And in all of those jurisdictions, it is not now nor has ever been just a matter of living with someone for a set period of time.
Your analogy is not helpful. I claim that every human society has practiced marriage. You doubt my claim, and ask me to prove it. And you propose that I prove it by making a table of every human society that has ever existed, and provide a citation from the anthropological literature for each one to demonstrate that it practiced marriage.
You think me claim is “wild” speculation? Well, have you ever heard of a human society that didn’t have marriage? No? Then it isn’t wild speculation, it’s well founded speculation. It isn’t possible for me to demonstrate the truth of the statement by listing thousands of societies and providing you an easy to follow link demonstrating that they practiced marriage, because there have been hundreds of thousands of such societies.
All I can say is that since I’ve never heard of a human society without marriage, and you’ve never heard of a human society without marriage, and no one else has heard of a human society without marriage, that means that marriage is a feature of every human society we’ve ever heard about, and that means it is also a very likely feature of every human society we haven’t heard about.
So which human societies didn’t have marriage? You can’t find any? Well OK then. All known human societies practice marriage. If you find one that doesn’t you can falsify my claim.
Note that I provided a list above of human societies that practiced marriage. I listed a couple dozen, and I could keep going. Wikipedia is my cite. All you have to do to disprove it is to find one, just one, that doesn’t have marriage. But you can’t.
it’s not a sufficiently extraordinary claim to require the effort. There may have been a human society that was reasonably developed and lacked marriage, but it’s fairly obvious that such societies are vanishingly rare throughout recorded human history, so if you insist that Lemur take this into account, at most the concept changes from “all societies practice marriage” to “the vast majority of societies (almost certainly all of them) practice marriage”. At most, Lemur mildly overstated his position, and it has nothing to do with the premise of taking a modern society that practices marriage and abolishing it as useless, which strikes me personally as contradictory and irrational and the argument can only be continued if the OP ignores all the counter-arguments offered thus far.
But that’s about there being different kinds of marriage in different societies, not about some societies not having marriage.
“People eat different things in different places” isn’t the same as “there are places where people don’t eat.”
(Not picking on you, I did select that quote because it was the concisest among the people who mentioned different kinds of marriage)
Polygamy is fairly common, at least in the sense that while most marriages aren’t polygamous marriages, most societies throughout history have allowed high-status males to have more than one wife.
But it is different from the gorilla system in that these high-status males with multiple wives are living in an band that includes other mature males. Male gorillas wouldn’t tolerate the presence of other adult males, and juvenile males are kicked out of the group when they mature. Juvenile females remain in the group.
We humans don’t usually realize that our social structure is pretty unusual among mammals. Gorillas and Orangutans are more typical.
The technicalities may be outdated or changing, but the general concept of partners/families will probably be relevant in law for ages. It’s not just about shared property, it’s also about responsibilities: partners have the power to make medical and legal decisions for each other when the other is incapacitated, just like parents/guardians have the power to make those decisions for their “children”. People feel a need to share those kinds of responsibilities with their partners.
If you’re arguing that the “till death do us part” / religious aspect of marriage is outdated or not all that realistic, and that some of the legalities are archaic, I’d agree, but many humans clearly have a need for a similar type of contract/arrangement and the law can and probably should take those arrangements into account in at least some circumstances (shared property is probably the most obvious, but powers of medical decisions might be an example of something that’s arranged relatively cleanly by marriage laws without having to spell out every potentiality for each partnership).
That wasn’t an analogy. You made a claim that you said I had to accept as true until I disproved it to your satisfaction. If such was an acceptable way to proceed then I also made a claim that you must accept as true until you disprove it to my satisfaction.
You can prove that every society has practiced marriage with tables or any other method. Provide a list of every society that has ever existed (with citations) and a citation individually on its social and reproductive bonding. Provide a citation that reviews the social and reproductive bonding of societies as a study of large groups that covers all societies every found.
Now you are modifying your claim. You first stated in Post 13,
that is a factual statement. Now you claim your statement is ‘well founded speculation’ which would be stated as an opinion.
If it’s not possible for you provide proof of your statements then maybe you shouldn’t state them as facts.
You you know all my experiences and those of everyone in the world to their knowledge of social and reproductive bonding
again your claim, your burden
I don’t agree that the above original statement in Post 13 is a mild overstatement of “the vast majority of societies practice marriage”.
I don’t think there are many who propose ‘taking a modern society that practices marriage and abolishing it as useless’. I do think that people are proposing changing marriage from its current form and/or to provide for alternatives for social and reproductive bonding.
As you wish, though treating .99 as equal to 1 isn’t that much of a stretch.
Well, there’s the OP, for one.
