DeletedUser4844
Since marriage is a man-made thing, not a biological thing, we can't really use science to prove what the definition ought to be. We can perhapos use it for guidelines in some cases. Mostly, however, marriage is a contract between two people, at least now. It used to be more of a contract between two family groups or clans. Nowadays, marriage usually, but not always, involves a religious ceremony, and involves certain legal and ethical obligations between two people. Marriage often involves the creation of offspring, and, long ago, people discovered that too much interbreeding between people that are closely related often results in highly damaged or even non-viable offspring. This is considered a bad thing for society, and thus a taboo arose about breeding between close relatives (by taboo I mean it is considered both icky and very bad). One of the aspects of marriage (not a necessary, or a sufficient aspect to define marriage, but one of the aspect) involves breeding between the two people involved, and so marrying a close relative also became taboo.
At various points in time, marriage arrangements have been allowed involving more then two people. Sometimes with 1 man and multiple women. In much rarare cases (by case, I mean culture, not a particular marriage) between one woman and multiple men, and in at least one case between multiple men and multiple women.
Until recently, most of the major world religions have forbidden marriage between same sex partners as taboo. However, not only do we see all kinds of same sex pairings, which simply don't have the name of marriage, but serve the exact same functions, occurring in human society, but we see many same sex pairings occuring in nature as well, so if you want to go by biology, same sex marriage is a perfectly reasonable thing to have. There is no "damage" to the offspring resulting from same sex marriage, as there are no offspring resulting from same sex marriage. Primarily, I believe the taboo developed solely because people thought it was icky, and so the taboo became part of most religious belief systems. If there is any other reason for the taboo it involves the each of the major world religions wanting their followers to breed as many people as possible in order to overwhelm the other major world religions through the overwhelming weight of sheer numbers, and therefore strongly encouraging marriage and breeding of as many offspring as possible among followers, while simultaneously doing what they can to prevent breeding among followers of other religions. Not what I would call an ethical reason to prevent same sex marriage.
In the old days, offspring were really necessary, because 4000 years ago there was no such thing as social security or medicare, and if you got old and didn't have kids who would take care of you (or younger friends) you were probably just going to be food for wolves. Not something we want to emulate. In somewhat later times, when marriage was mostly a contract between families in order to concentrate the wealth of both to make them more powerful, offspring who inherited would be the way to accomplish that. Again, not exactly an ethical reason these days for us to prevent gay marriage. What we have now for reasons to prevent gay marriage mostly consists of a whole bunch of old traditions most people don't understand the origin of and reason for, along with an enormous ick factor among heterosexuals who generally won't acknowledge this because they recognize it as an immoral bias.
Jesus Christ has always been portrayed as being loving, above all. I don't think he would have objected to gay marriage, even if the old testament does. More likely he would have had a problem to those who would, through and and all means, attempt to deny gay people the chance to express their love to one another.
But hey, that's just my opinion.
At various points in time, marriage arrangements have been allowed involving more then two people. Sometimes with 1 man and multiple women. In much rarare cases (by case, I mean culture, not a particular marriage) between one woman and multiple men, and in at least one case between multiple men and multiple women.
Until recently, most of the major world religions have forbidden marriage between same sex partners as taboo. However, not only do we see all kinds of same sex pairings, which simply don't have the name of marriage, but serve the exact same functions, occurring in human society, but we see many same sex pairings occuring in nature as well, so if you want to go by biology, same sex marriage is a perfectly reasonable thing to have. There is no "damage" to the offspring resulting from same sex marriage, as there are no offspring resulting from same sex marriage. Primarily, I believe the taboo developed solely because people thought it was icky, and so the taboo became part of most religious belief systems. If there is any other reason for the taboo it involves the each of the major world religions wanting their followers to breed as many people as possible in order to overwhelm the other major world religions through the overwhelming weight of sheer numbers, and therefore strongly encouraging marriage and breeding of as many offspring as possible among followers, while simultaneously doing what they can to prevent breeding among followers of other religions. Not what I would call an ethical reason to prevent same sex marriage.
In the old days, offspring were really necessary, because 4000 years ago there was no such thing as social security or medicare, and if you got old and didn't have kids who would take care of you (or younger friends) you were probably just going to be food for wolves. Not something we want to emulate. In somewhat later times, when marriage was mostly a contract between families in order to concentrate the wealth of both to make them more powerful, offspring who inherited would be the way to accomplish that. Again, not exactly an ethical reason these days for us to prevent gay marriage. What we have now for reasons to prevent gay marriage mostly consists of a whole bunch of old traditions most people don't understand the origin of and reason for, along with an enormous ick factor among heterosexuals who generally won't acknowledge this because they recognize it as an immoral bias.
Jesus Christ has always been portrayed as being loving, above all. I don't think he would have objected to gay marriage, even if the old testament does. More likely he would have had a problem to those who would, through and and all means, attempt to deny gay people the chance to express their love to one another.
But hey, that's just my opinion.
