Actually, "is" doesn't always mean "="-as-in-full-equivalence. Dogs are hairy, but they don't equal hairy. The issue might be that the quasi-equivalence does not commute.
In other words, Jesus=God, The Father=God, and The Spirit=God, but God!=Jesus, God!=The Father, and God!=The Spirit.
That would explain why Jesus=God and The Father=God does not imply that Jesus=The Father. Because Jesus=God!=The Father.
Because "God is one"--the Shema Yisrael--is (and has been since long before the time of Christ) a fundamental affirmation about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You cannot reject it without denying the Hebrew Scriptures.
Is it really that much easier to believe in one god with multiple personality disorder?
On "easier": No, it is no harder or easier to believe in Jewish monotheism, Christian trinitarian monotheism, or modalism, or Arianism, or Mormon polytheism. We're not talking about "easiness to believe". We're talking about definitional aspects of a religion. Joseph Smith doesn't get to come along 2000 years later, change whatever he wants, and use the name "Christian".
Religions define themselves; there are limits to what you can change/reinterpret and still call yourself part of that religion.
(Yes, identifying those limits can be a challenge. You can go ahead and object to the idea that the Shema is definitional to Christianity, or that the Trinity fits into the Shema. I think you'll be wrong, but it's a valid question to ask.)
That Jesus prayed to himself?
What? We don't believe that he did. See the shield of the Trinity. "Jesus did not pray to himself" (and similar issues) is exactly why we articulate the Trinity in the way that we do.
Hmm... Actually, on second thought, I don't think it's that you have the ability to respond. I think it's that you really didn't read & understand what I said.
Because, two things:
1.) Jesus didn't tell the pigs/demons/whatever to jump off the cliff. He didn't ask them to. There's nothing to indicate that he wanted them to. So... You're spouting nonsense on that count.
2.) I agreed with you in part. Your reply doesn't seem to understand that. (A quiz for you: Which part did I agree about? Can you say without going back to look? Or did you miss it entirely?)
3.) My problem with your initial mockery was that no one in church history--the witnesses of the account, or any later readers of the account--responded to that story by saying, "Well, Jesus must be God!" The thinking and beliefs that you ascribed to Christians and proceeded to mock are not part of Christian reasoning.
1.) I fully recognize that a lot of nonsense is spewed out. People talk lightly, without documentation, and say many untrue things.
2.) I recognize and appreciate your reasonable, civil manner. I hope that your examination of Mormon claims will proceed carefully and critically. (The Book of Abraham, for instance. Do you accept the current explanation for why the heiroglyphics turned out not to say anything like what Smith translated?)
3.) It annoys me when people dismiss Mormonism because of "weirdness". I don't believe Mormonism is different from Christianity because of weirdness. I believe it is different because so many fundamental beliefs--particularly, but not limited to, monotheism--are different. (For careful documentation from Joseph Smith's teachings and other primary sources, I hope you'll take the time to read through last year's "Mormonism 101" series at Alpha & Omega Ministries. The blog interface isn't too good--the earlier entries are lower down on the page. The series started in May, and continued through June, July, and August.)
Back to our topic.
Yes, taking "former" that way is at least plausible, though "former" could also refer to the precolonization inhabitants--i.e., American Indians in general.
Don't you think it's significant that your own church interpreted it that way, and said in the introduction to the Book of Mormon that "After thousands of years, all were destroyed except the Lamanites, and they are the principal ancestors of the American Indians"?
I would be curious to know if Smith himself said anything that would clarify which sense of "former" he meant. Did he touch on it in any of his sermons? (If you can find such references, it would be a good way for you to prove your own interpretation. Or disprove it. I'm curious--what would it do to your perception of Smith's prophethood if it turned out that he was wrong about "revealed-by-angels" information on the source of the American Indians?)
If you're not requesting that we believe it is true, you'd rather us judge how the modern world would react to the account? "Officer, first I talked to the pigs, and convinced them to jump off the cliff by themselves." Mmmmm, hmmmmm. "Time for a little Vitamin H, son. Haldol, the docs call it." An antipsychotic. *sigh*
So, then you're not interested in replying to what I wrote?
You made a claim about "the pot calling the kettle black" because a traditional Christian said something about "the screwed up nature of their [Mormon] beliefs". But then your mockery wasn't based on Christian beliefs. Hence, I called it ignorance.