Yeah, I didn’t say “the vast majority of human societies practice marriage”. That’s because I’ve never heard of even one exception. Therefore, I said all human societies practice marriage.
Now, I’m not a tenured Anthropologist who studies marriage customs. But since a human society that didn’t practice marriage would be incredibly rare and therefore incredibly interesting, any such Anthropologist who discovered one would make it the cornerstone of his career. This society would be constantly cited whenever people like you and me discuss marriage.
Since no such society ever gets cited during marriage discussions, it seems reasonable to say that no such society has been discovered. And since no such society has been discovered, it seems reasonable to say that marriage has existed in all known human societies. And since marriage has existed in all known human societies, it seems reasonable to say that marriage has existed in all human societies.
You don’t have to accept that claim as true just because I said it. But if you want to convince other people that my claim is not true then there’s a very simple way to do so.
Oh, and that table of every known human culture that has ever existed? Try here: www.wikipedia.org.
Your demand for “proof” is like someone demanding proof that there are no stars that are green with purple polka dots. I can show you star after star, and you just say, “Sure, THAT star isn’t green w/ppd. But the next one might be.” If an astronomer claimed that there are no stars that are green w/ppd, would you demand a listing of every star in the universe?
i do think that those issues are much of what is significant.
there is religious/spiritual marriage; you might be married on earth and in the afterlife, that you might need to be married in a certain fashion to get to a good afterlife.
there is the social marriage which includes aspects of contracts and responsibilities as you have stated.
the same term is used for both and they have been linked in the past.
take a heterosexual couple who love one another and get a legal marriage performed in a religious ceremony: are they less married if a bunch of queers get married, are they less loving to each other because a foursome want to be married to each other, will they not get to heaven because some others are differently married. i can understand their burden and distress due their doubting their love and their faith.
there are societies that practice long term marriage (used to be more permanent for many, but times they are a changing), some that have short term marriages. there are structures for long and short term parenting. there are people who want the marriage structure for social/legal purposes, it probably would be good to make it available to those who want it.
If i said 0.99 was equal to 1 then I would be absolutely wrong. If I said that 0.99 was close in value to 1 then I might be correct in some circumstances. One is an absolute statement the other a relative statement. Post 13 was an absolute statement.
If one person is equal to many then we use the word ‘many’ very differently from one another.
Thing is, you don’t know he’s wrong. All the evidence supports the idea that he’s right. And there’s a lot of it.
You might want to stop bothering. Most of us realise that absolute statements have some small chance of being potentially incorrect, but unless you can find the black swan, we don’t really care - until then his statement is still accurate for all practical purposes.
I’m operating on the assumption the OP didn’t wholly invent the idea.
If you think it is reasonable to state a limited statement then you should have made a limited statement.
again it is not my burden to convince people not to believe your statement. absolute statements demand absolute proof, the burden is yours.
That doesn’t lead to any table on human culture, only to the front page of the webpedia.
I don’t think many astronomers would make such an absolute statement. Scientists largely accept the limits of the knowledge in their field and their individual knowledge. An astronomer might state they haven’t experienced something, have ever seen evidence that others have seen something and think that something is unlikely. Scientists know that with accepting limited knowledge comes with acknowledging vast ignorance.
No I have never offered an opinion on if most societies have practiced marriage. Again not my burden to disprove his statement. His burden to prove it.
I think you have it the wrong direction, absolute statements have a large chance of being wrong. Absolute claims demand absolute proof.
Always?
Dude. The horse. Is dead. Heck, you’ve de-juiced it by now.
Even among strict scientific and linguistic pedants like myself, we recognize that lots of people make absolute statements when they really lack that 100% certainty. For example: “If you drop that, it’ll fall”. That’s an absolute statement. But the speaker doesn’t know that gravity won’t suddenly hit its expiry date sending everything flying into space the moment the guy lets go of the object. So the speaker was speaking with a certainty that wasn’t merited by his available knowledge.
Could we attack him for his massive failure in logic, in failing to qualify his statement? Typically, no. We recognize that all absolute statements outside of, say, math and logic have a little disclaimer attached - something like “supported by everything I know based on all available information until something shows up to prove me wrong.” We all assume this disclaimer to allow reasoned conversation to continue without being constantly bombed into little peices by repeated attacks on not-completely-proven-beyond-complete-certainty statements.
Well, we all assume that disclaimer applies except you, apparently. So if you must, keep bombing away. I’m sure it’ll help move the discussion forward in an insightful and productive way.
I think the OP said it was outdated as it exists with its current restrictions (in many places), I don’t think he was saying it be abolished. But either way I would also assume that he didn’t originate the thought.
Though I can’t think of any serious or substantial group that is advocating the abolishment of marriage. There seems to be substantial numbers that want to extend its application.