Box Turtle Bulletin

Welcome back, Rob.

The biggest point in this particular argument is that whatever marriage may have been in the past, the argument from tradition is the weakest possible argument. It says that things should never, ever change, that we couldn’t possibly know more or be more humane than our remote ancestors. Absolute nonsense.

Even more to the point, marriage has come to include lots and lots of different functions, not just the functions defined by the right wingers. One of the most important is the creation of legal kinship.Another is a public declaration of same to the community, what the posting of banns used to be when people did that.

Can’t wait to see the rest of what you have to say.

Priya Lynn

I can’t wait to see the rest of your series.

Timothy Kincaid

“Itâ€™s a pre-political, pre-religious institution…”

I may be mistaken, but it is my understanding that there are no existing records of the social structures of any societies that were pre-religious. If such societies existed, they didn’t chisel their marriage rites into the cave walls.

Timothy Kincaid

It says that things should never, ever change, that we couldnâ€™t possibly know more or be more humane than our remote ancestors.

Good point. It’s, in a weird way, a form of ancestor worship (similar to the wacky “founding fathers” myths held by some conservatives who consider themselves to be patriotic). I think that Abrahamic religions would call that idolatry.

David in Houston

I’m really looking forward to this. I faced off against that bigoted weasel about a month ago. You can read my rebuttal here:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/david-grossman/brandon-vogts-flawed-rebuttals-to-arguments-for-same-sex-marriage/596209503738701

Just like with Robert George, when you remove all of Brandon’s irrelevant talk about procreation and religion, all that’s left are sex organs.

re: “pre-law, pre-religion”

That on its face is nonsense. I’d wager that there has never existed a human society that didn’t have some form of law and religion, no matter how rudimentary. We know of 60,000 year-old grave offerings, and you can bet that any people thinking in those terms also had some form of law, if nothing more than custom. (Which, after all, is what the English Common Law was based on.)

I admire you for having the patience to wade through something that, from this sample, is badly conceived and poorly argued.

PS — chimpanzees and gorillas have politics. Does anyone think there was a time in human evolution when humans didn’t?

BrianQTD

I’m sorry, the concept of something being pre-political and pre-religious is “pre-posterous.”

Rob Tisinai

I have to admit, I myself have wondered at our opponents’ ability to tell us the historical record of what happened prehistorically.

Priya Lynn

Hunter said “re: â€œpre-law, pre-religionâ€

That on its face is nonsense. Iâ€™d wager that there has never existed a human society that didnâ€™t have some form of law and religion, no matter how rudimentary. We know of 60,000 year-old grave offerings, and you can bet that any people thinking in those terms also had some form of law, if nothing more than custom”.

I think your claim is on its face nonsense. Humans have existed more or less in our present form for about 200,000 years. For most of our history we lived in small groups of hunter gatherers and no doubt there was no such thing as a codified law for much of human existence and highly unlikely anything we would recognize as a religion existed for those early small groups of humans struggling to survive in the stone age.

Priya Lynn:

Whether you recognize it as “law” or “religion” is largely irrelevant. For most of our history, and in most cultures, “law” was simply custom — the way the ancestors did it. The idea of codified laws is fairly recent — maybe you get something like that in ancient Babylon or Egypt, but by the time of the Romans, it was an established concept — although certainly not universal: Anglo-Saxon law was custom, pure and simple.

As for religion, we’re talking about a time before the monotheisms, or any idea of “organized religion” at all. If you look at early cultures — pre-Colonial Africa, pre-Columbian America, pre-Christian Europe, ancient Japan, Siberia — you find the idea that everything is imbued with spirit, and you negotiate your way through the world on that basis. If that’s not religion, what is it? (It would be fascinating to be able to find out when the idea of actual “gods” — personifications of those forces people were trying to explain — gained currency.)

And it was Stone Age humans who left those 60,000 year old grave offerings. What’s the basis of that, if not religious?

Priya Lynn

Hunter, the times you’re talking about in human history are relatively recent. There’s simply no way you can support the claim that everything in pre-(whatever) times was “imbued with with spirit, and you negotiate your way through the world on that basis.”. The early cultures you refer to are a quite recent phenomena compared to the hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of years humans have existed. We know virtually nothing about human culture prior to the dawn of agriculture when humans first settled down into larger communties and developed the ability to write, in fact, its a stretch to say there was a culture as we know it prior to that time.

