Also, note that the 11th century (Thudlow Boink’s cite) is when the Roman rites to which the R in “RCC” refers were created. Before that, rites - all rites - were defined locally. That does include wedding rites but also Mass, funerals, baptisms…
What Nava said. In medieval European societies, there generally wasn’t the government/church distinction that you observe. There were certainly no government functions relating to marriage separate from church functions - no government-conducted marriage rituals, no government registration of marriage. People married by the exchange of vows and by living together; they were known to be married by their immediate community; there was not often any need for more formal proof. If more formal proof was required, then you would look to church records; there typically were no separate state/government records.
In the western world, this is something governments copied from the church.
In Christian societies, marriage was constituted by the mutual exchange of promises, plus consummation of the relationship. You didn’t need either church or state to be involved in the creation of a valid marriage. It was considered fitting that a marriage should be celebrated publicly, that there should be witnesses, etc, but it wasn’t essential. Entirely private marriages (“clandestine marriages”) could and did happen. But they gave rise to obvious problems - how could you be sure that someone who presented themselves as free to marry wasn’t already married? Or, if it was claimed that someone was married, how could this be verified?
Clandestine marriages were generally seen as a social evil and, as part of the general modernisation and tidying-up associated with the Counter-reformation, the Catholic church introduced a rule that, for a marriage to be valid, it either had to be celebrated in canonical form before a minister of the church, or the couple had to get a dispensation from this requirement from the bishop. At the same time the church introduced universal (within the Catholic church) rules about keeping records of marriages celebrated, and dispensations granted.
This was a controversial move. While all agreed on the practical benefits, some - especially Protestant critics of Roman authoritarianism - objected that it was simply beyond the legitimate power of the church to tell people how they could or couldn’t marry; an intolerable intrusion on their natural rights and God-given capacity, etc, etc. However the practical advantages of the system eventually won out, and most Protestant countries adopted similar rules, either by having their own established churches regulate the celebration of marriage, or by introducing a system for state licensing/registration of marriage, or some combination of these approaches. And, in the nineteenth century, those countries which relied on the church to regulate, register etc marriages mostly secularised the process, transferring it to civil agencies.
The fact remains, though, that in most western countries a marriage is, fundamentally, constituted by the couple’s exchange of vows. The state may regulate who can marry by exchanging vows (e.g. by setting a minimum age for marriage) and it can regulate how this is done (e.g. a rule requiring it to be done before a religious or civil celebrant) and it can impose other consequences (e.g. a rule requiring those who marry to register the fact). (And of course churches can impose similar rules on their members, though unless the church is an established church these rules have no consequences in civil law.) But, conceptually, it’s still the mutual exchange of promises that constitutes the marriage. Ultimately, a couple aren’t married by registering the appropriate paperwork with the state; rather, they are required to register the paperwork because they have married.
I am not sure if you are replying to my post. Assuming you are :
Everything you write is based in the context of Abrahamic religions and is probably correct. It’s hard to explain this for Non-Abrahamic religions without some background. Maybe it is easier to say that marriages were around even when many religions had not had their hold.
As to atheism, I believe that western atheists describe themselves (unwittingly) in the context of Abrahamic religion (primarily Christianity or Judaism) - nothing wrong with that but it doesn’t translate to other religions well.
Buddhists are mostly outside the marriage business. (Of course you can always throw some money around and sponsor a monk to earn merit, on the occasion of your marriage, or get a monk or two to show up and throw some blessings around.) But marriage is largely a civic and legal business for Buddhists. Not a spiritual or religious affair, in essence.
Not true for this atheist. My lack of belief is the same whether those around me believe in christianity, scientology or norse mythology.
I believe that there is a very close relationship in most people’s minds. I believe most of the objections to gay marriage are based on religious principles. The policy of my national Church is not to perform gay marriages because of the nature of our religious beliefs but, at the same time, to recognize, respect, and accept the legitimacy of gay marriage in the context of it being a civil right.
