Marriage is a PAGAN Institution

Marriage existed way before Christianity was ever dreamed up. Before Judaism was ever dreamed up. Before Zoroastrianism. Marriage was created by Pagans. It's not a Christian religious institution. WE perfected marriage. WE created marriage. So the Christians should not get a say in what is and is not permissible for our religious rites.

The concept of marriage predates Christianity and the other two forms of Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam which share a common origin and common values. Marriage is very ancient dating back beyond recorded history and was practiced by all people of many cultures, ethnicities and belief systems on all continents.

The prevalace of the concept of marriage came to the forefront of culture when humankind evolved from hunter gatherer to agriculture and pastoralism which occured during the neolithic/agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago.

Originally "marriage" was a private, binding contract between clans (families) to form an alliance, thereby increasing the clan's chances for survival in war against rival clans. A "dowry" was given by each clan to "seal the deal". Marriage was contractual, considered a passing of "property" between clans as a symbol of intention to honor the agreement being made. Property took many forms: cattle, land, children, whatever was considered to be of great value at the time. In the United Kingdom, a requirement for a public announcement in a Christian parish (banns of marriage) was introduced by the Roman Catholic Church in 1215. This set the precident for marriage as is recognized by the Christian community.

The origins of marriage is NOT religious, nor does it have anything to do with the God of the Abrahamic religions. It was around way before organized religion which by Christian standards means it is PAGAN. Christians "borrowed" many pagan rites and rituals so Pagans would convert more readily and easily to Christianity.

In modern times in the United States, before a legal marriage ceremony can be performed, one must obtain a marraige license from government authorities. When a legally married couple seeks a divorce they must go before a judge to have the marriage annulled. Ministers and priests do not issue legally binding marriage licenses, nor do they have the legal authority to grant a divorce. The religious concept of marriage has nothing to do with the legal concept. Church and State are completely separate in the case of the institution of marriage.

Read more: wiki.answers.com...

Uh oh! You good Christians better throw down your wedding rings or else you're going to hell for performing a Pagan rite!

Although the institution of marriage pre-dates reliable recorded history, many cultures have legends concerning the origins of marriage. The way in which a marriage is conducted and its rules and ramifications has changed over time, as has the institution itself, depending on the culture or demographic of the time.[13] Various cultures have had their own theories on the origin of marriage. One example may lie in a man's need for assurance as to paternity of his children. He might therefore be willing to pay a bride price or provide for a woman in exchange for exclusive sexual access.[14] Legitimacy is the consequence of this transaction rather than its motivation. In Comanche society, married women work harder, lose sexual freedom, and do not seem to obtain any benefit from marriage.[15] But nubile women are a source of jealousy and strife in the tribe, so they are given little choice other than to get married. "In almost all societies, access to women is institutionalized in some way so as to moderate the intensity of this competition."[16] Forms of group marriage which involve more than one member of each sex, and therefore are not either polygyny or polyandry, have existed in history. However, these forms of marriage are extremely rare. Of the 250 societies reported by the American anthropologist George P. Murdock in 1949, only the Caingang of Brazil had any group marriages at all.

en.wikipedia.org...

Early marriage was borne of ancient societies' need to secure a safe environment in which to breed, handle the granting of property rights, and protect bloodlines. Ancient Hebrew law required a man to become the husband of a deceased brother's widow.

But even in these early times, marriage was much about love and desire as it was social and economic stability. In its roundness, the engagement ring, a custom dating back to the Ancient Rome, is believed to represent eternity and everlasting union. It was once believed a vein or nerve ran directly from the 'ring' finger of the left hand to the heart.

Many other modern day marriage traditions have their origins in these ancient times. Newly-weds are said to have aided fertility by drinking a brew made from honey during certain lunar phases and it is this tradition from which we derive the origins of the word 'honeymoon'.

uktv.co.uk...

So. Why should Christians be allowed to say gay marriage is a sin? Marriage doesn't belong to you. It wasn't created by you or your god. Stop profaning OUR religious rites with your bigotry!

reply to post by cetaphobic
Being melodramatic in response to the melodrama of others doesn't do anyone any good, but I do appreciate the actual information in your post.

