K4YZ wrote:
wrote:
K4YZ wrote:
In fact, it has become common for people to have multiple
spouses, just not simultaneously. There was a time when
divorce carried an enormous social stigma and was made
legally difficult in most places. That's all changed.
Yes, it has...and it shouldn't have, but then that's a
trade-off to
civility that we surrendered for the "Sexual Revolution"
in the 60's.
Please explain "tradeoff to civility"?
As for the sexual revolution, I'd say the climb in divorce rates
is/was much more connected to women's liberation and changing
expectations.
And here's a fun fact: The divorce rate in the USA tends to be
*highest* in the "red/conservative/Bible Belt" states, and *lowest* in
the "blue/liberal/leftcoast/eastcoast" states.
However Christian principles were the
basis for most of thier beliefs and were codified into early
American law.
The polygamist folks you mention are all Christians.
Those particular ones are...Well..let me ammend that to say they
CLAIM they are...
What are the criteria for the CLAIM to be valid?
I don't recall any prohibition against multiple spouses in the
"New" Testament. Do you know of any?
The "Old" Testament is full of polygamous families.
The "New" Testament does include a clear prohibition against
divorce, however. Yet all of the "mainstream Christian religions" have
found a way around it. Most simply recognize civil divorces
as the end of a marriage. Roman Catholicism plays a semantic game
(called "annulment") where they declare that a valid marriage never
existed.
Not Muslims, Jews, pagans, agnostics, Wiccans or atheists.
Do you know of any nonChristian groups in the USA advocating polygamy, Steve?
Not off the top of my head, Jim, but then even if there were, my
response would be the same.
My point is that monogamy isn't necessarily part of Christianity.
The main obstacles to simultaneous-multi-spouse arrangements that I can see a
- Peer/societal pressure
- Personal preference of most people regardless of religion
- It's tough enough for two people to get along in a marriage (how many
US marriages end in divorce?). How are three or more
supposed to make it work?
I'm not saying that polygamy or polyandry or any other
multi-simultaneous-spouse situation should be legal or
illegal. All I'm
saying is that the laws governing marriage are not so much
derived from
"Christian" principles as they are derived from
society's overall concept of family structure, regardless of religion.
You still side-stepped the poverty issue, Jim.
Then I'll have another go at it.
Polygamy doesn't necessarily mean poverty.
When I was a kid, I knew plenty of families with 8, 10, 12 kids,
and only the father worked outside the home. Those families were
not well-to-do but they weren't in poverty either. Today such
families are rare, for a whole bunch of reasons, none of them
have to do with legal restrictions on family size.
Divorce is often financially devastating to those involved because
the same earning power goes to support two households. Yet divorces
remain easy to get. How many families exist in the USA where one spouse
is paying child support and/or alimony to a former spouse, plus
supporting a current spouse and kids? Yet there's no law against it.
There have been a few documented cases of hidden polygamy, where
a man had multiple wives in different locations who did not know about
each other. Poverty was not the rule in those cases.
You've pointed out those isolated polygamous communities as
proof of the poverty=polygamy connection, as if that's the only
way polygamy could exist. But that's not the case - one can imagine a
polygamous family where all the adults have jobs outside the home and a
reasonable number of kids. Of course
most people I know would never choose to be part of such a
relationship!
And yes, laws governing marriage and the structure of the basic
family unit in THIS country were derived from Christian
principles.
Which "Christian principles"? See above about NT rules about marriage.
American History 101 refers.
Most of the Founders were nominally Christians, but that doesn't
mean everything they did came from Christianity.
73 de Jim, N2EY