I think more of the point is that western atheists are largely Christian in their worldview and outlook. They are bathed in the broth of Christendom so to speak. A lot of ideas we have regarding the place of people in the world and our interactions with one another are Christian ideals translated to a secular environment. We are so inundated with Christian identity in the west that we simply call it ‘common sense,’ but a frequent criticism of westerners is that what we regard as common sense or universally true is actually a direct product of Christianity. Non-Christian countries don’t have those same traditions.
Human rights is a big one that frequently gets criticism from the developing world. What we regard as self-evident human rights are actually rights that were formed in the crucible of Christian thought and have since secularized. As one example, there’s no universal reason to believe in an inherent equality buried deep within all humans. (Why aren’t rulers better than peasants? Why isn’t a ruler more valuable as a person than a peasant? There are philosophies that say they are.) That’s a concept developed within Christianity that we are so engrained with that we take it as true while in many non-Christian cultures, they don’t feel the same need to accept it. A lot of what we see as rights developed because Christianity was a bottom-up religion that placed much more emphasis on the lower strata of society and as a result, Christianity and therefore western culture place greater emphasis on caring for and protecting this lower strata. This isn’t a universal world-view. There are cultures that find the idea of rights protecting the weak to be misguided at best. Within our Christianized worldview, we don’t see it that way.
Aaaaagain, it varies by location. In many countries the distinction between civil and religious marriage is a lot more clear than it appears to be in English-speaking ones. Definitely clearer than in the US. This means that even when you encounter someone who for example has an objection to SSM on religious grounds, pretty much all you need to do is point out that “we’re talking civil marriage here” and the objectors become ardent defenders.
Well, they may tend to describe themselves in terms of what is most socially familiar to them, but living without a belief in Yahweh/Jehova does not mean you are living WITH a belief in Zeus or Osiris.
Novelty Bobble, I think that am77494’s point is that Westerners tend to consider “lack of religion” and “lack of belief in God/gods” to be the same thing, while in other cultures, they’re largely independent (thus, allowing for people who consider themselves Buddhist or Hindu or Jewish or whatever without actually believing in anything). For that matter, it’s also a Western/Christian notion that religions are mutually exclusive: It’s possible for a person to consider themselves to be both Hindu and Buddhist, or Taoist and Confucianist.
Except for common-law marriages. Then you don’t even need a ceremony.
You give it far too much credit. Wherever the concept of human rights come from it is clearly not the bible as written. “formed in the crucible of Christian thought” is an interesting concept as there was certainly a lot of burning going on and normally by those in charge. Heck, the catholic church even today cannot find it in themselves to treat women equally nor accept that they have full control over their reproduction choices, that’s a tough circle to square.
In any case, societies and belief systems that predate christianity were stating the equality of all humans, see Plato and Aristotle.
A codification of rights and responsibilities was needed in order for ancient human societies to flourish and they did so well before christianity came into being.
It took Renaissance Humanism and looking back to those societies to bring about a shift to what we might consider modern human rights. That came after a dark and repressive period of religious control certainly but it is a stretch to claim that it came from it, or* because* of it.
But enough hijack, I’ll leave it there.
I’m not so sure about that. A common enough response to being questioned about religion (certainly in the UK) would be
“I’m not religious but I think there must be something” which suggest clear separation of religion and gods.
But that’s anecdotal and I have no data to back it up either way so could be convinced otherwise.
That’s “spiritual”, not atheist or even agnostic. am77494 was talking about atheism.
I’m not sure we’re reading the same Plato and Aristotle. They believed in proportional equality of justice, but not a fundamental human equality. A tort against a metic did not carry the same weight as a tort against a fully-male citizen. In Gorgios, Plato specifically said it was better for the superior to rule over the inferior and in Aristotle’s Politics, Aristotle said some people were born to be slaves and no better than livestock. If that’s your definition of fundamental equality, maybe we have different definitions.
