taoist
New member
You're so cute when you get flustered, Knight. So, are you saying Bob doesn't say the one-man, one-woman definition of marriage has worked well for humans since biblical times? Or are you claiming the biblical patriarchs didn't take multiple wives? To each and/or both I say fooey!Knight said:
The old testament, and the qur'an for that matter, describe social arrangements for tribal cultures, cultures where the survival of the tribe was closely linked to the number of men they could put out on the line. Polygamy for the survivors of war was common in all such cultures, including the Hebrews, to strengthen the tribe, and, if you consider the qur'anic injunctions, to succor women who had lost husbands. That sort of thing happens in wartime. So long as we seem to give birth to just about as many men as women it always will be the case that the surviving warriors come back fewer than they set out.
Now, back to Bob's multiple marriages and the one man, one woman rule. So, have you ever noticed how Bob's pontifications always start out with the disclaimer, "I'm not a [pick your discipline]" just before he starts his lecture on that discipline? As if a frank admission of ignorance excuses expanding ignorance among his listeners. Sheesh. I don't know anything about the circumstances of his past divorces, and unlike Bob, I won't use that as a gambit to speculate wildly, though I admit I did take a cheap shot at it in a past post in a separate TOL thread. (And took guilty pleasure in it, too, for that matter.)
Well, when it comes to divorce and remarriage, at least he's speaking about something with which he's personally familiar, rather than being satisfied with millenia-old prescriptions for tribal harmony. One man married to one woman until death do them part is an ideal, (and one accomplished by both pairs of my grandparents, lasting over 60 years on the maternal side.) It works well when it works. But sometimes it doesn't work.
Some couples just should never have married. Others include an abusive spouse or a host of other issues not resolvable inside the bonds of matrimony. And, in fairly rare cases according to Kinsey et al., sometimes they include a spouse with the wrong sexual orientation. When these marriages, which should never have occured, break up, you get a population that has become accustomed to the privileges and responsibilities of marriage, and together with others who never took this path, make up a population that wishes to marry members of their own sex.
It is opposition to this, of course, that has driven the one man, one woman crusade. In the process of this crusade, facts have been trampled underfoot willy-nilly. In particular, the idea that one man, one woman marriage has been the path ordained by god himself for his chosen people, despite the fact you'd have to subtract entire tribes from the original twelve if you were to take it seriously, as they were the product of a polygamy!
We Americans are not a tribe. We draw our religious beliefs, and lack thereof, from multiple sources, many of which have historical animosities. But the genius of the first amendment was to free our people from an imposed religion in order to work out a way to get along. And, stumbling at times, we have. Even you and me, Knight. Take hope.
In peace, Jesse