Would you argue that our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos have culture, law and religion? Both are known to sometimes bury their dead, they have ways of group behavior that vary a bit from tribe to tribe and a tendency to reward nice members of the tribe and punish mean members. I think very few people would argue that they have religion and law in the sense of human understanding of the terms.

There is no solid line demarcating when the ancestors of chimps and humans became human. What I think we can agree on is that those proto-humans had no religion and no law as we understand it and those things developed gradually as humans evolved. Unless your definition of a human is a hominid that has religion and law there is no doubt that there were early humans with neither.

You’ve got to remember that for the vast majority of human history there were no settlements, no buildings, no form of government or law enforcement other than the ways of behavior that didn’t get you beaten by the alpha humans in the tribe of perhaps 20 to 50 hunter gatherers.

There is simply no way to know what the “offerings” in a 60,000 year old grave meant to the people at that time. Perhaps they did think there was some sort of afterlife but its a stretch to call that belief alone religion. Or it may be simply a way of demonstrating that the dead person was valued and would be missed. In any event while you may think 60,000 years ago is a long time, it is in fact a small fraction of the time humans have existed and certainly humans coupling happened far, far before humans had anything we today would recognize as culture, law, or religion.

As for the timeline, let me just note Altamira (14,000-18,000 BP), Lascaux (16,000 BP), the North African petroglyphs (ca. 8000 BP) — all show hunting scenes, and one of the Lascaux images is a very famous one of what we can only interpret as a shaman dressed as a deer (or wearing a deer pelt and antlers). The best guesses are that these were a form of sympathetic magic to insure success in the hunt. Also check out Mircea Eliade, “Shamanism,” and Joseph W. Campbell, “The Masks of God” — both discuss early forms of religious practice in non-agricultural societies. Also check out North American Indian creation myths, especially those of the Hopi and Navajo, which portray a world in which animals spoke and could take the form of humans. There’s an old custom among the Inuit of offering a prayer of thanks to the spirit of the slain animal when successful in the hunt — somehow, I doubt this is something they invented to keep anthropologists amused, and again, non-agricultural society. There’s also traditional Japanese religion, in which the world is filled with “kami,” which usually translates as “spirit” or “demon,” or possibly “god,” although that’s less usual. There are literally thousands of them. We’re pleased to call these forms of belief “animism” because I guess it makes us feel superior in some way, but the point is, they are still religious beliefs founded on fundamentally different bases than the monotheisms. You can find similar patterns in pre-Christian Europe as well, especially in the idea of sacred springs or sacred trees. And they are all much earlier in origin than any of the present dominant religions.

Those 60,000 year-old graves, by the way, were Neanderthal. Burial of the dead is generally considered a marker for religious belief of some sort. Some scholars have theorized that religious belief in some form may go back as far as 300,000 years, although I don’t know if I’m ready to credit that. 60-70,000 seems reasonable, though, since we have evidence that far back.

Don’t let yourself be trapped by the idea that religion must necessarily involve a priesthood or organized worship. That’s the late development, and does seem to have grown up among agricultural societies.

I have no way of knowing what chimps and bonobos are thinking, but my reservations about the possibility of their having developed some form of religion are centered more on questions about their ability to conceptualize in the abstract. They can be taught to use language, but their use tends to be fairly concrete, which leads me to wonder if their brains have the capacity to formulate concepts as abstract as “god” or “spirit.” (Most high-school freshmen have not developed enough abstract reasoning ability to handle algebra, which is actually a function of the development of their brains.)

There’s still a lot of debate as to when Australopithecus became Homo, and there are a few examples that are still in dispute, so I’m not going to go there, and I think trying to drag that into the discussion is a) a straw man, and b) pointless. My position is simply that by the advent of fully modern humans, ca. 100,000 years ago, we’re dealing with a group whose brains can handle abstract concepts such as “spirit,” whose ideas of law are most likely to be how the ancestors did it, perhaps coupled with some idea of fairness and/or compensation for injury, and who already have a long tradition of politics as the practice of social interaction.

And as for marriage’s place in all this, I’m happy with a definition of marriage that establishes it as community recognition of a new couple (or household, to bring it forward a few thousand years into a more agricultural context) and a new status for those two individuals as members of the community. It’s worth noting in this context that the blessings of a priest have, as often as not, been optional.

So, yeah, I stand by my original statement — the idea of a human society as “pre-religion” or “pre-law” is, to echo Brian, “pre-posterous.”

Priya Lynn