Is polyamory and incest next?

The Boston Globe ^ | 3/9/2003 | Jeff Jacoby

[A. Pole]

DURING THE ORAL argument in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the Massachusetts lawsuit aimed at legalizing same-sex marriage, it was Justice Martha Sosman of the state's Supreme Judicial Court who put her finger on the crux of the case. ''Could it not also be framed,'' she asked Mary Bonauto, the lawyer for the gay and lesbian plaintiffs, that ''you're seeking to change the definition of what the institution of marriage is?'' After all there have been right-to-marry cases before, involving (for example) interracial couples, prison inmates, or the mentally retarded. But, Sosman noted, they ''have not changed . . . the historical fundamental definition of what the institution is.''

[ninenot]

I can't speak to polygamy. I DO know that Christ made it clear that the Mosaic Law re: divorce/remarriage was not up to God's standards. That was specifically referenced in the Gospel.

The Church's teaching on marriage was based on two items known in the Gospel: first, Christ's sanctification of marriage through his action at the Wedding at Cana; and secondly, his comments (op.cit.) on the Mosaic Law.

The balance of the Church's teachings on marriage are either logical and precise development of the above two OR are drawn from Apostolic Tradition (commonly thought to be based on words/teachings of Christ NOT written in the New Testament.)

As to Natural Law--I think an earlier outline is found in Thomas Aquinas. Hobbes' take on the same is 'secular;' TA's is 'religious.' If I am not mistaken (and I could be,) Thomas A drew his teaching on the topic from Aristotle.

There is quite a body of literature which serves to argue whether or not Hobbes' view of NL should predominate in secular affairs, or whether it should be TA's. I think Mike Novak and Richard Neuhaus (among others) are in the fray...

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[The_Reader_David]

Just writing to confirm BlackVeil's report of Shi'ite marriage customs. The Iranian mullahs' like to boast the prostitution is unknown in Iran. Well, hardly surprising, since by involving a mullah, one can have what Christians would regard as prostitution, but which is defined by Shi'a Islam as "honorable marriage."

[The_Reader_David]

Interestingly, rabbinic Judaism only embraced monogamy in the middle ages, in the context of living as a minority in a world dominated by Christian monogamists.

Although monogamy was the Christian norm from Apostolic times, concubinage seems to have been tolerated well into the Christian era, though clergy were forbidden to take concubines even as they were forbidden to remarry. These fact, together with the fact that we have no record of Our Lord speaking against the polygamy of the patriarchs makes me wonder whether monogamy is really part of universal moral law, or whether it may---unlike non-adultery---be an ascetic discipline incumbent upon Christians in particular rather than on human beings in general. If it is a Christian ascetic discipline, insisting on the state enforcing it on society in general is rather haughty and intolerant. I don't, for instance, want the government to enforce the keeping of Great Lent according to the Orthodox rule, while I do expect my spiritual father to give me an epitemia if I break the fast.

[only1percent]

Short term, if not de jure "temporary," marriages are a common guise under which rich Sunni Muslims from the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia procure themselves teenage vacation girlfriends in Egypt and other less prosperous Arab states.

Sadly, because in these countries citizenship flows solely through the paternal line, but the fathers won't acknowledge them, the children born of these arrangements are stateless and disenfranchised -- suffered to reside in the mother's country, but without many rights reserved to citizens (advanced schooling, much healthcare and other benefits, many jobs).

[tortoise]

I also think it is imperative a SECULAR basis for marriage should be the scientific realities of human reproductive biology (male + female) that renders the whole homosexual issue moot.

But taking this stance pretty clearly implies that if you don't plan on having kids, there is no good reason to get married. If the core of the institution is biological reproduction, then half the people out there should not have bothered to get married.

[xm177e2]

The plaintiffs are not asking for the right to marry, for each of them has exactly the same marriage rights as every other Massachusetts adult.

