An young being

The culture here in South India is entirely different from the rest of India. In this culture, parallel cousins are considered same as siblings whereas cross cousins are allowed to get married. An example of cross cousins would be a male marrying maternal uncle's daughter. He cannot marry his paternal uncle's daughter. This type of marriages are mostly arranged with consent, and not out of love, just like kings do in age old days, i.e., formally marry the queen, the main purpose here is to maintain the family wealth within themselves ( so selfish, lol ), and to strengthen the family relationship further. Here, there's also caste issues, i.e., it's difficult to marry outside of a caste, and hence we have less brides and grooms to choose from, unless if it's a love marriage.

Because, for the ones who aren't able to find way any material way out of the suffering created by the world, Spirituality ( aka chasing Enlightenment/ awakening) becomes a need rather than a want. That's when you are able to focus on Spirituality 100% where you have nothing to lose. Otherwise, it just becomes a side hustle, unless you devote yourself to Spirituality with an extreme desire or curiosity to know about reality.

Yep! Specifically cross cousins.

There is no wrong in taking medical help, but since you are a rational guy, question every experience you had or going to have with a rational and an open mind, without scientific biases, and you will find whether they are delusions or something else.

Accept whatever you are blessed with at birth : physical appearance, money, diseases, intellect, type of parents etc. And enjoy your unique, exciting up and down experience of a life trying to fill what you lacked, trying to chase what you desired, trying to change what you disliked etc. Or find peace with Spirituality, just accepting what it is and will be.

Assuming you are pointing at me,my points are aimed at incest for close relations that are strongly bonded, which are parent-child and sibling relationships. My points are not valid or mildly valid for cousins or other types of incest. It's not necessary to be generalized for all kinds of incest, as laws or morality can clearly differentiate between different kinds of incests. They need to be differentiated, as the strength of relation with degree of closeness drastically changes. A fun fact is that everyone is related by blood in one way or the another, since we all came from our ancestors. Another reason why I ignored cousin relations entirely is because it's not at all a taboo in my state! Around 30% of all marriages here are cousin marriages, lol!!!

@zazen, when talking about morality,one of my main points is that, we cannot judge or label a person as good or bad, based on his actions. I was speaking against allowing incest with some reasoning on my own, but also stressing not to label or judge the ones involved in incest as bad, and I had shared the reasoning for that as well. That's what my part of the posts are about. This is the continuation of the discussion from a previous post, I created a new one since it deviated from the topic. Here's the old one: https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/97756-why-heterosexuality-is-natural-and-homosexuality-a-deviance/ I believe such discussions are necessary atleast in open minded forums like this, ( that's what I believe, lol ),if not in the normal ones.

The need for spirituality, specifically awakening or enlightenment arises when you are undergoing extreme suffering and there is no other way to get out of it or you are extremely curious that you are ready to undergo any extreme of suffering for it. There are other aspects of spirituality though: compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, unconditional love. Anybody can strive to practice these qualities, no matter what their condition is. Edit: I forgot the most important thing, Mindfulness.

I agree that these biases play a role in making incest in general illegal or immoral. @Scholar I agree that there is no good evidence, and in that case, we have to run on assumptions or reasoning based on the data that we have now. My reasoning is that, the bond formed by parental or sibling love is on average more unconditional and leads to happier relationships compared to love out of lust or sexual attraction. One of the reasoning is that, both spirituality and psychological studies point out that happiness created out of pleasure such as lust,pleasure harmones, physical attraction is not long lasting compared to happiness created out of strong relationships, such as parental and sibling bonds or a lust independent romantic love or platonic love. While I am not against romantic relationships or even lust, incestual relationships lead to breaking of the previous superior bonds formed by blood relationships, due to the introduction of pleasure factors. This is evident from the fact that relationships formed primarily out of lust don't last longer and end up in divorces or has high expectations and desires from the opposite party. The introduction of these conditions and expectations in a relationship that doesn't have those, can affect the unconditional nature of those relationships, and hence push the society towards more suffering. This is just a reasoning that point towards a direction for studies to look into, and not a ruling.

