Stephen168
New member
You assume there are an infinite number of women. There are not. The shortage of women seems to be the cause of intergenerational and incestuous marriage practiced by Mormons.
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KathleenGee
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And those poor boys thrown out … their sons…with no one to care for them.
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RebeccaJ
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A friend of mine was married by a polygamist bishop. I don’t know if he was FLDS or some other sect. He is a good friend of the groom, and when they were looking for someone to marry them, they chose their friend.
He is in his 40’s, as is his first wife. Shortly before my friend was married, the polygamist guy who married them, married a woman in her early 20’s. When my friends asked him about his sex life, he just sort of chuckled and said of course he spends all his time with the youngest wife.
There is a reason that Mormon polygamy has been called “sacred loneliness”. The men move on to a younger love interest, leaving the older women essentially celibate.
He is in his 40’s, as is his first wife. Shortly before my friend was married, the polygamist guy who married them, married a woman in her early 20’s. When my friends asked him about his sex life, he just sort of chuckled and said of course he spends all his time with the youngest wife.
There is a reason that Mormon polygamy has been called “sacred loneliness”. The men move on to a younger love interest, leaving the older women essentially celibate.
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GaryTaylor
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This was a complete horror show. It wasn’t missing a thing. The fact religion was used to validate the thinking isn’t surprizing.
My question is what is the official taught understanding on this behavior by Mormons? Jeffs certainly was convinced his religion gave him permission to act as such.
Peace
My question is what is the official taught understanding on this behavior by Mormons? Jeffs certainly was convinced his religion gave him permission to act as such.
Peace
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GaryTaylor
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There’s a concept based on Love.
So you trade in the 40 for two 20’s? 
I believe we have love/lust and wants/needs confused in this theory.Peace
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soren1
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The Mormons roundly reject Jeffs, and do not even acknowledge him as an authentic “Mormon.” Here is an article at the Church’s official website stating their position on polygamous sects along with a video. Read it before continuing.This was a complete horror show. It wasn’t missing a thing. The fact religion was used to validate the thinking isn’t surprizing.
My question is what is the official taught understanding on this behavior by Mormons? Jeffs certainly was convinced his religion gave him permission to act as such.
Peace
It must be noted that as much as modern LDS leaders distance their Church from their polygamous neighbors, they do not have as strong a foundation as we do to actually justify condemning their actions. For us, polygamy is a disordered form of marriage as such, but for them, it is only unauthorized polygamy that is evil. While Warren Jeffs’s particular actions are not absolutely identical to Smith’s, they are similar enough to bear direct comparison. There is no standard one could use to criticize Jeffs’s behavior at one point that could not apply to Joseph Smith at some other point, and so the decisive difference for Mormons can only be that Smith was a prophet and Jeffs isn’t.
Of course, Mormons don’t put it that way. But that is because few of them are brave enough to stick with their premises. They prefer an incongruous double-standard here to calling attention to the fact the Mormonism espouses polygamy in principle if not as a current practice. A consistent Mormon, if such existed, ought to believe several things that Mormons now generally deny. First off, he would hold that Jeffs and others should have a legal right to practice plural marriage. Even if Jeffs committed other actionable crimes, he should not be punished on the specific charge of polygamy. This follows directly from LDS principles. They view the legal restrictions placed by the US Government upon polygamy in the nineteenth century as a persecution, and the early Mormons did all they could to resist the encroachment of the federal government in LDS marital matters. Today, however, virtually no Mormon objects to throwing Warren Jeffs in the clink, even though religious freedom, as an article or their faith, applies to other religions just as well as themselves. Thus, the moment they embrace prosecution of non-LDS polygamy, they admit that a religious freedom that was due to themselves in the nineteenth century is not due today to members of other religions. That constitutes a form of legal religious preferentialism contrary to their own creed. Consistent Mormonism provides no grounds for civil law to oppose religiously-motivated polygamy.
Further, for reasons already given, a consistent Mormon would not use the enormities committed by Jeffs to sow he is not a prophet, but would instead condemn his actions on the explicit basis that he isn’t really authorized. If Jeffs’s actions taken on face, show him to be evil, then they must show how he differs from Smith without resorting to the assumption that Smith was a real Prophet and Jeffs isn’t, since that would be circular.
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Telstar
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Unfortunately, the only thing that seems to really be consistent in Mormonism, is inconsistency.