Gays and lesbians are already allowed to get married. If a gay man wants to marry a lesbian, it's legal! </sarcasm>

[r9etb]

The compact that is made is between the two people and God. It is none of the government's business.

You're wrong. When people are married, there are all sorts of legal implications concerning property, financial obligations, and so on. Even within the context of Biblical marriage there were legal/governmental implications.

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

Interestingly, rabbinic Judaism only embraced monogamy in the middle ages, in the context of living as a minority in a world dominated by Christian monogamists.

Although monogamy was the Christian norm from Apostolic times, concubinage seems to have been tolerated well into the Christian era, though clergy were forbidden to take concubines even as they were forbidden to remarry. These facts, together with the fact that we have no record of Our Lord speaking against the polygamy of the patriarchs makes me wonder...

This is the central question Christians and Jews must ask themselves. As with Hobbes' assertions concerning the Laws of Moses and those of Christ, what is the non-sectarian interpretation of Biblical Law? Who are the ultimate lawgivers, God or Mammon?

This is why I am forever (it seems), introducing Hobbes:

Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness
Chap. xlv. Of Demonology and other Relics of the Religion of the Gentiles.

[10] Another relic of Gentilism is the worship of images, neither instituted by Moses in the Old, nor by Christ in the New Testament; nor yet brought in from the Gentiles; but left amongst them, after they had given their names to Christ. Before our Saviour preached, it was the general religion of the Gentiles to worship for gods those appearances that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies upon the organs of their senses, which are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits, as being representations of those external bodies which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream. And this is the reason why St. Paul says, "We know that an idol is nothing": not that he thought that an image of metal, stone, or wood was nothing; but that the thing which they honored or feared in the image, and held for a god, was a mere figment, without place, habitation, motion, or existence, but in the motions of the brain. And the worship of these with divine honour is that which is in the Scripture called idolatry, and rebellion against God...

When does obedience to God become replaced by an idolatry of sectarian dogma?

I have also asserted elswhere, that in certain circles (most notably in the conspiracy crowd), that there has grown cults of personality, which are really nothing more than Leftist subterfuge. All too many conservatives have been taken in by this, and we have lost elections because of it.

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

If the core of the institution is biological reproduction,...

Note the difference...

I'm not saying I support something by discussing the issue, but it is imperative that a biological basis for marriage is established. This makes the issue of homosexual marriage null and void...

I also think it is imperative a SECULAR basis for marriage should be the scientific realities of human reproductive biology (male + female) that renders the whole homosexual issue moot.

There is a difference between what I said and what you have interpreted it to mean.

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

If I am not mistaken (and I could be,) Thomas A drew his teaching on the topic from Aristotle.

I do not think you are mistaken. This was one of Hobbes' criticisms of Aquinas and Augustine.

[The_Reader_David]

I really have no use for Hobbes, particularly as a commentator on religion and law. His misapplication of social contract theory to justify absolute monarchy should have been debunked once and for all by the success of the American founding. As for his religious views, they seem to be of the hyper-Augustinian variety which Orthodox Christians regard as as species of Western Christian heresy.

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

I really have no use for Hobbes... As for his religious views, they seem to be of the hyper-Augustinian variety which Orthodox Christians regard as as species of Western Christian heresy.

Care to give me Biblical support for this claim? What evidence from the Bible can you give, in reference to Leviathan, that would show Hobbes to be a heretic? (I'm talking about Biblical support, not sectarian dogma, as you did mention a sectarian source.)

To say Hobbes was hyper-Augustinian also neglects to consider Hobbes was an anti-Papist.

-

His misapplication of social contract theory to justify absolute monarchy should have been debunked once and for all by the success of the American founding.

Hobbes, and the later John Locke, laid those philosopical foundations for the success of the American founding. Hobbes lived in the 15th Century, monarchy and the Bible was all he ever really knew.

