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.
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.