EricBess said:
I don't know enough about the Hindu religion. Do they believe in reincarnation and that sometimes you are male and sometimes you are female. If so, then perhaps their view would be different then mine, certainly, but the fact that there are separate genders, I have the believe that they, as a religion, at least feel that there is a reason for the difference and different things to learn through each.
Yeah, I suppose they would be the same in that respect, but if you stretch it that far, EVERYONE believes that there is a reason genders are the way they are. Like Modus pointed out, evolution has an answer to that. And at the very least, we can say that unless we reject causality outright, there HAD to be some reason.
Great question, and perhaps the reason we have such debates in the first place is because this is even a question. It has already been discussed that marriage is a public awknowledgement of two people coming together to form one unit. It is the creation of a family. But I think a more important question is what is the duration of marriage?
Too many see marriage as just a momentary convenience that can be disolved once it is not longer convenient. Most religious ceremonies talk about "til death do you part", indicating that the cerimony is binding only for this lifetime. The catholic church only relatively recently awknowledged divorce, for example, but so many people just shake it off and leave their kids wondering what they did wrong (sorry about soap box
).
But it's the people who choose to include the ceremonial religious tidbits (it isn't required or anything) in their marriage and later disregard those parts or never took them seriously to begin with. There are some problems associated with this, but I fail to see how it's my problem or your problem or society's problem. It's a problem for the people who got themselves into into this type of situation.
And what does it have to do with gay marriage, anyway?
The scriptures talk of a "new and everlasting covenant" and the sealing power to bind in heaven that which is bound on earth. Marriage isn't just a convenience for the duration of this life, but is a commitment throughout eternity. Government can't make that happen, though, and it certainly isn't available where gender roles are ignored.
Legally, marriage is not an "everlasting covenant." Nothing about heaven either. You're right, the government can't make that sort of thing happen and I submit that the government should have no business in such things. So yeah, if the legal marriage doesn't really have much in common with the religious concept of marriage (I mean, they do have a common origin and an intertwined history and the same name), what's the problem?
As for church and state, government and church were never completely meshed. There was always a religious leader and an administrative leader. The differences came in how much influence one had on the other. There were certainly times where the religious leader was the true power and the King was just a puppet, but I don't know of anywhere that they didn't both exist.
Yeah, with the caveat that there have been some important exceptions here and there, I concur.
Modus Pwnens said:
The reason that man and woman are physiologically different has nothing to do with any religions, it is nature's way of allowing different species to reproduce. Of course, this is stuff for an entirely different, and already aged debate on Intelligent Design versus Evolution.
ID is dead. It's been replaced with "teach the controversy." Although arguably, that's all it ever was in the first place.
I personally do not care what "scriptures" have to say about my life, but I wonder what proof or empirical evidence (scary word when religion is involved) you have for your rather strange claim that an enternal commitment is not available for gay people (if I misunderstood your point, please tell me).
I don't even see how it matters. Legally, eternal commitments and other such things should be pretty much irrelevant. EB is free to make whatever statements he likes about eternal commitments, but neither his nor my nor anyone else's views on eternal commitments should shape policy.
Spiderman said:
Like I said, the time where the "king" or administrative leader was the puppet is the times I'm wondering about. In the Western world, I don't think there were ever theocracies, but the whole point is if and when did religious leaders have enough influence to make law and were the marriage stuff part of it?
Well, Henry VIII did have to break his whole country away from the RCC in order to annul his marriage, because it was only the church that had the authority to do so and the Pope wouldn't allow it. Is that the sort of thing you're talking about? Religious leaders at points in history have been powerful enough to influence pretty much everything. But what's your point?
Mooseman said:
Are you kidding me? Constintine changed the entire religion of the empire..... who else but the religious leader has the power to do that..... The roman Emporer may not have dealt with day to day crap in the church, but when he talked the church listened......
Who else but a religious leader? How about a really powerful king/emperor/despot/dictator/whatever? There was a well-established church. He converted, but the circumstances behind his own conversion are a bit sketchy historically. I hesitate to give him credit for single-handedly changing the religion of the empire when Christianity was already a significant force, despite religious persecution and all that.
Also, Constantine was rather late in the empire, long after the Pax Romana. I doubt that every Roman emperor would have had the power to change the religion of the whole empire. Constantine's reversal of Christian persecution and later conversion to the religion were probably the culmination of an existing trend that began long before he was born.
For Louis XIV: "Bishops were not to leave France without royal approval; no government officials could be excommunicated for acts committed in pursuance of their duties; and no appeal could be made to the Pope without the approval of the king. The king was allowed to enact ecclesiastical laws, and all regulations made by the Pope were deemed invalid in France without the assent of the monarch"
Like Henry VIII, this is an example of a very powerful king (only moreso). He disagreed with the church and was powerful enough to buck their authority. He wasn't the religious leader and I highly doubt that anyone at the time considered him to be.
