🚀 go-pugleaf

George (smooth@aloha.net) wrote:
: Not yet... it was the other poster.
: It would be rather difficult to use historical examples when all written material remains from ... who?... 
: the Church. Of course they adjusted reality a "little" to their liking. Here's an interesting related 

Written material is very unreliable, especially when it has been frequently re-written...

: paragraph from the "History of Sex" book, I mentioned before, about King Arthur
: 
: "... One of the things which has done much to build up in our minds a false and idealized conception 
: of the Middle Ages is the representation of King Arthur and his knights as paragons of chaste and 
: gentlemanly behaviour. This has been done primarily by the Christian authorities, who rewrote the old 
: British folk tales as as to bring them in line with the approved morality of the Middle Ages, though 
: the process was carried further by the romantics of hte eighteenth cewntury and by Victorian 
: sentimentalism. The facts arew very different. Gildas, as as Christian historian, is no doubt somewhat 
: biased, but he describes the knights as "sanguinary, boastful, murderous, addicted to vice, adulterous 
: and enemies of God", adding "Although they keep a large number of wives, they are fornicators and 
: adulterers."  The morals of the ladies are no stricter. At King Arthur's court, when a logic mantle is 
: produced which can only be worn by a chaste woman, none of the ladies present is able to wear it.
:    When we examine these stories in their original form, we begin to see, not immorality as such, but 
: a completely different system of sexual morality at odds with the Christian one: a system in which 
: women were free to take lovers, both before and after marriage, and in which men were free to 
: seduce all women of lower rank, while they might hope to win the favours of women of higher rank if 
: they were sufficiently valiant... "
: 
: So were are spoon-fed here with this Christian monogamy idol since a good millenia;  it would be 
: rather hard to untangle how much of our present monogamy is cultural heritage and how much of it 
: is a real natural instinct. (I'd say much less than we'd dare to think.) Especially now that you got 

Why should humans be any more inclined to monogamy than any other mammal??

: missionaries even in the wildest jungle bushes of the Third World, teaching the "other cultures" on 
: our ways and values.