Nothing wrong with in game incest I also get a kick out it everytime the leader agrees to it... I get this expression:

I'm a redneck that starts fights with Muslims because I think your arguments in favor of incest are gross?  You are calling me intolerant because I think incest is wrong?  That is amazing. 

So you believe that we should respect all aspects of other cultures?  If  children in China are maimed in factories, women in Saudi Arabia are being married to 40 year old men when they are 8, or stoned to death when they don't wear the right clothing or talk to a man, or how about the caste system that existed in India?  How about slavery?  Wasn't slavery considered okay in several cultures at times?  We can't judge that as inherently wrong because it's a part of their culture? 

And I'm not grossed out that you can marry your sister in the game, I am grossed out about all of the defense of it as an acceptable real world act.  I understand an argument as a game function, but to say that I am intolerant becasue I think marrying your sister is wrong, is idiot logic. 

So you've *never* bought anything, ever, that had a little sticker that said "Made in China?"  I think it's funny how people are so quick to bring up child labor in China and how wrong it is, yet they are so quick to line on up at the Walmart feeding trough.

I'm not arguing for or against incest.  I am rather apalled at your rather aggressive and violent reaction to it's mere possibility.  While I normally agree the "it's realistic arguement" has no place in the video game debate, I can easily see a "ZOMG!  How could you miss this rather obvious oversight!?!" being countered with a "they did it in medieval times" as a perfectly valid response.  The arguement that it shouldn't be there is an arguement of validity and social taboo, whilst our counter-arguement is not that it *SHOULD* be there (or even that it should not be there), we are simply arguing your stance of invalidity.

Now, to confront your...*ahem*...intelligent counter-points.  No, you are not a redneck that starts fights with Muslims because you think my arguments in favor of incest are gross.  I accuse that you are indeed a redneck that starts fights with Muslims because you are intolerant, and in your rather narrow and myoptic world-view, you've somehow skewed reality until you A:  have established an arguement of causal effect when there is none, and B:  shifted the arguement to "incest" as an act, rather than an arguement against a previous statement of invalidity.  You can't "win" an arguement if you refuse to understand the battlefield.

I believe we should respect all cultures and keep an open mind about things.  If we all had an open mind and encouraged intelligent discussion instead of intolerance and violent rage, we could work out such miscommunications and misunderstandings.  In this, I kind of equate you to the 40 year old man stoning his 8 year old bride for talking to a man while dressed inappropriately.  You both demonstrate the same sort of intolerance.

Your next sentence is punctuated as a question, and says "If" and then makes a series of statements which are generally considered true, so I cannot quite figure out if you're asking if they're true, or asking if we should respect them.  Let's assume the latter, just to make the discussion fair.

1:  You purchase their plastic wrapped blood at Walmart for 60% off.  Enjoy your alarm clock, child killer.  I would counter-point, that an asian child, which grew up in China, working in an electronics factory would not quite be the same as Billy-Joe from Arkansas doing the same.  For one, Billy-Joe can't work a soldering iron or read an electronic diagram.  If we hate it so much, pay more for your toys, American.

2:  6?  8?  14?  16?  18?  Who determines what's old enough anyways?  It wasn't too many years ago a young hispanic man was arrested for statutory rape for being with his own wife here in America.  The catch?  He was 18 and she was 14 and neither of them spoke enough english to say "Married."  By the same token, our culture is synonimous with having multiple wives, polygamous sex, incestuous orgies and gratuitous sodomy.  I mean, you've heard the redneck jokes about your sister, right??  Or the mormons?  The porn?  The gays?  The lesbians?  The trannys?  The metrosexuals?  We're really an advanced culture when it comes sexual abominations against God, just short of Europe probably, so I really don't see how you take a moral high-ground in not liking 8-year olds.  Our biblical brides weren't *that* much older, 12-14 was prime marrying age even up to medieval times.  So really, Saudia Arabia can say the same thing about us marrying off 8 year olds.  Funny how one can view a country that you've never been to based solely upon a distorted view of their ancient history.

3:  You ask an american woman about being stoned to death for being dressed inappropriately, and she will cry out in outrage, protest, and probably run through the streets naked.  You ask a Saudi Arabian woman about it, and she'll say, "...so don't dress like a fuckin' whore."  Funny how that works.  Barbara Walters is not the expert on what middle-eastern women think, sorry.

4:  Slavery!?!  Google "BDSM" next time you're free.  Then come back and talk to me about how inherently "wrong" slavery is.  BTW.  White people didn't enslave the blacks, Africans enslaved the blacks.  We just bought them from the Africans.  Slavery was *THEIR* culture.  Not ours.

5:  Humans as a whole are a morally depraved species that will harvest it's own kind for it's own uses and benefit in whatever arena it is capable of.  In the middle east, it's a mysogynistic culture, in the US, it's capitalism.  Whether you're paying the poor slut $500 or baking her face in an oven, it's still coercion.  Just because one version is easier to stomach than others doesn't make it any less wrong.  Ironically enough, we're the infidels because of our "sex sells" attitudes towards women.  It's our love of porn and T&A that makes us the evil beings that must be destroyed.  So, really, the more you hate "them" the more like "them" you are, in this.  Sure, they marry their children, then dress them up conservatively and respectfully and teach them proper manners.  Here we just strip our children naked, plaster them up on billboards, and then sleep with them WITHOUT EVEN MARRYING THEM!  ...and how come no one brings up the japanese culture's predisposition with 14 year olds in french maid costumes?  ...oh right, because they're CUTE!  We like them too, so it's ok.    And they all look so happy in the hentai videos.