Now, as far as the "social contract" theory... Jean-Jacques Rousseau in A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences:

An ancient tradition passed out of Egypt into Greece, that some god, who was an enemy to the repose of mankind, was the inventor of the sciences.³ What must the Egyptians, among whom the sciences first arose, have thought of them? And they beheld, near at hand, the sources from which they sprang. In fact, whether we turn to the annals of the world, or eke out with philosophical investigations the uncertain chronicles of history, we shall not find for human knowledge an origin answering to the idea we are pleased to entertain of it at present. Astronomy was born of superstition, eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; all, even moral philosophy, of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices; we should be less doubtful of their advantages, if they had sprung from our virtues. (Rousseau, p 15)

3. It is easy to seethe allegory in the fable of Prometheus: and it does not appear that the Greeks, who chained him to the Caucasus, had a better opinion of him than the Egyptians had of their god Thetus. The Satyr, says an ancient fable, the first time he saw a fire, was going to kiss and embrace it; but Prometheus cried out to him to forbear, or his beard would rue it. It burns, says he, everything that touches it.

The philosophies of Rousseau and Hobbes are not generally considered analogous. Rousseau is actually very hostile to Hobbes, calling him ‘pernicious’ in A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences:

Paganism, though given over to all the extravagances of human reason, has left nothing to compare with the shameful monuments which have been prepared by the art of printing⁴, during the reign of the gospel. The impious writings of Leucippus and Diagoras perished with their authors. The world, in their days, was ignorant of the art of immortalizing the errors and extravagances of the human mind. But thanks to the art of printing and the use we make of it, the pernicious reflections of Hobbes and Spinoza will last forever. Go, famous writings, of which the ignorance and rusticity of our forefathers would have been incapable. Go to our descendants, along with those still more pernicious works which reek of the corrupted manners the present age! Let them together convey to posterity a faithful history of the progress and advantages of our arts and sciences. If they are read, they will not leave a doubt about the question we are now discussing, and unless mankind should then be still more foolish than we, they will lift up their hands to Heaven and exclaim in bitterness of heart: ‘Almighty God! Thou who holdest in Thy hand the minds of men, deliver us from the fatal arts and sciences of our forefathers; give us back the ignorance, innocence, and poverty, which alone can make us happy and are precious in Thy sight. (Rousseau, p 26-27)

4.If we consider the frightful disorder which printing has already caused in Europe, and judge of the future by the progress of its evils from day to day, it is easy to foresee that sovereigns will hereafter take as much pains to banish this dreadful art from their dominions, as they ever took to encourage it. The Sultan Achmet, yielding to the opportunities of certain pretenders to taste, consented to have a press erected at Constantinople; but it was hardly set to work before they were obliged to destroy it, and throw the plant into a well.

It is related that the Caliph Omar, being asked what should be done with the Library at Alexandria, answered in these words: ‘If the books in the library contain anything contrary to the Alcoran, they are evil and ought to be burnt; if they contain only what the Alcoran teaches, they are superflous.’ This reasoning has been cited by our men of letters as the height of absurdity; but if Gregory the Great had been in place of Omar and the Gospel in the place of the Alcoran, the library would still have been burnt, and it would have been perhaps the finest action of his life.

Rousseau, Jean-Jaques. The Social Contract and Discourses. Trans. G.D.H. Cole, Rev. J.H. Brumfitt and John C. Hall. London: Guernsey Press, 1973.

Hobbes, and later John Locke, are philosophers who established philosophical ideals that are the basis for Modern Western Civilization. Rousseau, it is argued, establishes a philosophical basis for Marxism.

I would also note that Rousseau had six children, each of which he took to orphanages immediately after birth. Some Social Contract theory there all right...

The rhetoric of Marxists in politics often use the idea of a social contract and the term itself to promote the quasi-religious ideals they worship. Marxists, in a sense, worship the ideals of a dead Karl Marx like some Christians worship the image of a dead Jesus. The political Left often holds to the view of Rousseau, cited above. They eschew the advancement of science and of the arts. It is no wonder that in their pursuit to dominate academia, that the decline of education in the West has been a victim of the political Left. Is it any wonder that the modern Left opposes U.S. military action in the war against terrorism, hates the Jews and Israel, as well as supports the Palestinians and terrorism?