@Scholar The assumption that someone or their actions are immoral, simply because it is done without their consent is itself a limited assumption of morality. For example, a murder committed on self defence can be done without the victim's consent. That maybe moral. If we are talking about what we believe as a purely selfish intent, such as rape, even that cannot be used to judge whether a person is morally right or wrong. What if he was educated that women are inferior and he grew up without knowing about women, and he saw animals raping each other and convinced himself it was normal? What if you had no free will or limited free will in your actions on an absolute scale? Morality is always relatively defined based on a mixture of society's culture, beliefs, emotions, traditions, experiences and also science, and is used to judge a person. That's why I don't see morality as an effective way to judge something as right or wrong or good or bad. Instead, I suggest attempting to measure suffering caused by an individual to the victims, to themselves and the impact it has on the suffering of the society as a whole is a more rational approach to judge an action as right or wrong, especially while making laws. The most important point is, only the action has to be termed good or bad and not the individual itself, unless we know through science or some other means that humans have 100% free will. Morality had great use in the past when there are less rational means to determine something as good or bad. Morality was used to punish people to maintain order, teach people not to behave in the manner they thought is wrong, and despise people who do the wrong things. Even now it has great effects on maintaining the society , but using it to judge a person or the specific action done by the person as right or wrong, no matter if it's incest or rape, is entirely a wrong approach. Instead, methods to measuring the suffering caused by the actions and attempts to reduce it, including the doer of the action, is the right approach, in my opinion. There's no need to put a moral tag on the person who is doing the action or crime. Sexual freedom for homosexuality is drastically different from sexual freedom in incest relationships, except maybe in bisexual cases. The reason is, it's not impossible for someone in incestual relationship to have a relationship outside of it, whereas homosexual people cannot engage in sex with the opposite sex. The degree of freedom also matters. As I said earlier, it's not immoral. But consideration of making it illegal or not depends on the amount of suffering it brings, based on unbiased studies, including the suffering brought upon by making it illegal. It's not necessary to ban the relationship itself, but the root causes can be studied and identified and those aspects must be treated. If the root cause is the relationship itself, or the root cause cannot be identified for a long period, the consideration to make it illegal for the time period can be taken upon. But this case is entirely different from that of incest. Also, the punishment for rape or murder is severe, whereas here, there is no punishment, but only a limitation in freedom. The case of limiting freedom is a personal choice of the government or society and has both positives and negatives associated with it. It's like choosing between disciplining a child for his own good, or letting him do whatever he wants, no matter how he turns out to be.

True, let us create a separate topic to discuss incest, the topic of incest is interesting and I had never discussed or thought of it so deeply before, so I am not going to let it disappear before getting some insights!

@Scholar, will reply you after a couple of days, a bit busy and there is lot to read!

Sun is a demigod, so obviously it has an ego.

A set of humans realised that nobody is powerful enough to get them out of suffering. So they created god and satisfied themselves with faith. Another set of humans were never able to find out why or how they came into existence, so they also created god and satisfied themselves with stories. Another small group who were intelligent enough to realise that gods are just stories and people believe them without any need for rationality, disguised themselves as gods. That's how millions of gods were created. I don't know about the rest though.

Lol, this sounds scary to me than the nightmares itself!

Nothing to be worried about, I once had a dream where I know I was in the dream, fought hard to escape it, then finally woke up, only to realise I am still in the dream. This continued on a loop for around 4 to 5 times, and finally I got a huge sigh of relief after realizing that I am back here. It's scary since it's a long while since you had a nightmare, but it will vanish on itself after some time.

When you look into the bigger picture of how laws should be made, it's not only about being how immoral it is, but also depends on the degree of suffering it now causes and may cause in the future and whether it affects others or the society or themselves. For example, murder, rape, theft, abuse etc. are punished severely in general, because it has a higher chance of causing suffering to the victims, to the society, as well as themselves.The extent of severity depends on how much suffering it brings. Things like drug usage have higher chances of causing suffering to themselves, and to the society, hence they are punished moderately. Suicide and self harm causes suffering mainly to the individuals and to some extent to the society and hence punished less severely to severely depending on how liberal the country is. In order to see whether incest fits in any of the above, detailed studies backed by science, psychology or other rational studies must be conducted in order to see how much it affects and what's the probability of affecting individual's happiness or suffering, and other's happiness or suffering, with more weightage to the latter. Even many countries are confused with homosexual laws especially those with a mixture of rational and traditional views, because they are worried that it may affect the society and even the individuals in some ways, although scientific and psychological studies point to the opposite. In the case of incest, there are no proper studies available at all to decide anything upon it, as even in this discussion we are not able to point out large scale,well made studies. When it comes to immorality, in my opinion, for the law making bodies, there is no need to judge anyone or anything good or bad, based on the actions, even if it's a murder or a rape and even if it's done with utmost selfishness. Immorality is not solely based on rationality, and is prone to large number of biases, and hence should be replaced by laws and compassion. When it comes to incest, my personal opinion is that, it is capable of causing more suffering to the society than what already is, and to some extent to the individuals.

Lol, I was doubting my memory whether someone named Cygnus exists here or not!

I like this forum, but I wish to know if something similiar exists which gets good amount of traffic and has an active user base. I already know that reddit has a section on spirituality, and another one Nahm created, let's not talk about those, do any other forums exist which encourages open minded discussions, and has Spirituality as it's main theme?

Sounds interesting, but they look a bit too specific. Also, I am not able to find the second one you specified on internet, the zen forums.

It may or may not be frightening, but it is certainly humbling.

If you wish to be humbled more, here's the chance:

Thank you! Or maybe it was too long that nobody was able to have the patience to read it, lol!

True, I had written a detailed post on how biases affect our experiences: https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/96934-conditioning-your-mind-to-have-better-experiences/