Your follow-up makes it clear that it was not actually ignorance. You knew full well that Christians do not believe any such thing. (Presumably, you also know that Christian belief in the deity of Christ was never based on him supposedly casting out some demons. Run-of-the-mill prophets could do (or claimed to do) more than that.)
Instead, your mockery was based on you taking an account, hypothesizing what you think really happened, mocking the "screwed-up" nature of Christian beliefs as though they believed your guess. It's fine for you to have your own opinion about what really happened--it's moronic to pretend people believe something different than they do.
Perhaps you intended to mock the actual witnesses of the events with the demonized man and the pigs. As though people saw Jesus do that, and then proclaimed him God. (That's the most charitable way I can read your comments.) If so, you would certainly be right about those people being screwed up. But then, even if you were right about what Jesus did with the pigs...no one reacted the way you thought. So, you're still speaking with trollish ignorance.
I mean really. A man chases a bunch of pigs off a cliff and says "they're demons." Today, we lock him up in a psychiatric ward. But you, you call 'im god. Weird, eh. Why is this modded insightful, instead of troll?
In each of the three gospel accounts of that story, Jesus did not drive the pigs anywhere. He gave the demons permission to go into the pigs, and the pigs rushed off the cliff.
If you want to find something to call "screwed up" in Christianity, you can find things that are genuinely hard for us to explain--and you can do it without twisting or misrepresenting the people you're talking about. Doing it the way you did is just ignorance.
This is true. They do narrow the scope as the scrutiny tightens. I don't see a problem with that.
Joseph Smith's job as prophet was to re-establish the Church of Christ. Not provide a comprehensive history of the Americas. The problem is, you do not define the limits of Joseph Smith's claims. He does. And as has already been pointed out to you by roystgnr, Smith claimed that an angel told him the Book of Mormon accounts for the source from which the former inhabitants of the continent sprang.
Try as you might to avoid it, saying "the source from which they [=="the former inhabitants of this continent"] sprang" is fundamentally different than saying "a source" or "some of the former inhabitants". If I said that Bill Gates' mind is the source from which the product line of Microsoft sprang, I could not twist that to mean his mind is the source of "not even a significant minority" of the product line, to use your phrasing.
Portraying NA as a lost tribe of Israel
Not a part of Mormonism. The Book of Mormon is a history of a small group of people that emmigrated from Jerusalem to NA. It's not a history of the entire Americas and everyone that has ever lived on it. Or even a majority. Or even a significant minority. Yes, where on earth would people get such an idea?
Where is your evidence for this statement ? I find it sad that those of religious pursuasion are prepared to make definitive statements without the facts to back them up.
Yes. Because people making definitive statements without the facts to back them up is unheard of on the internet, except for those rascally religious people.
Well, I'm a conservative, and I don't think I'm a duck. (Though I'm sure there are many ducks in my camp.)
And sometimes, we think that something "looks like a duck" because we've never met a swan. And we think it "quacks like a duck" because we don't listen very closely--after all, we can see very well that it's a duck. And it sounds generally quack-like. It must be a duck!
He told me that the fossil record (i.e. dinosaurs and pre-humans like Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon) was faked, built up from tiny pieces of bone into what scientists imagined the creature looked like.
That's something else.
We were talking about the idea that the fossils in the ground were put there by God, but were never living animals. There's probably someone out there who would say that, but for any position you can find at least one person who holds it. It's not standard creationism, was my point.
Your friend was talking about the theoretical reconstruction of fossils from fragments. Which does happen a lot--you rarely find complete skeletons. So when you see a representation of a prehistoric animal, you can ask, "How much theoretical construction is involved? How certain is it?" I have no idea what specific cases your friend was talking about--he might be entirely right, he might have been blowing it way out of proportion.
Hmm...You were also talking about different areas of political philosophy.
He was talking about local/private vs. federal action.
You were talking about "social justice"[1] policies, corporate tax breaks, and tax cut philosophy. (Tax philosophy as in, should cuts be a constant percentage across the tax brackets (weighted in dollars toward the rich), or percentage-weighted toward the poor.)
Hmm...In your terms, I think most conservatives would not affirm that they want to care for society from the top-down. That's what you think is going on (and you could be right), but in theory, that's not their philosophy.
[1] I hate that term when applied to things like welfare or other ways to improve the lot of poorer people. It implies that they are poor because some injustice. Which may or may not be true.
