Societies that did not place boundaries around sexuality were stymied in their development. The subsequent dominance of the Western world can largely be attributed to the sexual revolution initiated by Judaism and later carried forward by Christianity.
This revolution consisted of forcing the sexual genie into the marital bottle. It ensured that sex no longer dominated society, heightened male-female love and sexuality (and thereby almost alone created the possibility of love and eroticism within marriage), and began the arduous task of elevating the status of women. (snip)
“Women should be very worried. Dennis Prager quote:
Societies that did not place boundaries around sexuality were stymied in their development. The subsequent dominance of the Western world can largely be attributed to the sexual revolution initiated by Judaism and later carried forward by Christianity.
This revolution consisted of forcing the sexual genie into the marital bottle. It ensured that sex no longer dominated society, heightened male-female love and sexuality (and thereby almost alone created the possibility of love and eroticism within marriage), and began the arduous task of elevating the status of women. (snip) “
AWESOME. When you think of the Pacific Island societies, for example - they simply stalled dead in their tracks, with this Cato lifestyle.
I'm not sure I totally buy that argument. Almost all societies place boundaries on sexual activity and there are other civilizations that shared the values of marriage that you classify as being initiated by the Jews. The Ancient Egyptians, for instance, had a very defined idea of the nature of marriage as did the Romans. In fact, the Romans had a strong sense of the importance of the nature of marriage and monogamy, from which the Christian Church took a huge influence.
Christian marriage is probably as much influenced by Roman ideas of marriage, as it was by Jewish ideas. (Monogamy is one of the Roman marriage values that comes out really strongly in Christianity. The Romans required monogamy by law and spread this and other customs around with the legal framework of the Roman Empire. In fact, several aspects of Roman marriage customs still survive in modern wedding ceremonies...The wedding ring, for instance, originates from a Roman custom of putting an iron ring on the middle finger of the left hand. It was believed that the artery/nerve there controlled the passions of the heart, and therefore, the iron ring on the finger symbolically put the passions of the wife in chains to the husband.)
In any case, it is true that before Rome was Christian, it had a moral collapse in the realm of sexuality. During this crisis, which occurred both in the Late Republic and apparently again in the Roman Empire, Rome appears to have abandoned its traditional values of marriage that it had originally espoused, which helped lead to a lot of the debauchery and social breakdown.
Regardless, however, prior to the modern age, the idea of marriage in the West was primarily a Christian one which descended from a mixture of Roman, Jewish, uniquely Christian, and even medieval Germanic sources. So I don't think it is fair to say that the Jews initiated this view of marriage, because many of our views on marriage were held by more than just the Jews, and many of the ideas the Jews held were already held by other civilizations as well. By the way, one of the reasons that there is so much Roman influence on our ideas of marriage is because most of our societies marriage values come from the Christian Church which was merged with the Roman Government in the fourth century A.D.