Texas is... progressive?Follow

Yes. But what aspect of property rights?



You wrote this and you still don't get how children matter to the equation? How can a child be the "property" of the man if the child is born by the woman? How do you determine who the father of the child is if you don't have something like marriage? Marriage forces the man to take care of the woman and any children she bears. In return he gets to pass on his name and property to "his child".

Without the need to connect fathers to children, marriage would not exist as a social concept. There would simply be no reason for anyone to have ever come up with it. If you're confused as to why this is necessary once societies grow beyond simple family clans and tribes, I'll do it, but it should be "obvious".



You're blending concepts here. Families often stayed closer together than they do today. That's a different social force at work.



Which has nothing at all to do with why marriage exists as a social concept, much less why society choose to grant various benefits to those who marry. You get that the reasons one might want a benefit might not be the same as the reasons why others might choose to grant it to them, right?



This is debatable. But it's not super relevant to the topic at hand, so whatever.




Sure. Other stuff has been lumped in along the way. But that stuff should not change the core reason for marriage existing in the first place. People put decorations on their cars, but we would never say that cars exist as a thing to put decorations on. I hope you understand the difference.



Answer the thought experiment. If there was no need to raise children, would marriage need to exist? Would we place as much weight on it as we do? Would society have some reason to encourage people to enter into it?



That's debatable as well. But it's connected to the whole womans rights thing, and I really don't want to get into it. Let's just say that it's a hell of a lot easier to dissolve a marriage today than it was say 100 years ago. Can we agree on that?



I see it just fine. And it is obvious. Obviously irrelevant and/or wrong.

Which would end up being full of lesbian incest. Nice!


We'll be safe here. This thread has been pre-disastered.

Incest is illegal because back in the day, marriage between siblings or family members didn't increase one's social standing or improve your family network. These days we keep incest illegal because it leads to a proliferation of unfavorable genetic diseases and health issues.

Legalizing polygamy would be an overall bad idea because, as mentioned earlier, if one man has 6 wives, that would leave even less wives for closeted douchebags such as yourself. Under our current system, at least you will still eventually be matched with someone of your undesirable caliber.


Just like guns kill people.


This doesn't deal with gay marriage, but I'll humor you.

This is a terribly outdated and asinine argument, seeing how all blood is still tested before it is used for infusion. By your logic, though, we probably shouldn't let black people donate blood either as they are also at a higher risk of HIV.


no, it is just blatant ignorance.

Edited, Oct 6th 2009 5:31pm by Bardalicious

Ridiculous. Ceremonial ownership of sexual partners would almost absolutely exist regardless. Hell, I'd posit a real possibility that ceremonial ownership of mates came about before humans had a real working connection between sex and the actual reproductive cycle. Humans most likely came to understand the connection after the domestication of animals where they could watch it occur in things that didn't take 9 months to produce whereas ceremonial rites can be traced back to nomadic tribes prior to the domestication of lifestock (the earliest signs of ceremonial burial are from 300,000 years ago and while burial =/= marriage -- save the jokes -- I doubt there was a three hundred thousand year dry spell in the evolution of ceremony and ritual in society when one looks at other artworks, carvings, etc). Obviously it can't be proven now but I'd strongly guess that men where declaring certain women their property for sexual (not breeding) purposes prior to understanding where their babies came from. And that they were justifying this ownership via ceremonial rite, i.e. marriage.


It doesn't need to exist now. Would it exist? Almost absolutely -- people have always formed lasting committed bonds and would no doubt do so with or without offspring in the picture. What would be the differences in society? Who knows?

So... well, I guess your "thought experiment" was a pretty worthless one. Just like every other time you've tried it.

Edited, Oct 6th 2009 5:57pm by Jophiel

That's a remarkably stupid comment, even for you.

You're asking about the genesis of marriage. Just because it doesn't fit into the point you're trying to make doesn't mean it's not true. It means that your point isn't really accurate.


Probably because monkeys and swans don't, you know, have ritualized ceremonies about it and stuff.


No, the child becomes "critically important" because you desperately need us to believe so for your points to have any merit at all. So anything not related to children doesn't really count and you continually assert that it's really all about children over and over despite any evidence to the contrary. You've done this in every single debate on the subject about every single aspect of the debate so there's no real surprise that you'd fall back on it now.


much? Humankind would continue to exist just ducky without marriage. Sorry, but them's the facts of it. Anything else you want to read into that is your own paranoid ravings.


Again, you're seriously conflating things here, reversing things, whatever. It's not even worth getting into, to be honest.


Whatever. Yeah, people getting married 'cause they love each other and want to create a dedicated realtionship to one another is really radically changing what it is.

The fact that you can't see it past "For the children!" is what's "telling". Doesn't tell us anyhting new though -- just that you still haven't learned anything years later.

No one at any point in time sat down and said, hey I'd like to get more people to marry what incentives can I offer. What actually happened is that a significant portion of married people wanted a certain benefit and a politician thought, hey I bet that would get me their votes. Or earlier then that, a group of people who had enough power to affect change thought of something they wanted and made it happen. I guess that's pretty much the same thing.

I think aside from the fact that I don't think benefits in marriage were created as an incentive, the biggest problem with your argument is that kids don't need marriage. If we're talking about early societies, children were a net gain. Children were essentially your retirement plan, and your free labour so they were sought out. There was no need to bind people to take care of their children because it was an investment. There is no need for marriage to enforce this, so there must be some other reason for marriage. Oh right, it's about the man and the women.

Edited, Oct 6th 2009 7:32pm by Xsarus

It's not so much that Gbaji overestimates everyone else's stupidity as that he underestimates his own.

Like your entire argument?

You're a riot.

"NO IT'S NOT MY ARGUMENT YOU GUYS ARE LIKE THAT IT'S ALL YOU."

Incorrect sweetheart, because you never respond to any rebuttals that hold the premises you claim to be starting with false.



Edited, Oct 6th 2009 10:16pm by CBD