Worldtraveller

I voted niether, since the term hadn't been clearly defined. I assumed a definietion similar to the at eventually given. Thanks fatherphil.
If it is agreed upon by both parties, then there is nothing wrong with it per se.
It's one of many possible 'victimless crimes'. All of which should probably be striken from the books.
My wife and I have even talked about it, although we haven't actually done anything along those lines yet.
So obviously WE don't think it's wrong.

Psycho Economist

I'm going to have to disagree again. I don't think outrage at sexual adultery is a religious value. Rather, I think it was criminalized and the criminalization justified as an offense to deities because the people who became religious leaders (i.e. men) were already outraged at it.

Promiscuity on the part of a woman made paternity hard to figure out. Especially in a smallish tribe where everybody looks kinda similar and lots of people are even kinda related you can't even make the "family resemblance" test. Even today, men get very hostile at the thought of their wives having sex with other men, way more than at the thought of women being emotionally intimate with them. The notion of wasting one's life to support another man's child and missing the opportunity to pass on his own genes is anathema to many men.

So the men sat down and said (in essence), "If our wives sleep with anybody else and we find out, we kill 'em before they can have a baby. And we kill the man involved. Agreed?" And they all nodded their heads and decided, perhaps even felt in their hearts, that their deities told them to take this course of action.

This problem of paternity is probably also why virginity was so important and it was such a bargaining chip for fathers of daughters. If the girl (let's face it, most ancient and especially midaeval marriages wouldn't withstand our age of consent laws) was a virgin when she was given to a man and never had sex with another, it was a given that no one else could be the father of his children.

But more importantly, men also let themselves off the hook they made. In the same religious laws (and secular laws, where such things existed) where adultry was punishable by death, men could often have multiple wives. Why? Men have no inherant disincentive against philandery but gaining a reputation as a womanizer. So they created an exception in their adultery laws: men could have multiple wives.

In contrast to men, women have a strong incentives for having few children and holding onto them until maturity. Pregnancy takes a year in round terms, there's no way to deny maternity like paternity, death during child birth was a very real threat... Women, as a general trend (even today) want the fathers of their children to be capable providers and demand the man stay and support a child he is half responsible for.

At the same time women were gaining more power in societies, polygamy became a smaller loophole. Originally there were probably no restrictions. Then men had to be demonstrably capable of supporting all their wives. Then it disappeared altogether in some cultures. Where it did remain, numeric limits were placed on the number of wives a man could have.

In contrast, one of the reasons we can have things like casual sex and open marriages today is that the problem of paternity has been resolved. We can affirm and deny paternity with increasing accuracy. We can also prevent pregnancy through a variety of means.

There are also other reasons that I think this revulsion to adultery started as a "man thing" that was legitimized by religion and not "a religion thing" in itself. But I hope this will suffice, at least until evening.

Jackalope

Damn vBullitin won't let me erase my own post...
decided it broadcasting WTMI (WAAAAAY Too Much Information).

Jamie_L

If adultery is defined as engaging in non-monogomous behavior after agreeing (implicitly or explicitly) to monogomy, then it is wrong.

If we are talking about non-monogomous behavior in general, there's nothing wrong with that. People can have whatever kinds of relationships they want, as long as they are ethical about them.

Jamie

Ab_Normal

what Jamie_L said.

(I wanted to voice my opinion, but I'm too sniffly to think coherently)

fatherphil

not to complicate the poll results, but consider this:
is adultery wrong/right in a family with children if the parents feel that its ok? (Danielle van Dam's family comes to mind as a case in point not to say that any such situation would produce the same tragic result)

keyser_soze

Ew, nice well poisoning, I give it a 7.4 for creativity, but only a 2 for subtleness. Nice try though! Play again, anytime.

Jamie_L

I don't think that multiple-partner relationships would necessarily have any adverse impacts on children, so long as the parents are devoted to the child.

Young children have no idea that their parents have sex with each other, much less other people. So, there's essentially no difference from the point of view of a young child.

It's only at older ages that children would even be aware of the sexual aspects of their parents' lives. At that point, if raised by people who don't find multiple-partner relationships immoral, I don't see why that aspect of the parents' lives would have any significant impact on the children.

Kids get raised by divorced parents, each of whom date other people, all time. The only difference between that and what I described above is that the parents are still together and love each other. It seems like that could only be an improvement over the divorce scenario.

Jamie