get from it.
Yeah. That really is “pretty-much jerk territory no matter how you slice it.”
Chanson, if I’m wrong, then why do I have such a hard time finding any societal discussion of children that isn’t couched entirely in adult-centered paradigms, with adult fulfillment as the primary overriding concern? The very language that adults use to defend their own lifestyle choices speaks quite a lot about the assumptions they hold and what they prioritize. I see a lot of talk of adults getting what they are entitled to. I don’t see a lot of concern for anything beyond the sphere of the individual.
You’re kidding. You seriously can’t find any societal discussion of children that isnt couched entirely in adult-centered paradigms, with adult fulfillment as the primary overriding concern? Is the scroller on your browser broken, preventing you from scrolling up and reading the OP?
If so, let me re-quote:
Well, gee, Seth. Maybe you’re looking in the wrong place. After all, as you yourself said, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
If YOUR inability to find these statements that undermine your position is going to count as ANY sort of evidence that there is ANY validity in your position, then the fact that no one is able to find DNA evidence to support the claims of the Book of Mormon–that in fact the DNA evidence contradicts the claims of the Book of Mormon–is evidence that the Book of Mormon is a load of bunk.
You can’t claim in one conversation the absence of evidence is an utterly trivial criticism that in no way undermines your position and then claim in another conversation that the absence of evidence is a damning point that entirely supports your position.
First off, I wasn’t talking about your original post when I made that observation Chanson. Secondly, you’ve shifted the topic to “children.”
Of course when people are talking about CHILDREN, they tend to talk about children.
I was talking about discussion of marriage primarily and other adult unions. When people talk about marriage – yes the discussion does tend to go adult-centered rather rapidly.
Well, gee. Since marriage is a commitment between TWO ADULTS, it makes sense that discussions of it would be adult-centered.
Everyone paying attention will notice that that contradicts
So which is it, Seth? Is it true that “Of course when people are talking about CHILDREN, they tend to talk about children” or is it true that you “have such a hard time finding any societal discussion of children that isnt couched entirely in adult-centered paradigms”?
Everyone paying attention will notice that that contradicts
So which is it, Seth? Is it true that Of course when people are talking about CHILDREN, they tend to talk about children or is it true that you have such a hard time finding any societal discussion of children that isnt couched entirely in adult-centered paradigms?
+
= ?
Oh, I see. You mean other than in discussions (like this one) where people talk about adult unions in terms of their effects on children, people never seem to talk about adult unions in terms of their effects on children.
Holly, you’re defining marriage as a commitment between two adults. It’s actually more than that. And the fact you’re reducing it to that kind of supports my point here.
Actually Holly, good point about the wording contradictions.
Couple things.
First off, marriage is being redefined in our society as merely a matter of adult-to-adult commitment, with little to no regard for any societal obligation or obligation to anyone outside the romantic couple. That’s one trend I’m very much seeing here.
Secondly however, children are largely viewed in terms of adult fulfillment in our modern society. Having children is largely couched in terms of personal rights. “I have a right to have a child.” And personal aspirations of self-fulfillment are put at the center of discussions of whether to have children or not. Discussions of the number of children, or whether to have children are all primarily couched in terms of adult well-being.
Both of these are trends that I see in our national discussion. Of course you can still find articles, studies, and blog conversations that talk about child well-being (though even those can jump the rails and start obsessively moping about whether the ADULT is a good parent – making it, once again, all about the adult). But that doesn’t necessarily negate the trend I’m seeing.
By the way, I don’t mean to suggest that adult selfishness is a new invention only discovered in the last 30 years.
But I do think our modern social context gives adult selfishness freer reign to express itself and get itself written into the legal and social code.
I’m defining marriage as a commitment between two adults because that’s how our society defines it. If you don’t believe me, try it yourself. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=definition+of+marriage
This is not a new thing, Seth, despite your assertion to the contrary.
Really? Since when? And what does that even mean? So when 25-year-olds “get married,” they’re not REALLY married….
until they have kids?
until Seth R says they are?
until what?
And yet, when someone else brings up a trend, you write things like
so which is it, Seth? Is the larger tend you’re seeing something valid, or is it just the product of a self-selected, small, and rather distorted segment of the population who “project their own issues onto everyone around them”?
it’s not an issue of mere “wording.” Your entire position is incoherent, your approach to argument utterly inconsistent.
