I come from southeastern Pennsylvania, am married to a wonderful woman and have a few children. The personal information is vague I know.
Having more than one wife is not for me since my wife does not believe in it and I am not about to break my promise to my wife. I am glad to be able to allow my children more options within marriage and I cannot condemn anyone for having more than one wife. The subject of oppression, control, power madness, jealousy, and ignorance are separate from marriage but can be interrelated subjects to marriage.
When I was younger, I had an issue with monogamy but just thought I was wrong, as I was taught polygyny was wrong. At that time I was not interested in studying the Bible to find out what it specifically teaches. I thank God for giving me some grace and time to learn. After I was married there was always the struggle why many men can have sexual desires for women other than their wife when monogamous marriage was supposed to be from God. It was obvious that something in God's world was more complex than what I was taught. This stemmed from my feelings for a woman that I still loved and couldn't understand how it was possible to love two women at one time if I was supposed to only love one woman. This created problems with loving anyone. It's a much longer story of learning and understanding each piece of this puzzle, but this is where the search started. Since my belief in monogamy was based on my religious beliefs, I had to reconcile my conflict with my emotions and the inconsistency with how the real world appears to work. While scouring the Bible and all other information I could acquire from any side of the issue, I realized that the churches restrict marriage more out of control and fear. Another thing I noticed was that the monogamy proponents had to be much more abstract in their argument to support their claims whereas the polygyny argument was fairly straight forward.
Biblical polygyny is one of those issues that seem to be restricted out of fear and ease of enforcement. This is something I cannot condemn completely either for those that do not desire to dedicate much effort to understanding the Bible and following it. I say this because having more than one wife can be a direct reason for destruction of a family without having understanding of more complicated and delicate issues within the Bible of how to interact with, deal with and work with people and wives equally and judiciously. Without putting God at the center of a family and without understanding, any marriage will have major problems.
That's the short of it for now. I look forward to following future topics on this site.