Tell me what is heretical about this:

Part III. Of a Christian Commonwealth.

Chap. xxxviii. Of Eternal Life, Hell, Salvation, and Redemption.

(12) And first, for the tormentors, we have their nature and properties exactly and properly delivered by the names of the Enemy (or Satan), the Accuser (or Diabolus), the Destroyer (or Abaddon). Which significant names (Satan, Devil, Abaddon) set not forth to us any individual person, as proper names do, but only an office or quality, and are therefore appellatives, which ought not to have been left untranslated (as they are in the Latin and modern Bibles), because thereby they seem to be the proper names of demons, and men are the more easily seduced to believe the doctrine of devils, which at that time was the religion of the Gentiles, and contrary to that of Moses, and of Christ.

(13) And because by the Enemy, the Accuser, and Destroyer, is meant the enemy of them that shall be in the kingdom of God, therefore if the kingdom of God after the resurrection be upon the earth (as in the former Chapter I have shewn by Scripture it seems to be), the Enemy and his kingdom must be on earth also. For so also was it in the time before the Jews had deposed God. For God's kingdom was in Israel, and the nations round about were the kingdoms of the Enemy; and consequently, by Satan is meant any earthly enemy of the Church. (Hobbes p 308)

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668. Ed. Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994.

[The_Reader_David]

Hobbes's anti-Papism is of the wrong sort, as evidently is yours since you demand "evidence" from the Bible (in bold, not less). To the Orthodox Christian, protestant anti-Papism is not really anti-papal: it is only anti-Pope-of-Rome. It makes every person who fancies himself a Christian and has a copy of the Scriptures into his own infallible Pope: the moment he is convinced he has Scripture to back an opinion on faith or morals, hey presto! It is TRUE and no one can argue with him. Both papism and protestantism make the mistake of thinking that Christianity is a religion based on authority. While authority has a place in maintaining good order in the Church and society, Christianity, is not a religion based on authority, but a life based on the experience of God as He as revealed Himself in His Incarnation and the Gift of the Holy Spirit. The Scriptures are not axioms we reason from, but he record of His preparation for that self-revalation (in the Old Testament) and the experience of the generation which witnessed and participated in it (the New Testament). The attempt to reduce the Faith to an ideology based on a text always leads to heresy, most patricularly and rapidly when done outside of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church (since the 11th century called the Orthodox Church, thanks to the loud misappropriation of the word "catholic" by the Roman Papacy), which is the Mystical Body of Christ.

It is years since I read The Leviathan, so I will not try to argue with you about what is usually called social contract theory (even if the term itself came from Rousseau, the late corrupter of the idea). Hobbes justified absolute monarchy, as I recall, as natural and necessary. Locke using the same view of society arising by agreements to escape from what Hobbes called "the war of all against all" justified liberty. As I said, the American Founding debunks Hobbes's reasoning that an absolute monarch is a necessity to escape from the state of nature, and giving extensive contrasts between Hobbes who started the idea and Rousseau who gave it what is now the common name doesn't really answer the point.

Hobbes's view of the state of nature, is, of course, part of what I would characterize as hyper-Augustinianism. It is only the overly radical understanding of the Fall which began with Blessed Augustine and was even more heartily embraced among the "reformers" of Northern Europe than by the Roman Papacy which justifies such a dim view of the human condition. Orthodox Christianity did not follow the West down that path, and speaks of "Ancestal Sin" not "Original Sin", recognizing that Blessed Augustine misread a passage in St. Paul's Letter to the Roman: it is by death, not by Adam, that sin passes to all men (the pronoun should be Englished as "it" not "him"). Even fallen man absent grace is still capable of good actions, though not capable of saving himself as Pelagius vainly thought.