Only if you chose peculiar definitions of 'Top' and 'Bottom'.
Bottom in my context means 'most needy of society's assistance', and top means the reverse.
It's not that you were using different definitions of "top" and "bottom". It's that you were talking about different senses of "taking care of society from the [*]".
You were talking about seeing to the needs of the bottom first, then seeing to the needs of the top.
He was talking about taking care of society by taking action at the top (the centralized federal government), versus by taking action from lower down (private charities or local government).
FYI... I grew up in creationist circles, seeing creationist videos, reading websites, etc. I've never actually encountered anyone who thought that fossils are fakes.
You might find such people in the back hills somewhere...But that kind of thing has nothing to do with the kind of creationism you're likely to encounter.
So, it sounds as though the state legislature is trying to pass a law that says that if a teacher personally disagrees with evolution, then they can refuse to teach it.
No, not judging by the text of the bill quoted in the article summary.
It says that something about what they're allowed to present "in connection with teaching any prescribed curriculum regarding chemical or biological origins". The state requirements are still the state requirements; what's prescribed is still prescribed. As I read it, Sen. Storms wants to allow teachers to also present ID arguments, on top of the required evolution curriculum.
It doesn't seem to give teachers a pass if they fail to present the prescribed curriculum.
Using false-color in an image is certainly not the innovation. What is innovative is their use of corrective optics to achieve much higher signal (100-fold increase compared to conventional techniques), and the integration of energy-loss spectroscopy. This means that for each pixel in the image, they can determine what kind of atom is being measured.
Almost. Energy-loss spectroscopy in SEMs isn't new. (And I don't think it's new in STEMs, either, AFAIK.) The innovation is in the corrective optics, as you said. It gives them much higher signal.
It has two results. (1) Very fine, single-atom resolution. (2) Faster imaging.
The last SEM I used with energy-loss spectroscopy was slow, because the signal-to-noise wasn't great. You had to wait a long time to get the spectroscopy data. If this instrument is faster, that's truly awesome.
Seriously, that's about as significant as the fruity variety of post-moderns who think that all discussion/argumentation/philosophy is coercive and power-based.
But, of course, you were wryly dissing religion, so you get a pass around here.
While I have many issues with the Xians in this nation, they are no where close to having the issues Islam has. Christianity has had it's reformation.
Er...
Minor comment on the history, here. The Reformation didn't really have much to do with the kinds of issues you're talking about--nothing to do with moral & theological problems involved with the Inquisition and the Crusades, for instance. As far as I can recall, the closest you could get would be Luther's dislike of the practice of selling indulgences to reduce time in hell.
You see the difference between murdering filmmakers and trying to change science curriculum as one of...greater sophistication? What a fascinating moral philosophy!
Or were you implying that Christians involved with trying to affect science curriculum would murder the science
teachers if they thought they could get away with it?
Where do people get this stuff? And how are there even two people out there that think it's "insightful"?
Are you saying that theologically conservative, evangelical, Biblical inerrantists make public protests with signs that says things like, "God Hates foo?"
No?
Then I think you perfectly understood the context of the question and just felt like jousting at windmills out of conceit.
Hmm... Sorry.
In the context of "the people who write the signs", you're absolutely right. And that was the original context. I should have kept that in mind when writing my responses.
The problem is, I'm used to people using the term "fundie" as a broad brush for evangelicals--especially, anyone who does believe that homosexual sex is a sin. And people were doing that in this very thread, as in this post. For those two reasons, I forgot the original context when I replied to your comment. It wasn't intentional, it wasn't arguing for the fun of it or arguing from conceit. I honestly thought you were broad-brushing. But the problem was on my end, not in the way you spoke.
We do have independent moral awareness, apart from verbal commands from God. I'm not sure where you got the idea that evangelicals deny it. On that contrary, it's part of an argument Paul makes in Romans 2, where he talks about how Gentiles (who did not have the commands of God) instinctively or by nature knew things from the Law--in Paul's terms, we have the work of the law written on our hearts. (This doesn't mean we have no need for verbal commands. People also do nasty things like suppressing our conscience.)
Nothing you said answered my question: Why make the peculiar assumption that every command in the OT law is of the same type, for the same kind of reason?
Yes, I think that if God tells us to do something, it's wrong to disobey. That's irrelevant to my question.
