Shame, Molinism
Step314 presented everything he/she(I suspect she) said honestly, coherently, and intelligently, yet you vaguely threaten to moderate it in your garbled post.
Thanks for supporting me, Balder1. I haven't a clue what about my post warranted its being split off from its original thread. Everything I said was relevant to the matter of how Cassidy should view her situation.
Perhaps a female pressured Asguard into treating me so uncivilly. I'm at a loss for any other explanation.
I'm definitely a "he", btw.
It is true that females who feel bad about themselves are more likely to find solace in people with ideas more normal than mine. But its not as though I insulted the people in that thread who possessed more standard ideas of the propriety of husbands having sex outside marriage. In fact, I agreed with the majority in the important matter of whether she be justified in leaving her swinging husband, and would be the first to agree that she would do much better to accept the opinions and advice of the majority of the responses in that thread than to continue in her present situation.
As for whether Cassidy should be ashamed of her behavior, maybe she should be rather ashamed of it? If a female is not to feel ashamed of her own promiscuity, what exactly is the purpose of shame? Why have people evolved to be able to possess it? Certain people make out that shame reflects a hurt that will be experienced when people no longer love you when they find out about your sins, and that is bad. But I did no such thing for it is not what I believe is the case. Repent and (if appropriate) undergo penance, and God (if he exists), other people, and your own conscience will treat you pretty much like new and you won't have lost much except time. (I don't wish to make an assertion here as to whether Cassidy as penance should try to set things right with her first husband as I do not have sufficient data as to whether she should have left him, and can well imagine, for example, that her family would be much wiser about that than I. Perhaps her opinion toward her first husband is something she herself should work out after having left her second husband sufficiently to have regained clear-headedness, I don't know.) I do think that her children probably ought to be very more important to her than her sex life, since I rather doubt she wants more children.
The purpose of shame reminds me of the 16th-century controversy regarding grace. The orthodox Thomists believed that efficacious grace (grace that can't be resisted) is efficacious because it is the peculiar nature of this grace that it should be ineluctable (roughly--I'm not a theologian--because God as prime mover caused a chain of events that made the sinner such as to find it and not resist it). The notion of a behavior being ineluctable was weaker than the notion of a behavior being forced, and so Aquinas allowed that God can reform strongly--not hesitating when he wants to elicit the full of arsenal of emotions (like shame, I suppose) that lead sinners to repentance--without actually allowing that such repentance is or should be forced. Quite an ingenious solution, IMO, and the cleverest thing about theology that I am familiar with. But then in the late 16th-century, the Molinists (Jesuits mostly) tried to water it all down to protect free will, thereby giving the impression (the philosophy is obscure) that God doesn't go farther in encouraging repentance than the person to be reformed wants even if the person to be reformed willingly (or should I say grudgingly) allows one to go farther. I don't think my ideal God would be so unkind to be less than entirely graceful except from a kind of necessity that occurs because it is unavoidable that allowing more forceful reforming would make the world worse in some other respect (as one can imagine inasmuch as the difficulty of separating natural will from sinful artificial will might make it impossible for the mechanisms of reform to behave according to rules that always can distinguish which will the person to be reformed is under the sway of). As Leibniz (who respected Aquinas) might say, ours is the best of all possible worlds, no better.
Since presumably in most ways people believe that they should try to behave divinely, Molinism encourages excessive hesitance as regards reforming and rescuing people. The Catholics were weak, ultimately not declaring Molinism a heresy (as apparently the Dominicans, who opposed the Jesuits, wanted), and I shouldn't be surprised if the decline of Spain (where the controversy most raged) was largely on account of Molinism, which in its discouragement of rescuing people forcefully from sin reminds me of the contempt Cervantes had for heroism--part and parcel of the decline in higher chivalrous thought that beset Spain, probably leading to its decline. I'm not Catholic or religious, but I recommend this online Catholic Encyclopedia entry on the controversies surrounding grace for further detail:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10436a.htm
