echi wrote:It is precisely because the origins are so shrouded that my request for evidence to the contrary was valid.
blatham...
Thanks for the advice. I do know to evaluate the legitimacy of information sources.
I was unable to find evidence to support my claim. I did find some evidence that marriage, in fact, came about for political and economic reasons and that love and religion were in no way involved.
echi
Sorry if that one sentence sounded pedantic. It's been a commonplace here to have folks zoom right for citations they've picked up from activist religious groups where the scholarship falls junior to the moral certainty and church authority.
This isn't a historical subject which I've had time to dig into to any depth. I do have some sense of the variety of notions and arrangements concerning marriage that exist in different cultures and different time periods - and there is a lot of variety. I doubt there is even one single factor common throughout other than some sense of bond/obligation.
But Americans or Canadians will tend to work out arrangements based on their own cultural and legal histories regardless of what is going on in Micronesia.
My position on the matter falls out entirely from my civil rights notions - that the state has no valid role in determining who might be allowed to marry and who not (given the standard provisos of maturity and absense of coersion). It is fine, it seems to me, if sub-groups in the community such as a church have a policy wherebye THEY won't add their special imprimateur of 'sacred' or some such to a union, but that's quite different than extending such a value more broadly to include folks outside that faith.
