I know Christanty and marriage are closely linked. Marriage legitimizes the sexual relationship between a man and woman. Marriage legitimizes the children from that relationship.
What about other major religions?
Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish etc?
Is marriage closely related to their core religious beliefs?
Are their any major religions that place no particular religious significance to marriage?
I imagine that every religion has some sort of marriage ceremony. Are you asking if they all frown on sex outside of marriage?
Yes, sex outside marriage is a consideration.
But, marriage today is a formality recognized by the government. The government issues the marriage license, blood tests, and issues the certificate.
Do any major religions view it in that way? As a civil duty they perform?
Does every major religion impart deep spiritual significance to marriage?
I’ve always found it interesting that so many religions share so many common traits.They evolved in various parts of the world, and still are not that dissimilar.
It hasn’t necessarily always been that way.
Ah, that’s very, very interesting.
That’s exactly the type of situation I was considering.
That a religion didn’t consider marriage anything special.
I guess it would depend on a religions views of relationships and sex. Two people can be in a committed relationship without a formal ceremony. But, that can be seen as sinful in some religions.
I couldn’t figure out a way to Google such a broad topic.
I guess religion only has whatever significance people choose to give it, since it has no objectively quantifiable characteristics of its own.
That varies by location. There are countries (such as the US) where it is common for weddings to have a religious officiant; there are others where the two are completely separate.
Spain has, within the last 50 years, gone from making no distinction between RCC-canonical and civil marriage to separating them partially (including the reintroduction of divorce in 1981) to separating them completely (with no religious ceremonies being recognized by civil authorities) to introducing the ability for religious registers to be valid for civil purposes (from any religious organization which has done the paperwork). The RCC has gone from performing the civil duty for anybody and everybody who wanted to get married, to doing it for those who wanted to have their marriage be valid both canonically and civilly (with automatic civil recognition), to not being able to perform the civil duty, to being able to perform it but with no automatic recognition. In the same period, other religious organizations such as the Iglesia Evangélica, Buddhists, Mormons, Jews, Muslims, Orthodox Church and Jehova’s Witnesses have gone from being viewed as curiosities to being able to perform religious marriages with civil recognition (not automatic, same as for the RCC; link in Spanish to a 2014 article).
I find this tidbit the most interesting thing to mull over regarding Christianity and Marriage. In the Holy Bible, Jesus says in James 5:12, regarding promises and vows “But above all, my brothers, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your “yes” be yes and your “no” be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation.”
I agree that the tradition seems to have more to do with Rome and census than Christ and spirituality.
From the BBC How And When Did People Get Married In The Medieval Period? | HistoryExtra
"Although the church controlled – or tried to control – marriage, couples did not need to marry in a church. Legal records show people getting married on the road, down the pub, round at friends’ houses or even in bed. All that was required for a valid, binding marriage was the consent of the two people involved. "
Marriage has always had a special place in Christianity, but it has not always been a sacrament. In other words, marriage was special and proscribed to be a certain thing, but the ritual of becoming married was not predetermined. This is likely because Christianity began as a sunset of the Jewish fairh, so the assumption was that you would be married in a Jewish way.
As to your question, does every religion have some sort of special rules regarding marriage or is there emphasis on marriage within all religions. The answer is that there are Lots of religions, many of which are extinct, so we can’t answer the question. We can say that most present day religions do place emphasis on marriage. This could be the divine imprinting himself upon the world, but it could also simply be due to the nature of religion. Allow me to conjecture, religion’s purpose for our species is social cohesion. It’s reasonable to conclude that it was religion that brought together small hunter gatherer groups and fused them into large societies. Part of creating these large groups involves making cohesive social bonds and one of those bonds is a stable family unit. We are well aware that unstable families create unstable societies. That’s one of the reasons sexual behaviour and marital bonds are policed by religion and society. Modern day western societies have enough wealth to mitigate the negative effects of unstable families, so we also largely feel it’s ok to ignore religion, within less wealthy societies, the social mores that religion enforces are still very, very valuable and thus they are much more religious.
I think we’re at risk of confusing “marriage”, the relationship, and “wedding”, a ceremony which inaugurates or recognises or validates or whatever the relationship. The fact that a particular religion at a particular time doesn’t have a distinctive wedding ceremony doesn’t mean that they don’t invest marriage with a particular spiritual and/or religious significance. It may be the case that church wedding ceremonies are a relatively late development in the Christian tradition, for example, but the gospels and the letters of Paul contain numerous examples of teachings about divorce - when it’s permissible, when it isn’t - and about adultery. Furthermore marriage and/or adultery is frequently used as an image or model in teaching about other matters, such as the relationship of the God and his people. And I’m pretty sure - other Dopers with better knowledge, feel free to correct me - that this fairly high, spiritualised view of marriage is something that Chistianity inherited from Judaism.
