"Wasn't marriage supposed to be a religious thing before making it a legal based thing?"
Not as far as most historians can tell. It's really just a matter of social infrastructure: more-or-less guaranteed paternity in return for more-or-less guaranteed paternal care. It's theorized that this makes monogamy particular important in humans, because whereas other animals are often already born with the ability to walk and properly digest for example, human infants are basically useless little shits for many years.
There's also the fact that humans started congregating in huge societies - in a budding civilization, it's much simpler to deal with small nuclear families instead of intermingling groups. Marriage just provides a great deal of structure, making issues like property, legality, and government a lot easier to manage.
In Western society at least, the idea that marriages had to be recognized by the church by a priest's blessing was only started with the Council of Trent, and that was in the 1500s if I recall correctly. That was the first time marriage became an official holy sacrament; before then they were informal and unlicensed, and largely for the purpose of aforementioned things like childcare, property, and paternal security. So really, it did start out as a legal process.
It's an interesting historical debate as to whether monogamy is even that important, how marriage got started, and why it's considered an entirely religious process today. Personally I think marriage gets a bad rap. It may not be the right thing for particular individuals and it may go against our instincts, but without it I have a hard time believing human civilization would have prospered as much.
What do you think of same sex marriage?
↑ View this comment's parent
← View full post
"Wasn't marriage supposed to be a religious thing before making it a legal based thing?"
Not as far as most historians can tell. It's really just a matter of social infrastructure: more-or-less guaranteed paternity in return for more-or-less guaranteed paternal care. It's theorized that this makes monogamy particular important in humans, because whereas other animals are often already born with the ability to walk and properly digest for example, human infants are basically useless little shits for many years.
There's also the fact that humans started congregating in huge societies - in a budding civilization, it's much simpler to deal with small nuclear families instead of intermingling groups. Marriage just provides a great deal of structure, making issues like property, legality, and government a lot easier to manage.
In Western society at least, the idea that marriages had to be recognized by the church by a priest's blessing was only started with the Council of Trent, and that was in the 1500s if I recall correctly. That was the first time marriage became an official holy sacrament; before then they were informal and unlicensed, and largely for the purpose of aforementioned things like childcare, property, and paternal security. So really, it did start out as a legal process.
It's an interesting historical debate as to whether monogamy is even that important, how marriage got started, and why it's considered an entirely religious process today. Personally I think marriage gets a bad rap. It may not be the right thing for particular individuals and it may go against our instincts, but without it I have a hard time believing human civilization would have prospered as much.