I love the way you’re ignoring Chanson’s comment, btw.
as for this
and this
Well, it’s not surprising, given the divine model we are supposedly encouraged to follow.
Let’s look at “Heavenly Father.”
If there was ever a parent who views his children in terms of his own fulfillment, it’s him. It’s his “work and his glory.”
He deprives his kids of their mother. She’s quite absent from the whole business. He makes and executes plans for his children’s growth with their big brother. When he has business so important that he has to visit them, as when he initiated the “Restoration” with Joseph Smith, he takes Big Brother along, not Mom. (The theological and psychological implications of Jesus as Big Brother are indeed rich.)
When his kids disappoint them, he figures the best way to deal with the problem is to kill all but a handful of them and start over, as in the whole Noah’s ark thing.
Finally, if you look at this success rate, he SUCKS at his work and his glory. He starts off by banishing a third of his children from his presence forever, and they become his mortal enemies, committed to destroying their siblings.
What would we think of a human father who achieved that outcome?
As for the kids he likes well enough to let them acquire a body and an education, most of them won’t measure up to the requirements necessary to go back and live with or even visit him again. And he doesn’t let them know much of anything about their mother–perhaps because she got so fed up with his crap that she left him? Went off to care for the third of the children he deprived of a home and a source of nurturing?
I remember being in the MTC, looking at a pie chart of world religions by number of adherents. I stared at the tiny sliver of Mormonness, and I thought, explicitly, “For someone who’s perfect, omnipotent, and omniscient, god sure isn’t doing very well at this work and his glory.”
At that point my concern was whether the church was really so important to spiritual salvation. I figured if it was crucial, it was pretty crappy of a loving God to take so long to restore it. I thought it seemed more likely that the LDS church wasn’t the only available means to salvation.
And I think that’s even truer now. But I also think that God’s an exceptionally lousy parent.
Mormon theology is not really child-centric. Instead, as Mormon scripture stresses, it’s about GOD’s WORK and GOD’s GLORY. It’s all about how having children makes God feel special and important. The focus is not on whether his children are well-adjusted and productive, but on whether they are obedient and humble, because he thinks their obedience and humility makes him look better. And requisite in the whole affair is the torture and execution of that Favorite Son/Big Brother who’s so important to him, the one other being he loves most (WAY more than he loves Mom).
Given that the parent-child relationship we enshrine in LDS theology and label “perfect” is entirely about one parent’s fulfillment, has no need of mothering except as a logical and biological necessity (Truth is reason, truth eternal Tells me I’ve a mother there), and results, for most of Daddy’s children, in an eternal and irreparable divide between parent and child that Daddy insists on, it hardly seems surprising that Mormonism in particular would create dysfunctional marriages and families and really skewed ideas about why we have children and how they should be nurtured.
As I wrote in a facebook discussion,
So if you dislike this trend of parenting being all about the parents and not so much about the kids, maybe you should reconsider the theology you embrace, since it takes this thing you claim to hate and enshrines it as divine.
Holly, I would simply note that you conveniently left out WHAT it is that is “God’s glory.”
@133: doesn’t change the facts that A) the whole proposition is still not child-centric and B) God sucks at his work and his glory.
And I do still love the way you’re still ignoring Chanson’s comment. Classy.
It’s the same logic as the criticism you make here http://irresistibledisgrace.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/marriage-is-dead-and-we-have-killed-it/#comment-8808
namely
God’s work and glory is not a sign of parental concern for the kids, but rather a sign of parental obsession with his own self-image.
And even still, he sucks at it.
Hold up a moment Holly…
You’re saying God is a helicopter parent?
That would be a bit inconsistent with how you’ve usually described him.
@136
Hang on there, tiger! Don’t get too excited just yet.
I’m saying that like helicopter parents, God’s parenting reveals a “parental obsession with their own self-image” instead of “parental concern for the kids,” even though God’s parenting style is anything but helicopter-ish. instead, it’s violent, abusive, and distant.
I still love how you’re still ignoring Chanson’s comment.
Well, you’re getting so excited yourself, I thought I’d join in on the fun.
But you still haven’t really recited for me WHAT God’s work and glory is.
Namely – the well-being of this children. So it’s not so much that God is obsessed with his own image – it’s that he has made his purpose synonymous with the ultimate well being of others.