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rmcmullan
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It’s interesting that you think you have refuted it and provided evidence. But it doesn’t even stand up to common sense. I think the problem is your assumption that everyone in the society is practising polygamy which is impossible.
My co-worker from Nigeria, her father had 5 wives and 15 children. If I had 15 children from one wife, it would be an astonishing feat.
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rmcmullan
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Agreed. When Carolyn Jessop met with the Utah Attorney General, she made a list of 17 abuses that led to seizure the FLDS properties in Utah. She mentions a few of them in the book but does not give the complete list. Are you interested in them? If this is just going to be another bash the Mormon thread, I won’t bother.
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GaryTaylor
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I have no desire to attack ones’ position. Its much easier to just protect the Truth and also less stressfull.
My next question would obviously be…is it likely that God Himself would be capible of this kind of thinking in regards to polygamy?
Now I must say, I find it very unwise to accept any concept if you have to invert a whole frame of reference in order to justify it. The procedure is painful just in minor applications and a genuine tragedy, and very stressfull on a wider scale.
“A consistent Mormon, if such existed, ought to believe several things that Mormons now generally deny. First off, he would hold that Jeffs and others should have a legal right to practice plural marriage. Even if Jeffs committed other actionable crimes, he should not be punished on the specific charge of polygamy. This follows directly from LDS principles. They view the legal restrictions placed by the US Government upon polygamy in the nineteenth century as a persecution, and the early Mormons did all they could to resist the encroachment of the federal government in LDS marital matters.”
Thanks for the effort and link.
Peace
My next question would obviously be…is it likely that God Himself would be capible of this kind of thinking in regards to polygamy?
Now I must say, I find it very unwise to accept any concept if you have to invert a whole frame of reference in order to justify it. The procedure is painful just in minor applications and a genuine tragedy, and very stressfull on a wider scale.
“A consistent Mormon, if such existed, ought to believe several things that Mormons now generally deny. First off, he would hold that Jeffs and others should have a legal right to practice plural marriage. Even if Jeffs committed other actionable crimes, he should not be punished on the specific charge of polygamy. This follows directly from LDS principles. They view the legal restrictions placed by the US Government upon polygamy in the nineteenth century as a persecution, and the early Mormons did all they could to resist the encroachment of the federal government in LDS marital matters.”
Thanks for the effort and link.
Peace
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PaulDupre
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Of course they publicly denounce Jeffs. The LDS want to obscure the fact that what Warren Jeffs did is exactly what Joseph Smith did - coerce young girls into his bed by promising salvation to their entire families if they would submit, and threatening damnation if they did not.
Both of them are creeps.
Paul (formerly LDS, now happily Catholic)
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RebeccaJ
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It isn’t all about you.
If 4 of those women had married 4 different men, they would have their own families and own children, which in total could be 15 or 24 or 10. Statistically speaking, it would be close to 15 in total for all five couples.
As it is, left untampered by abortion, the world is roughly 1/2 women and 1/2 men, so statistically speaking in this scenario, there are 4 men who will not marry and will not have any children.
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zaffiroborant
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Not so astonishing my great grandmother had 14, my neighbors growing up had 11 kids and my husband is still friends with 2 guys he grew up with, one in a family of 11 and one in a family of 10.
These 4 women averaged 12 children per wife, BY’s wives on the other hand averaged less than 1 child per wife. Even if you take out all the wives over 30 years old they are averaging only 1.4 children, that’s similar to what is seen in Europe and Japan. Hands down, the four women I know outdid BY’s wives when it comes to “baby making”. As a matter of fact he has a rather poor showing considering the potential “baby making” capacity of 40 women.
As t o your co-workers father, I can walk around my neighborhood and find women who meet and exceed the wives of your co-workers father, women who have 3, 4, or 5, 2 nearby women have 7 children. So while your co-workers father may have a lot of children none of his wives have what could possibly be considered a large number of children and the number of children they did have may have been limited because they have the limited support of a husband obligated to other women and children.
Did you skip the link explaining all this or did you not understand it? Polygamous wives have less babies than monogamous wives so polygamy fails to utilize the reproductive capabilities of the women in the system. Because being good for “baby making” depends on HOW MANY BABIES ARE BORN TO EACH WOMAN and not on how many babies a given man may father.