Last Paragraph:  Uh, again, no one was defending it as a current acceptable real-world act.  We were arguing the accusation of invalidity and referencing real-world historical existence to establish it's validity.  Please keep up with the class and don't read ahead.

Well, the game may be boring the hell out of me in it's current form, but at least you guys are entertaining.

You only ask one of two pertinent questions here.  Do you want to kill Commodus?

You're in charge of your own character, if you've gone and shagged your sister, it was by choice.  Being Commodus would be something you'd have to choose.

I think people need to step back and ascertain if they can still tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Games and the real world. Genocide isn't okay but ask the majority of gamers if they have ever razed a city in civ or nuked half the world, or carjacked someone in Grand theft auto.The whole premise of the game involves sending thousands of followers to their deaths and killing the followers of another channeler, yet people who seem okay with that aspect think inbreeding is taking it too far? I don't get how people can think violence and murder is okay but inbreeding(can't call it incest cause there is no sexual act  even implied in the game, as far as we know they magically transfer DNA since you can bear a child when your spouse is half the world away) is just too far. Its a game.. choices are there for people to make good and evil.. moral or immoral etc etc. But even if they choose to do the latter its still just a game.

My bad. 

You mean like the brother in one room with the air conditioning on and the sister in another room with the heat on?

I've got lots of relatives in Virginia, Arkansas and Oklahoma that can directly attest to the opposite.  The schmucks just down the road from us have two slightly retarded kids because they were cousins.

If you have a nice, recessive trait, you pass it on to your kids at 50% without ever knowing anything is wrong with you.  Your kids have a 25% chance of having passed that gene onto their kids.  First cousins, each with a 25% chance of possessing that defective gene.  The rate for something like ALS is up in the hundred thousandth range, do the math.

Every bleeding one of us have dozens, if not hundreds of FUBAR genes just waiting to get matched up.  At 6% you've got damn good odds of being hosed by one of them.  When your grandchildren start getting overly friendly with each other, worry for your great grandchildren.

It is indeed only 2 and 3%, as opposed to percentiles like .01% for the general population.  Everyone has bad genes, it's an unavoidable result of living.  Everyone does not have the same bad genes.  Cleft pallets and clubbed ears are widespread deformities.  So are discolored patches of skin.

The serious, lethal diseases, are rare, on account of people dying when they had two of them.  If there's someone in your family tree with MS, AS, SF, ALS, Huntingtons, any of the major genetic problems of a rare sort, you're playing with fire.  You're going to have significant defect rates regardless, but they'll just be slightly more likely common problems, like lazy eye, ocular degeneration in general, high frequency deafness, poor motor control.

Actually, the more common figure I've seen quoted for the general population is 3 to 4 percent. So if we are to take the other statistic as being representative of birth defects resulting from first cousins, it would make them 2 to 3 percent more likely. This is still stated as being less risky than birth defects from IVF and mature-age pregnancies.

You've probably done a bit of searching, so you would have found that the figures from different studies are not all that consistent. This is what I was getting at before regarding margins for error. These percentiles are so low, so close, and so inconsistent across separate studies as to make the difference virtually dismissable.

I understand what you are saying about the likelihood of bad genes in common in a connected line of inheritance. But there are two facts that put this in perspective. Firstly, ancestry dating to pre-civil war shows that marriages between cousins was very common. Meaning that many many people share closely tied ancestry, and thereby genetics. Secondly, people going into related marriages are more likely to know about each other's possible defects where said defects have been apparent in previous generations. So if the man's father has lazy eye, and he is marrying on his mother's side of the family, none of whom have reported lazy eye in a line of inheritance, then the marriage can go ahead, for example.

Conversely, non-related couples are less likely to know about each other's family's genetic history, or if their ancestors from two generations ago were first cousins, and so it's sort of like jumping in blind-folded. That is why I think the chances are much of a muchness. So if two cousins have feelings for each other that they would otherwise act on, I say they shouldn't let that stop them.

I haven't actually been with a first cousin, but I wouldn't let that fact stop me personally if there was the inclination.

[EDIT] As a side note, among my relatives, out of the many many children, there are three who had defects at birth. One has down syndrome, one has poor motor control, and the other is albino. None of those three children came from a related couple. A lot of my relatives marry their first-cousins as a general preference over strangers or those who are not as closely related. I don't know of a single related couple who has had a child with birth defects within my circle of relatives (sooo many relatives). That is just my personal experience and has no real bearing on the issue, other than being a small example.

.... and so began the eons long feud between Lord Xia and House Mercestes. Blinded by their rage and lust, they wrought cataclysmic devastation upon the world as their battles shook the very foundations of the soap boxes they stood on. Caught in a tempest of callousness and contempt, they knew not the consequences of their folly; that civilizations would be wiped from the memory of existence did not approach the warranting of an afterthought. May the Lord of the Worlds have mercy on their animated soulless cadavers. These forums will forever pay the price for that fateful day of woe, and the era of torment that followed shall ever be remembered as the Time of Chaotic Incest.

Not trying to yank anyone's chain here, just mucking around to lighten the mood!

These numbers are skewed because of your more risky behaviors.  Our birth defect rate is going through the roof as the average age of the parents increases.  I think anyone that starts popping kids out after thirty is insane too.  Most, like 99.9%, of the autism and downs syndrome is directly related to idiots waiting till after they've played at having a career to get busy.

The actual base numbers for chromosome defects start out in the thousandths, and end up somewhere around 1/5 in your mid 40's.  Ideally, genetically speaking, you want to start going at it like rabbits in junior high, early high school, and get tired of each other by 25.