Regarding your (I would assume satirical...) claim that christians will go to hell for performing pagan rights, you might want to note that marriage (or union, whatever, I don't care) - a life-long bonding of two people, becoming one flesh, is directly mandated in the bible:

Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

Now, personally, BASED on the example of the bible, I'm not concerned about ceremonies. For me, private acknowledgement between the two people is more than sufficient, and the fact that it's turned into a big political issue irks me to no end. Let whoever wants to associate with each other do so freely. Keep government out of it on any level, for that matter. It's a private bond between two (or more) people, whatever - I may not agree with what others might choose to do, but as long as I don't get brought into it, who cares?

At most, IMHO, the state at its various levels should just recognize the pact between these people and handle property claims, offspring, and inheritance accordingly.

Just...god, get the politics and always being up in everyone else's business out of it. It's ridiculous.

reply to post by cetaphobic


Good stuff here, OP! Monogamy and love of another are gifts from God, or at least, really good ways to learn something here on Earth. Marriage, however, as your posts have shown, was originally meant to protect wealth and property, and to treat women like a commodity so as to calm down the menfolk and ensure they all 'get access'. Pretty sick in my opinion. It's 2012, man, it's time to let us pretty girls run free and stop treating us like property or a product that needs to be regulated. And, it's time to get the GD government out of all of our personal relationships!

I think fundamentalist Christians have their own alternative world-history, and they don't recognize anything before Adam and Eve, which they think happened about 6 000 years ago.

So to them the first marriage was between Adam and Eve in the garden, which then also messed everything up.
(Although, according to other Jewish myth Eve was Adam's second wife after Lilith.)

After that, men could take multiple wives and concubines throughout the Old Testament.

Jesus narrowed this to one wife, and pointed out divorce and remarriage for women as adultery, and also spoke of three classes of eunuchs, or males who should not marry, which is totally ignored by the current anti-Biblical "evangelical" scam. (Matthew 19:10-12)

St Paul said that if one enters the Christian sect without a wife it's not necessary to take one, but one is allowed for those who would "burn with lust" without one.
So if one has a wife, it's also not necessary to get rid of her.
It's better to be without however, and not to be distracted by women. (1 Corinthians 7:25-29)
It's not sin to marry one virgin, but: "it remaineth, that both they that have wives be as though they had none".

The final procession of the Elect in Revelations are virgin men "undefiled by women":
"These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins". (Rev 14:4)

So women are clearly defiling, and marriage is an ignoble option compared to being chaste with other men, little better than masturbating with a chance of conception, and strict guidelines are laid down for the married.
Women caused not only the fall from the garden (1 Timothy 2:12-14), but also the destruction of Sodom (Ezekial 16:48-50) and many other problems for men in the Biblical sense.

However, one can take multiple meanings from the Bible, but the focus on modern marriage in Christianity as a general injunction in the NT is very hard to find.

I sometimes find it so anti-modern heterosexual marriage that some verses allude to homosexual lust as sinful just to make it clear that gender segregation should not be misconstrued as an implied injunction to practice homosexuality instead.

I'm a Universalist. It is all the same God. You are deluding yourself otherwise. (This is just an opinion. I mean no rudeness to you. As I'm of pagan beginnings too. I respect your research. Been there and done it.) Their is nothing inherently evil about Christianity. Nor them adopting practices that are beneficial to health and family unity. The problem is EVIL men and women, using their power to control world events through organized religion. Organized religion that connects with it's government and is driven by the financial system - that's the worry. Not any particular faith.

Christianity is filled with wonderful people. More often than not, I think. More than not. I'd not let bias of a religion, skewer your ability to know and talk with Christians. Pagans and Wiccan's greatest contribution to the world has been religious tolerance. Let that go, and Gnosticism gets as bad of a name as it ever has.

Christians are insightful. They are intelligent people, who will have ideas and answers to problems. Let us not write them off as quacks. They are insightful and honestly, often (not always) but from my experience, filled with love for those who are around them.

reply to post by cetaphobic


Actually, you're wrong. Man didn't create marriage, nor did pagans. YHVH created marriage when he gave our progenitor Adama the first woman as a wife.