Example: God told Abraham to leave the country in which he lived, and move somewhere else. It would have been wrong for Abraham to disobey, yes. (That's the "God commanded it, and he has the right to command us" element you're talking about.) But it would be absurd to infer from the command that it's inherently wrong to live in that country.
The Mosaic Law has a whole bunch of commands. It includes commands about what to do with the temple and a sacrificial system; it includes civil laws. Some of it involved moral principles that people already knew about--"Thou shalt not murder" was not new information. Some of it involved new ceremonial rules, and kosher laws, and the like.
Yes, after it was commanded, it would be wrong to disobey. That doesn't mean every command was based on a moral principle, any more than God's command to Abraham was based in morality.
As for a brief answer to the pre-marital sex question: If you're asking "How do we know it's wrong?", then yes, the answer might simply be "God let us know." (Though I'm not convinced it's not part of our instinctive moral awareness.) If you're asking, "Why is it wrong?", then I think the answer is wrapped up in the marriage covenant. Sex, marriage, & procreation were created as part of one whole. And sex is more than "enjoying each other's bodies in mutually pleasing ways"; it's being made "one flesh", which has a significance that is not going to make sense to you if you reject the existence of God and the biblical worldview. I don't expect this answer to be compelling to you, apart from that worldview. If I were an atheist, my view of sexual morality would be quite different.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait till I get going!
Where was I?
Oh yes.
Actually, "is" doesn't always mean "="-as-in-full-equivalence. Dogs are hairy, but they don't equal hairy. The issue might be that the quasi-equivalence does not commute.
In other words, Jesus=God, The Father=God, and The Spirit=God, but God!=Jesus, God!=The Father, and God!=The Spirit.
That would explain why Jesus=God and The Father=God does not imply that Jesus=The Father. Because Jesus=God!=The Father.
You just made one of the classic blunders!
If I started a sect of Islam, but rejected the Shahadah ("there is no god but God and Mohammed is his messenger"), Muslims would be entirely right to say, "No, that religion is not Islam. It is a different religion."
Religions define themselves; there are limits to what you can change/reinterpret and still call yourself part of that religion.
(Yes, identifying those limits can be a challenge. You can go ahead and object to the idea that the Shema is definitional to Christianity, or that the Trinity fits into the Shema. I think you'll be wrong, but it's a valid question to ask.) What? We don't believe that he did. See the shield of the Trinity. "Jesus did not pray to himself" (and similar issues) is exactly why we articulate the Trinity in the way that we do.
Hmm... Actually, on second thought, I don't think it's that you have the ability to respond. I think it's that you really didn't read & understand what I said.
Because, two things:
1.) Jesus didn't tell the pigs/demons/whatever to jump off the cliff. He didn't ask them to. There's nothing to indicate that he wanted them to. So... You're spouting nonsense on that count.
2.) I agreed with you in part. Your reply doesn't seem to understand that. (A quiz for you: Which part did I agree about? Can you say without going back to look? Or did you miss it entirely?)
3.) My problem with your initial mockery was that no one in church history--the witnesses of the account, or any later readers of the account--responded to that story by saying, "Well, Jesus must be God!" The thinking and beliefs that you ascribed to Christians and proceeded to mock are not part of Christian reasoning.
Excuses the man without the ability to respond.
First, three comments:
1.) I fully recognize that a lot of nonsense is spewed out. People talk lightly, without documentation, and say many untrue things.
2.) I recognize and appreciate your reasonable, civil manner. I hope that your examination of Mormon claims will proceed carefully and critically. (The Book of Abraham, for instance. Do you accept the current explanation for why the heiroglyphics turned out not to say anything like what Smith translated?)
3.) It annoys me when people dismiss Mormonism because of "weirdness". I don't believe Mormonism is different from Christianity because of weirdness. I believe it is different because so many fundamental beliefs--particularly, but not limited to, monotheism--are different. (For careful documentation from Joseph Smith's teachings and other primary sources, I hope you'll take the time to read through last year's "Mormonism 101" series at Alpha & Omega Ministries. The blog interface isn't too good--the earlier entries are lower down on the page. The series started in May, and continued through June, July, and August.)
Back to our topic.
Yes, taking "former" that way is at least plausible, though "former" could also refer to the precolonization inhabitants--i.e., American Indians in general.
Don't you think it's significant that your own church interpreted it that way, and said in the introduction to the Book of Mormon that "After thousands of years, all were destroyed except the Lamanites, and they are the principal ancestors of the American Indians"?
