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Couple of comments:

1. Monogamy is likely adaptive to farmer economics, which is why and how it spread, and is less useful to industrial economics, hence why its power has waned over the last 200 years. It's hard to say what will be adaptive in a world of AI economics.

2. Many Protestant Christians practice in denominations that originated with Calvinist beliefs, but unfortunately much of that has been lost. My own light experience with Presbyterianism is that some of the cultural Calvinism remains there (thanks, I suspect, to Presbyterianism's governing structure), even if the explicit Calvinist beliefs have mostly been lost.

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I know I'm late looking at this (I'm going back through these posts because I'm curious on the reviews of this book). But let me respond to this comment and to the broader post above on Calvinism, as someone who considers himself a Calvinist.

1. Your Presbyterian experience sounds like it's describing the PCUSA. The liberal Mainline churches like the PCUSA are relatively undifferentiated from one another on doctrine these days. The difference between a liberal Episcopalian and a liberal Presbyterian is mostly stylistic, because it's not like the liberal Presbyterian really subscribes to much of anything in the Westminster Confession of Faith, even though PCUSA officially still claims to uphold it on some level.

This is much less true of conservative churches (whose adherents outnumber those of the "Mainline" churches), where there are a lot more believers who stand firmly on the distinctives of their tradition, and who might, for example, have their children memorize the Westminster Shorter Catechism. I've also been to conservative Presbyterian churches that read from Calvin's magnum opus, Institutes of the Christian Religion, at every service.

2. On the broader post, what we call Reformed theology, which is a broader label that heavily overlaps (and at times is synonymous) with Calvinism, is alive and well and has been very successful in making inroads within evangelicalism in the last few decades, including within the Southern Baptist Convention. This is disproportionately true at the seminaries: Reformed theology has come to totally dominate the intellectual heights of American conservative Protestantism. Tim Keller, Reformed pastor and theologian within the conservative PCA, was perhaps the most famous evangelical pastor in America at the time of his death last year and is generally seen as an intellectual heavyweight.

What can probably be said, in references to some of the beliefs in the post, is that a lot of the strictness associated with the Puritans has generally been dismissed as "legalism" by the majority of latter-day Reformed Christians. Though there are still pockets where it is preserved.

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I think it's something of an inconsistency to be both into Calvinism and polyamory. There are branches of spirituality much more sympatico with polyamory, such as anything tantra, which notably also eschews self-denial.

Spirituality is ultimately about having a principle that is more powerful than the self guiding you, so it's important not to get lost in the exoteric aspects of religion when trying to dream up a new one.

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(Slightly delayed) AI Narration created for this part of the series:

https://open.substack.com/pub/askwhocastsai/p/pragmatists-guide-to-crafting-religion-0ba

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In addition to having fewer unattached young men, monogamous societies have typically had longer good periods, and less frequent bad periods. Or longer rises and fewer falls, if you prefer. Peter Turchin documents this in Historical Dynamics, and it fits into his view where falls/bad times are caused by intra-elite conflict: In a polygamous society, elite men have more women, and far more children, so the ratio of elites:nonelites grows more quickly.

The main relevant differences I see between polygyny and polyamory are:

- Polyamorous have fewer kids

- Elite women, not only elite men, can sleep around

- Polyamory allows some male losers to share a woman instead of having nobody

- Polyamory doesn't (currently) appear to have a way to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate children.

I expect that a high-fertility culture where polyamory is widely accepted differs little from polygyny in its social consequences. Elite men still have many kids, and male-fenale differences in sexual jealousy mean the typical poly man has more partners than the typical poly woman, and so many more men are excluded from sex and success than women.

I think the "more male losers" effect is avoided if poly stays opt-in, with a high male:female ratio, as today. But in practice, I expect this can't be maintained, because polyamory becomes the default relationship style in any society that doesn't stigmatize it.

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A lot of polyamory in a culture was downstream of male disposability. If a quarter to a half of your male population was expected to be lost in war and raiding, than you can expect men to have multiple wives. If your culture requires you to be a 'warrior' in order to be a 'marragable adult', then you kind of have to expect a lot of dead people.

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