The other people that came after just repeated the tradition so they were really plagiarizing God's gift.

reply to post by lonewolf19792000


Oh, foo. We all know that marriage was common among the pagan cultures and actually were more equality centered than Christianity is. At least in the end of pagan times, women could own land, vote, and fight in war. Christianity swoops in and women are degraded to second class citizens.

Thankfully, as does man, religion changes and grows, and Christianity isn't like that anymore.

But to why I posted to you, dear Lionheart, Genesis is right, at the beginning. When Cain was rejected from his fathers home, he went to the land of NOD. It already existed. You see, the garden of eden was, YVWH's personal lab experiment. He fashioned Adam and Eve, something went wrong, and Cain had to be banished. A different people, already existing, separate from the Christian/Judaic God. That is the land of NOD and where all your evolution comes into play. But that doesn't take anything away from your history, or religion, or faith. It just enriches it with culture and history of earlier times. It's a gift to know, and whatever Divine force governing us, doesn't want us to forget it....or it would have already been forgotten.

Blessings, Lionheart.

reply to post by cetaphobic


This is the same point I bring up all the time but no one seems to care. Apparently, there is no "Freedom of Religion" unless you are a Christian.

Christians should not have the right to stop others from practicing their religious views just because THEY think it is a sin. That is NOT religious freedom.

Good thread topic.

I'm suddenly inclined to think that the Adam and Eve story was concocted (or altered) partially to give a model for what the writers' culture deemed as a proper marriage... subservient wife and all. As someone who believes in equal partnership, it embarrasses me a little.
Who would have known that the early Biblical writers would end up wielding so much power?

Speaking of marriage as it is managed today, I think it is indeed a holdover from the days when women were passed around like property. It's why the wife's last name is traditionally changed, and why the whole arrangement is a legal matter rather than a private acknowledgement.

Originally posted by lonewolf19792000
reply to post by cetaphobic

 

Actually, you're wrong. Man didn't create marriage, nor did pagans. YHVH created marriage when he gave our progenitor Adama the first woman as a wife.

The other people that came after just repeated the tradition so they were really plagiarizing God's gift.

HAHA!

If we are all descendants of Adam and Eve, then how do you account for the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnum? Do you think that they are descendants of Cain? Can't be. There is no evidence of de-evolution in mankind's history.

No, the first marriage happened when a cave man saw a woman and he clubbed her over the head and took her his cave. The woman, now pregnant, used her wiles to convince the man to protect her and their offspring and provide meat, that she would magically cook with vegetables that she gathers in a steam pot she made from reeds. The way to amn's heart is through his stomach, after all!

reply to post by cetaphobic


ok first of all mariage may predate christianity but not hebrew culture. The type of mariage we christians use is based off of judaism. Which is one of the first religions and if you believe in the bible the first religion.

reply to post by windword


There is absolutly no definite proof of this

reply to post by dpeacock


No proof of what? That Neanderthal man and Cro-Magnum man predate Homo-Sapian?

ok first of all mariage may predate christianity but not hebrew culture. The type of mariage we christians use is based off of judaism. Which is one of the first religions and if you believe in the bible the first religion.

Of course marriage predates Christianity! Christianity didn't start until about 2000 years ago. It's a new religion, comparatively.

[RTF]
A SHORT HISTORY OF MARRIAGE
www.low.net.au/marriage.rtf

That depends on who you think the Hebrew people were, and how old their culture is.

350,000 BC Date of Heidelberg jaw. From its size and elaborate hingework, palaeontologists have now been able to sex it with confidence, and also attribute to it the beginnings of domestic conversation.

Phonetic experts believe it to have been capable of delivering complex structures at rapid speed, viz. 'What time do you call this, I have been slaving over this bloody lizard crumble all day, I was given to understand you were out gathering moss for afters, it does not take eight hours, whatever they are, to pluck a few handfuls of lichen, doubtless you have been lurching around after that top-heavy slag up the cliff, what is that curly red hair on your club, well I have not given you the best years of my life in order to...

350,000 BC (later the same evening) Date of Heidelberg head-ache.

200,000 BC Discovery of fire. It is now possible to get a decent steak. An entirely new area of marital discord is ushered in, since it is even more possible to get a lousy steak.