Why polygamous wives have fewer children than their monogamous counterparts is unknown. Mormons here have said polygamy was to insure raising “righteous seed” , I don’t know but I’d guess that BY’s offspring were dedicated Mormons or “righteous seed”
Whether or not the fact that polygamous women don’t have as many babies as they could is a good thing or not is also a question. There was an LDS poster here who believed that polygamous wives benefited from having less (or no) children giving them time and means to explore other options, like going to school to be doctors.
But simply said women having less babies is not good for “baby making”.
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soren1
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But I did provide evidence, when I wrote:
I don’t know if you noticed that “Documentation here” link and looked at the article. If not, I can see why you might have blown off my arguments. Everything I said was a reflection on the evidence it provides. It is a piece in the UK paper The Guardian that reports on the findings of a study on 19th-century Mormon birth rates done at the University of Indiana, which was published in the March 2011 issue of Evolution and Human Behavior, a peer reviewed journal that appears to be focused on human evolutionary ethology. At this link, you can read the names and credentials of the editors of this publication, who are obviously serious academics in major American and British institutions like the University of Durham, UCLA, University College, UCSB, etc. I have not yet read the original article, though I ordered it from my library earlier today, and will let you know more about what it says once it arrives.
As the Guardian article explains, the biological phenomenon that describes the study’s findings about Mormon polygamy has a bone fide scientific name; it is called the “Bateman effect.” It refers to a rare but real phenomenon among certain species (just fruit flies and one species of sheep) in which males who mate with many females have fewer offspring per female than those who mate with fewer. Since most species mate in ways that are good for themselves, I am not surprised that something as harmful as the Bateman effect is quite rare in nature; yet I am also not surprised to find that it pops up when humans, a naturally monogamous species, take on a polygamous lifestyle that does not suit human nature.
You also say I think I have refuted your argument. Well, not in the strictest sense. I don’t know that there might not be some good counterargument, but if there is one you have yet to provide it. One type of argument that could refute mine would be if you can show that individual women in polygamous marriages have as many children as monogamous women with otherwise comparable lifestyles and social situations. Another might be if you could show that there was such an excess of women in Utah that polygamy for some men did not harmfully reduce the number of women available to others. Since you have provided neither kind of argument, nor anything else that undercuts any of my foundational premises, my position is secure so far.
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soren1
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This is an important assertion, but it won’t be an argument until you show where my argument actually depends on the claim that polygamy was a universal practice. Obviously, if I made that absurd assumption, which would require the female population in Utah to be at least double the men, it would be fatal. But I have done no such thing, and you have not pointed out where that assumption figures into my claims. Quite to the contrary, it is crucial to my argument that one polygamous man deprives other men of potential spouses, so that there is less opportunity even for mere monogamy. Part of the problem is that when men equal or outnumber women, as was the case in nineteenth-century Utah, polygamy for one man necessitates celibacy for others.
That is why in the first paragraph of my first post, I brought up a scenario of seven men and seven women. Do you think there will be more children produced if one man makes takes all seven women, or if they all pair up one-to-one? Even if we suppose that female fertility is a constant, and that each women has, say, seven children in either scenario, then the average man will not have any children more or less regardless of whether we take polygamy or monogamy. Under monogamy, all seven men will have seven children each, by one wife each, for a total of 49 kids. Under polygamy, one man can have all 49 kids, but the others are all left out in the cold with zero; here the average is still seven children for each man, but they will be distributed unequally to one man only. Thus if we view the situation solely from the male side, polygamy in the best scenario offers us only a zero-sum game. As a result, the impossibility of universal polygamy provides me with my grounds for saying that female fertility must be the decisive factor. Polygamy would only increase the population if the wives of the one polygamous man would have more children by sharing him than they would if they married off several to each of the seven. Hence, I reduced the entire problem to one question, which I now reiterate:
Is a woman going to have as many children when her husband shares his attention with three other women as when he is devoted only to her?
If common sense is really on your side, then the commonsense answer to this question should be “yes.” Is that what you think?
This example demonstrates that you are still very far from grasping my argument. You are comparing your personal fertility as a male to another man’s personal fertility as a male, when the argument is about the effect of polygamy upon whole populations. If the Nigerian father has five wives, then there are four other Nigerian men who have none. That means that to his fifteen children there correspond not one, but five males in the preceding generation, for a ratio of only 3-to-one. That’s a good number, but nowhere near astonishing. If here were not keeping all the women to himself they might each have four or five children by marrying four other men monogamously, for a happy total of 20-25 children, a big increase over 15.
