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#11
September 10th 05, 03:03 PM
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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 |
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