Aceplace says that “marriage today is a formality recognized by the government”. I’d disagree with the word “formality” there - marriage is a real relationship, a real and meaningul set of commitments with real pesonal and social consquences; it’s not just a matter of form. But the key word there is “recognised”. The government doesn’t create or institute marriage; it recognises it as a social reality that has consequences of a kind the state needs to deal with. If the state fails to recognise marriages that are real and meaningful as far as the community is concerned, that gives rise to real problems.
Something similar is true of the church, at least in the Christian tradition. The church doesn’t create or institute marriage, and the church doesn’t marry people; they marry one another. But the church sees marriage as something that has real spiritual consequences, which are the business of the church. In many ways the relationship of the state to marriage, and the relationship of the church to marriage, are analogous; marriage is a social reality which precedes both church and state, but it has consequences which are the business of both church and state, and both church and state need to take account of it.
I don’t know that the same is true of all non-Abrahamic religions. It wouldn’t amaze me if it were, but I don’t know.
Nah, it began as the sunset of the Polytheistic Syncretic Greco-Roman Classical faith. It was merely a heresy of the Jewish faith. 
This does raise an important point: Christianity is a “universal” faith, in that it’s meant to be “true” at all times, in all places, regardless of the local culture. Therefore, there is no single Christian culture even to the extent there’s a Jewish culture: The Jews always have a set of dietary restrictions (with arguing about the details, what else?) whereas Christianity doesn’t imply anything about diet. Marriage, suffice it to say, is cultural, so there is no single Christian marriage style.
You know that atheists get married too, don’t you?
And it continued well past the Romans. In medieval society, it was the government who legitimized marriage. After that, the participants would go into church to praise God and give thanks.
Even now in the US, a church can’t legally marry anyone who hasn’t gotten a marriage license from the government. You can be married without clergy (by a judge, for instance), but you can’t marry without a license.
Hinduism is not really a religion especially in the western sense of the word. You can have a atheist Hindu - in fact there are many subgroups who are agnostic Hindus.
As to marriage in Hinduism, only a man and a woman need to agree and A fire (flame) is the only witness needed. Of course the practice got corrupted over the ages, but it is still legally recognized and some people follow it too.
Fire or flame is considered a diety by some Hindus
Yes, of course. But that wouldn’t stop religious people consider the marriage of two atheists to have a religious or spiritual significance, would it?
If you are talking about Hinduism, the answer is yes for some “religious” Hindus. Again not all Hindus have the same beliefs and individuality is encouraged.
No, not talking about Hinduism in particular. I was responding to Suranyi in post #13.
Marriage is a societal institution. What marriage means, what it signifies, isn’t exclusively, or even primarily, determined by the two people who enter into a particular marriage; it’s determined by their wider society, through its laws, conventions, customs, attitudes, values, etc. Thus the fact that atheists marry doesn’t necessarily tell us a great deal about the relationship between religion and marriage (beyond, obviously, that marriage is not confined to people who invest it with a religious signicance, which is trite).
One problem that modern folk living in paperwork-heavy societies have a lot of trouble with in trying to get to grips with the original conception of marriage in ancient societies, is that we are in the habit of understanding the official registration and government recognition as the main important feature of marriage, and it’s hard to get back into the mindset where they’re not a thing at all.
In the original form of marriage, as practised at the time when all the main religions currently around were getting going, “I’m married to X” meant “X and I live in the same house, we have sex, and everyone knows it” If there’s no registration of marriage, then there’s no way to be “living together and not married” because “living together” IS being married. Sure, you’ll probably have a party to celebrate the start of it - because people like parties - but you can’t be not married by leaving off the party any more than you can be not dead by leaving off the funeral. The only way to live together and NOT be married would be to already have another spouse - and that’s also something that’s going to get in the way of any form of official or religious marriage
This form of marriage was legally recognised in Scotland, that I know about, right up to 2006, by the way, and quite likely is a perfectly valid marriage variant in lots of countries today. I’m currently reading a Chinese woman’s autobiography, and her description of her grandma’s marriage (1930s) is basically “Dad & daughter walk from their villiage to New Husband’s villiage. Neighbors come round with food and everyone has a nice(-ish) dinner. New Husband hands Dad a bag of yams. Dad goes home.” That’s Original Recipe marriage, right there.
In which medieval society, and note that you’re assuming the participants were Christians. You’re probably talking about England, but even so, Christianity wasn’t the only religion present there through the entirety of the Middle Ages.
In the Iberian Peninsula, it was religious authorities who handled marriage issues, with their decrees being recognized by civil authority; depending on which exact time and location we talk about, which religious authorities were present varies. The Jews had paperwork, commonfolk Christians usually did not, members of Christian nobility might… I understand that for the Muslims there was also a correlation between socioeconomic class and amount of paperwork, but that’s actually a very vague understanding.