traditions are useful, because I don’t have time to experiment with the best way to cook a turkey, the best piece of furniture to sit on, and the best way to get to work. I’ll trust the traditional way, which is whatever Google tells me, a chair, and bus/car/bike respectively. The drawback is there might be a way to get to work that doesn’t kill as many people as cars, but if everyone relies on tradition, we won’t find it.
Traditions usually have a reason behind them as well. They could be bad or good, but throwing out a tradition without knowing the reason for it could be risky. If you have a good reason to do it the new way, good reasons outweigh mystery reasons, but it would be best to resolve the mystery reason first.
Traditions are barriers. Some barriers keep you from going off the cliff, others impede your forward progress. The trick is to figure out which are which, and only smash the progress-impeding ones.
Why do people try to justify their actions using an appeal to tradition? Probably because they always did before! Appeals to tradition have been around for a long time, and they got us here today. Who are you to go changing things now with your fancy logic and newfangled evidence?
My argument for “traditional marriage” isn’t about tradition. Marriage isn’t only about love. Its about procreation(creating a family). The government regulates marriage not because of love, but because it directly affects the population of citizens. Secondly, a family with parents of the same gender simply can’t be equal to one of different genders.
"I wholeheartedly support civil unions for gay and lesbian couples, but I am opposed to same-sex marriage. Because activists have made marriage, rather than civil unions, their goal, I am viewed by many as a self-loathing, traitorous gay. So be it. I prefer to think of myself as a reasoning, intellectually honest human being.
The notion of same-sex marriage is implausible, yet political correctness has made stating the obvious a risky business. Genderless marriage is not marriage at all. It is something else entirely.
Opposition to same-sex marriage is characterized in the media, at best, as clinging to “old-fashioned” religious beliefs and traditions, and at worst, as homophobia and hatred."(Mainwaring)
Have requirements for procreation ever been a traditional part of marriage, i.e. was there ever a time in the legal history of the country of your choice where the marriage of an obviously infertile couple was denied for that reason?
For the thousandth time, this is not even close to being true. My father and step-mother got married long after more procreation was possible. Is this wrong in some way?
If marriage were only for procreation, then you would want to ensure that married couples could do it. Now the ancients couldn’t predict this, but if this were so important they’d just have to make marriage contingent on having a child already (even a dead one.) Simple, right?
The government regulates marriage because of the contractual implications of marriage, including visitation rights and joint property. But it is not regulated very heavily. It was far easier to get a marriage license than a driver’s license, and in states like Pennsylvania a couple can marry themselves, no officials required.
The reason for SSM is to give gay couples the same contractual rights as straight couples. Reason enough. And far simpler than ripping up the marriage laws.
If opponents of SSM had supported civil unions with the same rights as marriage, there would be far less of a push for SSM. They did not. In fact, as others have noted in similar threads, some states specifically banned SS Civil Unions. Do you admit that most opposition to SSM come from homophobia, religious or not?
That word does not mean what you think it means. SSM is perfectly plausible.
Which is mostly correct. Why else has support for SSM increased as people were forced to acknowledge that that nice neighbor was gay?
As for tradition, I see it as kind of the null hypothesis - the way to go until you have a good reason to do otherwise. Not wanting to find these good reasons is why traditions can hold you back.
But I’ve seen lots of new employees who decide that the way things are done is stupid. Until they learn enough about the problem to see why it is done that way. After they do that they can successfully combine a new perspective with knowledge of the environment.
I would be curious to discover where this idea originated. Marriage appears throughout the New Testament, from the story of the first miracle by Jesus at the wedding at Cana, through the several parables that rely on references to marriage, through the admonitions of Paul regarding spousal relations, and the direct instructions in the letters to Timothy and Titus regarding the number of times a bishop may marry, along with several references to people who were married, marriage is a frequent theme within the New Testament. There is no definition of marriage in those works, but that is hardly surprising when most people would have considered it to be understood.
Numerous early Christian writers penned tracts addressing or mentioning marriage: Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, Ambrose of Milan and others all wrote on the nature of marriage within Christianity from the late first century to the middle of the fourth century, before Augustine of Hippo has even decided to become Christian.
The notion that all these men were spending time addressing an issue in which the majority of Christians were not even participating is simply odd.
Insistence on linking marriage strictly to procreation ignores the reality that the explicit and exclusive connection between procreation, child-rearing, and marriage was broken well before the movement to extend the definition of marriage to homosexual unions.
Marriage has definitely been tied to procreation throughout history: responsibility for children, provisions for inheritance, identification of family/clan bonds, and a number of other issues.
However, just as family/clan importance has been dwindling in Western society for several hundred years, significant factors that bonded marriage to procreation have changed.
Specifically, the necessary tie between sex, marriage, and procreation has been utterly lost.
Chemical contraception, (“the Pill”), removed the direct connection between sex and inevitable procreation.
The development of IVF and similar therapies broke the last bond that limited procreation to actual sex.
Changing attitudes toward adoption have made it more acceptable for people to raise children whom they did not procreate, themselves.
This is a case where the purported reasons for a tradition had already dissolved before a particular aspect of the tradition was even challenged.
(and you can’t ‘know’ if they’re wrong in their subjective belief system unless you apply your own subjective system; a belief system you’re so convinced is true you assign objective truth to. In some parts that’s called faith.)
I believe I came across that anecdote in The Chicken Soup for the Soul Cookbook, which, while it has many fine recipes, does NOT, ironically enough, have one for chicken soup for the soul.
Emphasis added. My point being that whether or not some kind of JudeoChristian god actually exists, contradictions within any particular worship system are not hard to find. If a particular faith was more direct, i.e. “this particular denomination puts hatred of homosexuality above all else, so there is no contradiction between that and the secondary dogmas of ‘love thy neighbor’ and such”, then perhaps flaws in its design would be harder to find.
In any case, I look forward to religion’s steadily-diminishing importance in the West in my lifetime.
I wondered when that violinist was going to show up…