Or how about this? Leaving aside the leftover males, what if we just changed our approach to the example. Don’t compare yourself to the polygamous father. Instead, compare your wife to one of his. I know nothing of your family, how many children you have, how old you are, so I will just speak for myself. I have been married five years and have two children. My wife is still under 30. If in the next 15-20 years, my wife succeeds in having only two more children, she will exceed the average of the Nigerian man’s wives (three each) by a whopping 33%. I bet it’s a realistic hope than we can even have three more children, giving her a dominating lead of 67% over the average wife of the Nigerian man. You see where this is going? Obviously, the Nigerian father is a man who wants children, and we are a couple who wants children. While I will personally have fewer than he does, my wife can hope to do much better than anyone of his, so that our family will provide a greater percentage increase to the population than his.
Note as well: if we get those two more kids, we will also be doing better than Brigham Young. Young had 16 wives who bore children, and they got him 56. Since 56/16 = 3.5, his wives averaged better than the Nigerian’s. Yet if my wife has just those two more children, she will already exceed the average in the Young household by a comfy 14%. I promise not to boast until we get there.
Yes, I would be interested. And I would change some of my claims about the comparability of Jeffs and Smith if there were anything different in kind between them. For instance, if Jeffs beat his wives brutally, then I would have to submit that point, just as I wouldn’t compare him to Smith insofar as Jeff’s probably has committed sodomy. (I should’a checked that before I wrote, dang it.)
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soren1
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and
Holy smokes! While I was busy writing my super-long reply, you two briefly made just about exactly the same arguments I did, and even used the same examples. Cheers!
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rmcmullan
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SO far as I know, Mormons and Catholics both practise intergenerational and incestuous marriage to the same degree. You are probably confusing Mormons with FLDS. You have not been paying attention.
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rmcmullan
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I will agree such an effect is possible and even likely. In some circumstances. Since soren1 did not source his study, it’s difficult to tell what those circumstances are. And so long as we are dealing in if’s, maybe none of those women would have been married at all or married to an infertile man. So let’s not deal in if’s, there’s too many of them.
In the FLDS sample, and I am certainly not offering it up as either typical or in any way healthy, the women had as many babies as they could. There was a big incentive to do so. It improved their status and power within the family. Infact, it was about the only way they could.
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rmcmullan
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Ooops, soren1, I do apologize, I see your source now. It was important and I missed it. And it brings up a lot of questions about the practice of polygamy that are difficult to answer with regard to fertility and married/unmarried partners. I am thinking that there are less unmarried woman under polygamy but I don’t know for sure. Any sources on that?
The study you cite is on 19th century Mormons. I’d be interested if modern Muslims show the same effect. Polygamy there is much more acceptable and has been practised for much longer. I think you’d probably get more reliable results.
I’m going to have to go to Carolyn Jessop’s book to get the list of abuses. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference between crimes, abuse and cultural differences. No question that there was a lot of physical abuse but it was rarely between the man and one of his wives. In her case, it was often the favourite wife beating the other wives’ kids. In some cultures, that’s an acceptable thing, beating your wife or children, although it would be abhorrent to us. The only crime Jeffs was charged with underage marriage but the abuse was phenominal.
Her affidavit is here: vancouversun.com/pdf/affidavitcarolynjessop.pdf. It’s a little hard to read but gives you an idea of what she is saying.
The study you cite is on 19th century Mormons. I’d be interested if modern Muslims show the same effect. Polygamy there is much more acceptable and has been practised for much longer. I think you’d probably get more reliable results.
I’m going to have to go to Carolyn Jessop’s book to get the list of abuses. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference between crimes, abuse and cultural differences. No question that there was a lot of physical abuse but it was rarely between the man and one of his wives. In her case, it was often the favourite wife beating the other wives’ kids. In some cultures, that’s an acceptable thing, beating your wife or children, although it would be abhorrent to us. The only crime Jeffs was charged with underage marriage but the abuse was phenominal.
Her affidavit is here: vancouversun.com/pdf/affidavitcarolynjessop.pdf. It’s a little hard to read but gives you an idea of what she is saying.
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KathleenGee
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For a Mormon sister wife to have only one child, it shows me the woman is now already used…time to get a new one.
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