I would be curious to know if Smith himself said anything that would clarify which sense of "former" he meant. Did he touch on it in any of his sermons? (If you can find such references, it would be a good way for you to prove your own interpretation. Or disprove it. I'm curious--what would it do to your perception of Smith's prophethood if it turned out that he was wrong about "revealed-by-angels" information on the source of the American Indians?)
So, then you're not interested in replying to what I wrote?
Oh, please. I did no such thing.
You made a claim about "the pot calling the kettle black" because a traditional Christian said something about "the screwed up nature of their [Mormon] beliefs". But then your mockery wasn't based on Christian beliefs. Hence, I called it ignorance.
Your follow-up makes it clear that it was not actually ignorance. You knew full well that Christians do not believe any such thing. (Presumably, you also know that Christian belief in the deity of Christ was never based on him supposedly casting out some demons. Run-of-the-mill prophets could do (or claimed to do) more than that.)
Instead, your mockery was based on you taking an account, hypothesizing what you think really happened, mocking the "screwed-up" nature of Christian beliefs as though they believed your guess. It's fine for you to have your own opinion about what really happened--it's moronic to pretend people believe something different than they do.
Perhaps you intended to mock the actual witnesses of the events with the demonized man and the pigs. As though people saw Jesus do that, and then proclaimed him God. (That's the most charitable way I can read your comments.) If so, you would certainly be right about those people being screwed up. But then, even if you were right about what Jesus did with the pigs...no one reacted the way you thought. So, you're still speaking with trollish ignorance.
In each of the three gospel accounts of that story, Jesus did not drive the pigs anywhere. He gave the demons permission to go into the pigs, and the pigs rushed off the cliff.
If you want to find something to call "screwed up" in Christianity, you can find things that are genuinely hard for us to explain--and you can do it without twisting or misrepresenting the people you're talking about. Doing it the way you did is just ignorance.
Joseph Smith's job as prophet was to re-establish the Church of Christ. Not provide a comprehensive history of the Americas. The problem is, you do not define the limits of Joseph Smith's claims. He does. And as has already been pointed out to you by roystgnr, Smith claimed that an angel told him the Book of Mormon accounts for the source from which the former inhabitants of the continent sprang.
Try as you might to avoid it, saying "the source from which they [=="the former inhabitants of this continent"] sprang" is fundamentally different than saying "a source" or "some of the former inhabitants". If I said that Bill Gates' mind is the source from which the product line of Microsoft sprang, I could not twist that to mean his mind is the source of "not even a significant minority" of the product line, to use your phrasing.
Yes. Because people making definitive statements without the facts to back them up is unheard of on the internet, except for those rascally religious people.
3 and 4 are standard creationism. 1 and 2 are not. (Well, 2 might show up when talking about a particular fossil, but not generally.)
Well, I'm a conservative, and I don't think I'm a duck. (Though I'm sure there are many ducks in my camp.)
And sometimes, we think that something "looks like a duck" because we've never met a swan. And we think it "quacks like a duck" because we don't listen very closely--after all, we can see very well that it's a duck. And it sounds generally quack-like. It must be a duck!
We were talking about the idea that the fossils in the ground were put there by God, but were never living animals. There's probably someone out there who would say that, but for any position you can find at least one person who holds it. It's not standard creationism, was my point.
Your friend was talking about the theoretical reconstruction of fossils from fragments. Which does happen a lot--you rarely find complete skeletons. So when you see a representation of a prehistoric animal, you can ask, "How much theoretical construction is involved? How certain is it?" I have no idea what specific cases your friend was talking about--he might be entirely right, he might have been blowing it way out of proportion.
Hmm...You were also talking about different areas of political philosophy.
He was talking about local/private vs. federal action.
You were talking about "social justice"[1] policies, corporate tax breaks, and tax cut philosophy. (Tax philosophy as in, should cuts be a constant percentage across the tax brackets (weighted in dollars toward the rich), or percentage-weighted toward the poor.)
Hmm...In your terms, I think most conservatives would not affirm that they want to care for society from the top-down. That's what you think is going on (and you could be right), but in theory, that's not their philosophy.
[1] I hate that term when applied to things like welfare or other ways to improve the lot of poorer people. It implies that they are poor because some injustice. Which may or may not be true.