As I said, I have no use for Hobbes: as an American who loves liberty because of his misapplication of ideas Locke used to justify free societies to justify instead absolute monarchy (which thanks to the propensity toward sin of fallen man leads always to tyranny--quickly in the case of non-Christian monarchs, and alas sometimes quickly even in the case of Christians), and as an Orthodox Christian because he is a heretic, the fact that you define heresy differently than the Church, apparently as disagreement with your own reading of the Holy Scriptures notwithstanding.

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

The attempt to reduce the Faith to an ideology based on a text always leads to heresy, most patricularly and rapidly when done outside of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, which is the Mystical Body of Christ.

The Bible says otherwise. Christ said otherwise.

Jesus defined the Church in the Gospel as being wherever two or more are gathered for My namesake, there shall I be in your midst.. Your sectarian doctrine is contrary to the Word of God.

As I have said previously, outside of Scriptural reference (most especially the Gospel), all else is the sectarian dogma of institutions constructed by men.

Likewise, morals are such a construction of idols commonly used by the Left as a rationale for them to demand compliance to their wishes in politics, which most often are a skewed mess of fallacies in logic. Morals are a deceptive replacement for the avoidance of sin. If a person believes in a God, it is the conviction of the Holy Ghost by which they are guided and not by the idolatrous vanities of morals constructed by others.

They worship for gods 'those appearances that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies upon the organs of their senses, which are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits, as being representations of those external bodies which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream...'

Like the necromancy of the Wellstone funerally, the use of Martin Luther King Day, or constantly invoking the "spirit of the '60's," the Left attempts to raise spirits of the dead as a totem for worship.

Marxism and their forms of Cultural Marxism are a religion, a collection of cults. In many cases they worship a dead Karl Marx like some (and I stress some) Christians worship a dead Jesus, and not a living God. This is no more apparent than in the practice of enshrinement and regular grooming of Lenin's corpse in the former Soviet Union.

It is the religious fervor associated with the pro-abortion advocacy. The societal practice of abortion is ritual mass murder upon the altars dedicated to idolatrous vanities, a collective human sacrifice to pagan idols. It has a similitude to the Teutonic paganism of Adolph Hitler, whose idolatry was the idea of a "master race." In effect, this genocide was a mass human sacrifice to those pagan idols.

The Left is properly identified with a 'confederacy of decievers that, to obtain dominion over men in this present world, endeavour, by obscure and erroneous doctrines.'

Now, you can criticize Hobbes as being a fallible human being as all are, but his interpretations of Scripture concerning Christian doctrine are pretty solid even though his politics are based on the 17th Century idea of a divine right of Kings. He lived in a different time, but did have the same Bible.

[The_Reader_David]

Blah, blah, blah.

The Holy Scriptures also speak of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ. This will be my last post to you. It really is useless arguing with a protestant auto-Pope. Tertullian was right when he held that heretics have no right to appeal to the Scriptures.

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

It really is useless arguing with a protestant auto-Pope.

I am not a Protestant.

I say if you claim to be a Christian, then your claim, unless based on the Bible, is meaningless.

Plato's Euthyphro is a great illustration...

Socrates advances the argument to Euthyphro that, piety to the gods, who all want conflicting devotions and/or actions from humans, is impossible. Such is the same concerning a sectarian interpretation of the nature of God.

If a person believes in a God, it is the conviction of the Holy Ghost by which they are guided and not by the idolatrous vanities of morals or sectarian dogma constructed by other men (this would be idolatry).

-

The Holy Scriptures also speak of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ.

What did Jesus define the Church as being in the Gospel? Answer: Wherever two or more are gathered for His namesake.

-

This will be my last post to you.

Can't take a little critique, or do you think you have the only true message?

[Socks C.]

Ahhh . . . there was a time . . .

[Socks C.]

The Senator has placed certain pussys on his anathema list. You probably ought not push him.

[Phil V.]

Sorry, Senator.

I'll punish the pussy by placement in Pategonia post haste. Please postpone pissiness.