More To Anonymous on The Origins of Modern Monogamy
Anonymous said...
What about Adam and Eve? Or the concept of duality? What you write is interesting, but I do think there is a basis for duality in marriage. I don't necessarily see polygamy as a bad thing. Gay rights activists seem to hate it as much as they think their opponents hate them. The analysis I would like to see. What would the US look like if the determinant religions was purely secularism, spirtitual christianity, buddhism. I believe polygamy arises from desires for variety. Is it wrong in the above contexts? I think same sex arises from incarnational puzzles that have vague boundaries when measured against their intensity. Genes and enviroment are mutable to the mind, and the mind is mutable to the other two. Now that last statement you can see it's form plastered all over the major minds processes of the past.
8:34 PM
This post is in response to the above comment which was made by an anonymous respndent to my earlier post regarding the origins of monogamy. I have no idea if this "anonymous" is the same as the "anonymous" my earlier post on this topic was
written in response to or not. In any case, I find it interesting that the more orthodox Christian prespectives offered in this discussion seem to come from authors unwilling to identify themselves even via an Internet pseudonymn.
The debate over contempory marriage in America centers around two variables: numerosity or how many partners may simultaneoulsy live in a publically sanctioned union, and gender or what mix of genders may be party to a publically sanctioned union. I am discussing publically and not religiously sanctioned unions. I assume that the governemnt cannot and should not tell religions what they must believe or accept as a marriage, and that likewise religion has no business dictating what secular law should or must be. If we get to the point that that assumption is invalid then we need to have a larger discussion about the fact we are no longer a democracy but have become a theocracy.
Admittedly the myth of Adam and Eve is about a couple, a man and a woman, who are depicted as the two first human beings. Admittedly all human procreation occurs out of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman (other than in the Christian scripture as revised by the Council of Nicea to incorporate the ancient Roman Pagan tradition that the Saviour of all men was born of a virgin birth). It is the hugest of leaps in logic however to infer from that myth that the only ethical or even optimal family structure is monogamy.
The story of Adam and Eve is at the very beginning of Old Testament Scripture. Presumably all the earliest Hebrew Fathers and Prophets were privy to it. Presumably Moses being visited by God via the burning bush was aware of the story of Adam and Eve. Somehow the prescription that the duality of Adam and Eve meaning that men and women were to live monogamously escaped not only Moses, but David and Abraham, and well, everyone for the supposed 405 centuries from the date some attribute to Adam and Eve until when The Pope suddenly came to understand the entire Judeo-Christian world had until that time been living in sin, and needed to become monogamous. Co-incidentally at the same time it became law that the assets of anyone dying intestate would innure to the Church.
If the story of Adam and Eve is prescriptive of the optimal numerosity of marriage why should not the Holy Trinity not also be a basis? Our family is a triad.....a threesome.....a trinity. Perhaps we are the optimal number of marriage partners. There were twelve lost tribes of Israel and twelve disciples could the optimal number in a marrraige be twelve partners?
Numerosity aside, there is the issue of gender mix in marriage. What would beome of us if homosexual unions were permitted? What would become of us indeed? The primary role marriage plays in modern society is to create legal responsibility for child support (although umarried parents can be held as legally responsible for child support as married ones can), and to prescribe the distribution of assets at the time of divorce/dissolution, as is the case in the end of the vast majority of marriages. This latter role for marriage seems remarkably consistent with the role marriage was created to perform by the Church 2000 years ago. I would asume that if same sex marriage had been permitted historically that in the rare cases where a same sex couple had adopted children they would have been held financially responsible for child support and that their marital assets would have been distributed according to divorce law if their union ended before the death of either partner, and according to probate law if one/or both partner(s) died.
You question what it would be like if there were some differet mix of "determinant religions" in America. This question assumes a falacy. For many Americans and certainly for a majority of America's founders there was no determinant religion. There are many many peoplw who do not live their lives based upon some superstitious myth and the belief in an all knowing all powerful invisible giant or force in the sky. The majority of the most inflential American founding fathers were not Christian, but were Deists whose philosophy was primarily rationalist coming out of the industial revolution. America is the result of "determinant religion" to only a minor degree. The reason for the frenetic assaults on secualr freedom today by Christianity is their own recognition that their influence, which was never as great as it was in their own minds, is likely to be non-existant within a couple generations.
How would America be different if there had been less or differeent mixtures of "determinant relgions?' I suspect there would not have been witch trials and burnings, or the genocide of native Americans, or lynchings of blacks or a huge plethora of social evils which while they generally seem to fly in the face of Christian precepts also always seem to occur based upon Christian rationalization.
I've tried to decide how to resond to the last two sentences about genes, and mutablility, and the mind etc. I've read and reread them several times. I am just not smart enough to understand what they mean so I am not going to respond.
Your comments, Anonymous, have kicked off quite a discussion here. I hope if you want to continue this that you will attach some identity to your posts or comments, so that we can at least know if we are responding to the same individual or various different writers.