You were talking about seeing to the needs of the bottom first, then seeing to the needs of the top.
He was talking about taking care of society by taking action at the top (the centralized federal government), versus by taking action from lower down (private charities or local government).
FYI... I grew up in creationist circles, seeing creationist videos, reading websites, etc. I've never actually encountered anyone who thought that fossils are fakes.
You might find such people in the back hills somewhere...But that kind of thing has nothing to do with the kind of creationism you're likely to encounter.
It says that something about what they're allowed to present "in connection with teaching any prescribed curriculum regarding chemical or biological origins". The state requirements are still the state requirements; what's prescribed is still prescribed. As I read it, Sen. Storms wants to allow teachers to also present ID arguments, on top of the required evolution curriculum.
It doesn't seem to give teachers a pass if they fail to present the prescribed curriculum.
It has two results. (1) Very fine, single-atom resolution. (2) Faster imaging.
The last SEM I used with energy-loss spectroscopy was slow, because the signal-to-noise wasn't great. You had to wait a long time to get the spectroscopy data. If this instrument is faster, that's truly awesome.
Seriously, that's about as significant as the fruity variety of post-moderns who think that all discussion/argumentation/philosophy is coercive and power-based.
But, of course, you were wryly dissing religion, so you get a pass around here.
Minor comment on the history, here. The Reformation didn't really have much to do with the kinds of issues you're talking about--nothing to do with moral & theological problems involved with the Inquisition and the Crusades, for instance. As far as I can recall, the closest you could get would be Luther's dislike of the practice of selling indulgences to reduce time in hell.
You see the difference between murdering filmmakers and trying to change science curriculum as one of...greater sophistication? What a fascinating moral philosophy!
Or were you implying that Christians involved with trying to affect science curriculum would murder the science teachers if they thought they could get away with it?
Where do people get this stuff? And how are there even two people out there that think it's "insightful"?
In the context of "the people who write the signs", you're absolutely right. And that was the original context. I should have kept that in mind when writing my responses.
The problem is, I'm used to people using the term "fundie" as a broad brush for evangelicals--especially, anyone who does believe that homosexual sex is a sin. And people were doing that in this very thread, as in this post. For those two reasons, I forgot the original context when I replied to your comment. It wasn't intentional, it wasn't arguing for the fun of it or arguing from conceit. I honestly thought you were broad-brushing. But the problem was on my end, not in the way you spoke.
Hmm.
We do have independent moral awareness, apart from verbal commands from God. I'm not sure where you got the idea that evangelicals deny it. On that contrary, it's part of an argument Paul makes in Romans 2, where he talks about how Gentiles (who did not have the commands of God) instinctively or by nature knew things from the Law--in Paul's terms, we have the work of the law written on our hearts. (This doesn't mean we have no need for verbal commands. People also do nasty things like suppressing our conscience.)
Nothing you said answered my question: Why make the peculiar assumption that every command in the OT law is of the same type, for the same kind of reason?
Yes, I think that if God tells us to do something, it's wrong to disobey. That's irrelevant to my question.
Example: God told Abraham to leave the country in which he lived, and move somewhere else. It would have been wrong for Abraham to disobey, yes. (That's the "God commanded it, and he has the right to command us" element you're talking about.) But it would be absurd to infer from the command that it's inherently wrong to live in that country.
The Mosaic Law has a whole bunch of commands. It includes commands about what to do with the temple and a sacrificial system; it includes civil laws. Some of it involved moral principles that people already knew about--"Thou shalt not murder" was not new information. Some of it involved new ceremonial rules, and kosher laws, and the like.
Yes, after it was commanded, it would be wrong to disobey. That doesn't mean every command was based on a moral principle, any more than God's command to Abraham was based in morality.
As for a brief answer to the pre-marital sex question: If you're asking "How do we know it's wrong?", then yes, the answer might simply be "God let us know." (Though I'm not convinced it's not part of our instinctive moral awareness.) If you're asking, "Why is it wrong?", then I think the answer is wrapped up in the marriage covenant. Sex, marriage, & procreation were created as part of one whole. And sex is more than "enjoying each other's bodies in mutually pleasing ways"; it's being made "one flesh", which has a significance that is not going to make sense to you if you reject the existence of God and the biblical worldview. I don't expect this answer to be compelling to you, apart from that worldview. If I were an atheist, my view of sexual morality would be quite different.