Which is ideally what a parent or a lover of any kind should do – to reform their own desires, purpose, and self-image in conformity with devotion to another. Some of us are better at it than others, but it doesn’t have a lot to do primarily with rights and whether I’m getting as much of the approval pie as Harry and Sally down the street.
Sorry
“well-being of HIS children”
Sorry for the typo.
Oh. OK: “To bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of MAN.”
If that argument works for god, it works for helicopter parents as well, who at least don’t require their children to worship them, and don’t insist that one of their kids get murdered in order for the others to have the privilege of hanging out with Dad.
if that’s true, why do you trash helicopter parents for trying to do that?
Still ignoring Chanson? Can’t you also admit to her that she caught you up on your “wording”?
Because I already responded to Chanson’s remark.
And your attempt to make this a debate about the theodicy (every angry atheist’s favorite pet issue) is nothing more than subject-changing and heckling.
I can almost accept that you believe that. You used some of the same words she used and wrote a comment after she commented, so I guess in your book, that could count as a response.
It’s a discussion of parenting. If families are forever, then it’s worth examining the one “forever family” we are told about, which is that of God and his children.
But if this is your tacit admission that God’s way of parenting is so alien that there’s really nothing meaningful we can learn from it and should not use it as the basis for anything we do in this life, I can live with that. Certainly that’s one of my critiques of Mormonism, so it’s nice to have you back that up.
And if you’re also admitting that Mormon theology is so morally repugnant that a believer can’t help but find a discussion of it “heckling,” I can live with that too.
Admit it Holly, you’re just trying to derail this into a discussion about why God allows suffering.
Even if it has some tangential reference to the topic at hand, it’s pretty obvious an inflammatory topic like that is just going to hijack the entire thread.
Wow, Seth. You do fancy yourself as quite the mindreader, don’t you?
anyway, you’re wrong. I’m content to show that God is a bad parent and that his example as a bad parent creates a lot of dysfunction in LDS families and results in incoherent and inconsistent ideas about relationships precisely like the ones you are expressing, so thanks for helping to prove my point.
If you want to return to earlier subjects–if, for instance, you want to deal with @131 or @127, no one is stopping you.
Yes and the topic of “is God a bad parent” is inevitably going to wind up being a debate about why suffering is allowed. I’ve been on enough atheist message boards to know that 9 times out of 10, if an atheist brings this topic up, it’s going to derail the conversation completely – and about 7 times out of 10 – that was deliberate on the part of the atheist who brought it up.
More amazing displays of mind-reading! And yet, not quote amazing enough to mind-read (or recall) that Holly doesn’t identify as atheist.
Well, if that does happen, it won’t be because of me. I find theodicy really boring and beside the point. It’s an unanswerable question I don’t really care to discuss.
Sorry, Seth, but those telepathic powers you are always trying to advertise have really failed you on this one.
However, analyzing the fictitious character “God” and figuring out how his small-mindedness interacts with his egomania and his violence and his astonishing lack of self-awareness–that I find interesting. Why, of all the creatures we could have invented to worship, did so much of humanity decide to latch onto that nasty bastard? What does it say about humanity as a whole that we’re so stupid that we think someone who traffics so blatantly in violence and cruelty is the epitome of unconditional love? How are our notions of family, love, and forgiveness necessarily poisoned when our ideal of a loving father is that mean-spirited, egomaniacal crank?
I also like the impressive deployment of made-up statistics.
To show you, Seth, that I’m happy to discuss human relationships rather than divine malfeasance, I invite you again, Seth, to address @127 or @131.
p.s. For the record, Seth, Chanson is right. Though I know most people who consider themselves christian would consider me an atheist, I don’t really consider myself one. I have a concept of god, but it’s very idiosyncratic, so I don’t bring it up much.
@148 Well, y’know, 9 times out of 10 stats are just made up.
“However, analyzing the fictitious character God and figuring out how his small-mindedness interacts with his egomania and his violence and his astonishing lack of self-awarenessthat I find interesting.”
Right – exactly. You wanted to talk about the theodicy.
Because there is nowhere else that line of argument is going.
Chanson, I remember one of my friends who was taking some college statistics classes report his professor stating that “statistics is the art of taking the numbers and making them say what you want them to say.”
Now we just need a fun quote about “rhetoric.”