All the best:)
Tom
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined.
posted by Anonymous @ 6:30 PM
8 comments
8 Comments:
Welcome back!
Thank you for this post, not an easy thing to do given the current religious/political situation in the States, I hasten to add as viewed from the UK.
Your post is succinct and clear and for me remarkably sane.
I too have spent the last few hours trying to determine what Anonyomous means, genes, mutability, mind???
One last thing, so pleased to see that you feel up to posting again, I've also read your reply to one of the comments on the post, "Thinking about Power", you do seem to make a lot of sense.
You and your swan have given me a lot to think about since I discovered your blog, good exercise for an ageing brain, thank you.
Continue to make good progress, don't push to hard. :-) Paul.
Searabbit, the jewish system of blood raltions prevents that...
Jewish bloodlines are matriarchic(al?). It's the mother that counts, the father is....irrelevant.. as far as bloodline and heritage is concerned.
As far as Anonymous' last paragraph is concerned, I could hold a long dissertation on that.
I will, however suffice with a counterquestion:
What's it going to be? Man, or Monkey...?
note to others: Biology is *not* a fullfy subject, and he's simply displaying his.....iggerance...
not amused at all, although you get them all the time...
Sea -- If the only reason for "marriage" is to determine who the children "belong" to it would seem that today's science has ended the need for that. A simple blood test can prove paternity easily enough (probably with more credibility than a marriage license does in any event). Even in poly families where there is reproduction happening, parents manage, with the judicious use of birth control and timed and creative sexual interactions, to sire children whose parentage is "known." This is not really all that complex with a basic understanding of reproductive science ;-)
swan
temptation -- please add whatever thoughts you might have here. The conversation benefits from your participation as much as from anyone else's. Your contribution is valued and welcome. We all learn and grow from what we share with one another. Please don't just sit and watch if you have something to add...
swan
Tom, I think you may have read Freke and Gandy's books "The Jesus Mysteries" and "Jesus and the Lost Goddess". If not, I strongly recommend them to anyone thinking along your lines.
I must admit I find it puzzling that a) same-sex marriages have not apparently been a noticeable part of Western culture historically; and b) there is so much opposition to them today. Exactly what is wrong or dangerous about a same-sex marriage? Presumably, the thought of sodomy being legitimized in the case of two males; a similar objection can hardly be so valid in the case of two females. Are there other objections? I don't count vague references to "destroying the sanctity of marriage" or similar non-sequiturs, there has to be a more cogent reason than that. I would be interested to hear precisely what the objections are, whether from an anonymous reader or anyone else.
Hi. I found my way to this blog via a link to the first post on marriage from another blog....
Interesting comments. I just wanted to mention a new book, called _Marriage, a History_ by Stephanie Coontz. Her focus in this book is the development of the ideal of marriage based on solely or primarily on love, which she argues has taken place over the last 200 years and carried with it the seeds of the breakdown of marriage. It's a great example of how the study of history shows that what contemporary people think of as "the way it's always been" hasn't really been that way.
But her early chapters are more relevant to the discussion here. She's read and synthesized an amazing amount of research on marriage, from anthropology, history, the study of ancient cultures. She rejects both the idea that the development of marriage was a patriarchal power grab and the more outdated idea that it developed to protect and provide for women. She argues that over time, marriage has tended to be about the pooling of resources and labor and the maintenance of networks of support and influence, and was therefore seen as far too important to be left to something as unreliable as love between two individuals.
In the earliest chapters, she marshals a lot of evidence to demonstrate that almost any form of marriage and family organization has existed somewhere: same sex, multiple partners/spouses, series of shorter term relationships.
Foxy
Malcolm, I think that the primary reason that we do not find same sex marriage in western cultures is that most western culture is dominated (or at least heavily influenced) by Judeo-Christian and Muslim religious / philosophical thinking, and so biased against same-sex people. There was far less of this sort of prejudice in many earlier and more "primitive" cultures. I know that many indiginous North American peoples had particular cultural niches reserved for people that would be viewed as "gay." It was a recognized and acknowledged way of being within many of the tribes.
As Foxy points out, historically and anthropologically, marriage was an arrangement that was about surviving from the standpoint of making sure the social group, clan, or tribe survived. Marriage was about making advantageous economic matches, political alliances, etc. It is only in our more recent history that it has taken on its heavily religiously laden context.
Years ago, I participated in many lengthy and painfully serious discussions about same-sex meetings in the Quaker meeting that I belonged to at the time. With a fervent testimony to equality, Friends labored with real desire to come to clearness about the question. In my time there, that never occured. Fear and stiff-necked adherence to "the way things have always been" and anger and bitterness on both sides blocked the way forward. People are such interesting critters -- capable of brilliance and then, so utterly foolish when they are, as temptation points out, "scared."
swan
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