80,000 BC Neanderthal Period. Tools become much more sophisticated: the needle is refined, making it possible to invent the nightdress. Cohabitation enters its darkest phase to date.

50,000 BC The First Ice Age. Neanderthal man, maintaining that it was Neanderthal woman's job to get the firewood in, bloody hell have I got to do every little job myself, and while we're on the subject it wouldn't kill your mother to get up off her backside now and again, becomes extinct.

30,000 BC Emergence of Cro-Magnon man, and the Aurignacian culture, bringing with it cave-painting and violent arguments about what colour to do the dining-room. Chisels become more sophisticated, and Cro-Magnon woman suggests that a shelf be put up in the kitchen.

25,000 BC Cro-Magnon woman asks how the shelf is coming along.

They didn't have religion, no reverence for something greater, a soul or life after death? Many will disagree with you.

At Iraq's Sharindar Cave, for example, flowers were left with a burial. Personal effects accompany other burials. Neanderthals also began the practice of carefully orienting the body on an East-West axis or so that the corpse faced east. (Orthodox Christian cemeteries maintain this tradition.)

reply to post by cetaphobic


WRONG.

Marriage is almost as old as dirt and comes from the garden of eden.

Much older than paganism. Nothing predates the one-true God of Abraham.

reply to post by RevelationGeneration


Do you think that Neanderthal and Cro-Magnum man were the offsprings of Adam and Eve? Can't be. There is no evidence of de-evolution.

Marriage is not unique to Hebrews or even to humans. Many animals mate for life too.

Keeping in line with your bible story, God told Adam and Eve to "get busy" and replenish the earth. Eve didn't give birth to Cain until after they were expelled from the garden. A little math will tell you that they weren't in the garden even 9 months.

The world was already populated when Cain was banished. Adam and Eve weren't the first humans, by any stretch.
Some sort of "coupling" ie. marriage was going on outside of Eden. Archaeology shows that primitive people had some sort of spiritual ties to each other, as shown in my previous post.

Abraham was from Sumeria, Ur, where other religions were flourishing at the time. Noah did not impart any religions text or laws, and indeed his seed supposedly spawned Nimrod and subsequently a Sumerian religion. Moses was the first to impart religious rites, rituals and hence the first Hebrew religion of Judaism.

reply to post by windword


Prove to me a primitive Neanderthal man ever existed...

And your comparison to animals and humans is just slightly disturbing.

reply to post by RevelationGeneration


Human ARE animals! Homosapian animals to be exact.

If you deny that Neanderthal man existed, despite scholarly and peer reviewed evidence there is nothing I can do to change your mind. I can only refute your ignorant and biased stance, to others.

Originally posted by windword
reply to post by RevelationGeneration

 

Human ARE animals! Homosapian animals to be exact.

If you deny that Neanderthal man existed, despite scholarly and peer reviewed evidence there is nothing I can do to change your mind. I can only refute your ignorant and biased stance, to others.

Here we go again... Pagans claiming there religion is the "old religion"... What a load of nonsense, do you know pagan worship came up in opposition to the one true God of the Bible?

Go right ahead and refute me... Your the one making the claim that some Neanderthal man existed not me. The burden of proof is on you. The Bible clearly contradicts this idea. Humans are not animals, we were made in God's image, animals were not. See when evolution gets people to believe we are just primitive animals people start acting like them and all morals fly out the window.

reply to post by RevelationGeneration


No one can refute you because of your arrogant obsession with the Bible, not because there are no facts on our side. If you refuse to even look at science, you are too stupid to be refuted.

The burden of proof is on YOU to prove that God exists without using the Bible. Can't do it, can you?

reply to post by RevelationGeneration

Humans are not animals, we were made in God's image, animals were not. See when evolution gets people to believe we are just primitive animals people start acting like them and all morals fly out the window.

How do you get around the fact that human's have physical bodies that are classified in the mammalian animal kingdom. We have to eat and poop, drink water and sweat, breath air and have sexual intercourse to transfer sperm. Women have menses. Children nurse from their mother's milk, learn ambulatory skills and grow teeth and hair.

Not animals my arse!