As for your claim about Renaissance Humanism ushering in human rights, you’re right. It certainly did help usher them in. Renaissance Humanism though was a very Christian phenomenon. When we look at the Italian Humanists like Bracciolini or Bessarion or Petrarch or (surprisingly enough) Pius II, they are people heavily involved in the Italian Catholic Church hierarchy and supremely devout. We sometimes confuse the word humanism with ‘secular humanism’ of the 18th century and later, but Renaissance Humanists were not at odds with the church at all. They WERE the church. There are at least three popes that are regarded as part of the Humanist wave, more Cardinals than can be counted and almost all of them were church affiliated in some way. What was happening was that the discovery of classical texts motivated them to apply classical philosophy to Christian ethics. Renaissance Humanism was not a tearing down of the religious edifice, but rather an attempt to supplement religious teachings with rational thought.
Thank you Chronos for the good clarification.
I am not a Hindu spiritualist so I may not be the best person to explain. But I will try :
The Hindu (Historical texts) considers our existence (the Universe, past, present future everything) to be something like the movie Matrix. Just like the movie Matrix, based on a person (sentient being)’s personality, upbringing, environment, exposure to historical texts, etc. etc. that person will have beliefs or will not have beliefs or will have the opposite of beliefs - it’s not important, the point is that your thoughts /feelings/ beliefs are still part of the Matrix and you are right in feeling that these are uniquely yours (and yet it’s a part of the Matrix).
Here’s the rub - you may not believe in all the above and that’s okay too 
.
So when you come out of the Matrix - that’s termed as Nirvana. There’s no prescribed path to Nirvana since the Matrix itself cannot tell you how to get out of it. The answer is left for the user/sentient being to realize
I may have confused you above, so let me try another way. In the western way of thinking, there is observer created reality and universal reality (also known as objective reality). There is always the pre-supposition that the universal reality exists no matter if you are aware of it or not. That is to say, Universal reality is knowable. So for example, the Schrödinger’s cat in the box is either alive or dead but you presuppose that it is knowable.
In the eastern philosophy, there is only observer created reality and universal reality is unknowable. But here is the do loop in the reasoning that the observer may “believe” in the existence of a “Universal reality” and that is okay too since the belief in the “Universal reality” is also observer created.
We perhaps place different weight and interpretations on different writings. Nevertheless ignore both of them if you like, it is true that pre-christian civilisations in general were writing and speaking on matters of, what we would now consider “human rights”. It was not something that christianity invented.
There was no other game in town. All the academics and thinkers of the time *had *to be in the Church…or else. You may as well claim that so much great art and architecture of the time is religious so it wouldn’t exist without it. No, the christian church just happened to hold both the carrot and very pointy stick.
Christianity did not invent the idea that beings may have rights, but it did invent the rights that we currently consider universal.
I think that you misinterpret what was happening during the early Renaissance. Humanists were not people that simply existed within a Christian world, but people heavily embedded in the church. We’re not talking about people that happened to go to mass twice a year, but the esrly humanists were Cardinals, popes and clerics. Obviously, not every person who existed or was educated was a member of the church hierarchy and philosophical opinions outside of the church certainly existed (Menocchios Cheese and Worms as a particularly famous example.) For one, Islam still dominated much of Europe and had access to the same texts that set off Renaissance Humanism.
I think you are playing with the term “invent”. Are you suggesting that Christianity invented freedom of speech? freedom of religion?
equality of the sexes etc? That such concepts didn’t exist? or had not been discussed previously? or that the christian texts set these out? Heck, right there in the UDHR is the concept of presumed innocence, that’s in direct contradiction with original sin.
I’m well aware of who they were and the positions they held. That they were high up christians does not necessarily mean that their philosophy was based on christianity and christianity alone. In fact, we know it wasn’t as they were studying the ancient texts and using those to mould their thinking. Did they seek to align their religious texts with more enlightened thinking? clearly yes and a good thing too.
Bolding mine, this rather suggests a rediscovering of these concepts rather than an invention. The power of the time (the church) aligned those concepts with a generous interpretation of their own scripture and gave it some form of authority but it is far too much of a stretch to say they invented it, that they finally allowed it is a more realistic assessment.