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Continuing to examine Rick Warren's claim that "For 5,000 years every single culture and every single religion has defined marriage as a man and a woman", I spent a few minutes Googling, and came up with multiple cultures for which this is not true.

There are cultures in Africa, including the largest ethnic group in Kenya, the Kikuyu, in which women marry other women. The word for male-female marriage and female-female marriage is the same, as is the marriage ceremony.

There are a large number of cultures in which polygyny, a husband with more than one wife, is quite usual, and that's been true throughout history. There are also some polyandrous cultures where women take more than one husband, such as the Nyinba of Tibet. (It's also possible that there were polyandrous marriages in early Sumer.)

And then there are also matrilineal, matrilocal cultures in which there's really nothing that looks like the Western idea of marriage, such as the Nayar of East India, and the Mosuo of China.

Even from this small pool of examples, it's obvious that Rev Warren's statement is incorrect: over thousands of years of history and thousands of human cultures, what counts as "marriage" has actually varied quite a bit. That said, Warren's argument is fallacious in any case; just because something is popular or traditional doesn't make it right.

Date: 2008-12-27 08:47 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] outsdr.livejournal.com
I bet his rebuttal would be that these examples aren't "real" cultures.

Date: 2008-12-27 11:06 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nyssa-p.livejournal.com
Damn right!

And in anthropology last year, I learnt that the definition of man and woman isn't even the same!
I forget which culture it is, but they actually define THREE genders: men, women, and men who act like women.

Looking at Warren's biography, the only real degree he did was arts and then he did a "masters" in "divinity" and "ministry". Uh right....and what do they "teach" there?

(I love using quotes to be sarcastic ^_^)

And outsdr - I freaking LOVE your icon! LOVELOVELOVELOVELOVELOVELOVELOVELOVELOVELOVELOVELOVELOVE!
Edited Date: 2008-12-27 11:09 pm (UTC)

Date: 2008-12-27 11:10 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nyssa-p.livejournal.com
Oh BTW - I found this comment by our mate Rick Warren which made me giggle:
"There is a verse in the Bible that says the intelligent man is always open to new ideas; in fact, he looks for them."

Ah nothing better than an arrogant man who thinks he's open, but knows he's right *rolls eyes*

Date: 2008-12-28 07:35 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] outsdr.livejournal.com
And outsdr - I freaking LOVE your icon! LOVELOVELOVELOVELOVELOVELOVELOVELOVELOVELOVELOVELOVELOVE!

Thanks, I made it myself.

Date: 2008-12-27 11:10 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] thegameiam.livejournal.com
That's the problem with using absolutes: a single counterexample blows them away. If he had said "the overwhelming majority" he may have been correct (although polygyny certainly has a long and storied history as well [c.f. Abraham and Jacob, with whom he should be familiar - then again, neither of those turned out so well...]).

I have not encountered any of the cultures you mentioned before - I presume that they either are small or had bad PR agents - are there any examples from cultures which would be considered the dominant one at the time in a large area?

Date: 2008-12-27 11:52 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kateorman.livejournal.com
I presume that they either are small or had bad PR agents

Well, it really depends where your interests lie. We had cable for a year or two, during which the National Geographic channel and similar greatly expanded my horizons. I'd already heard of the Mosuo thanks to a documentary called Secret China - The Female Kingdom, so when writing my posting, I just Googled the doco. :) But it really did only take a few minutes' Googling to turn up the Kikuyu (whom I knew a little bit about, as I put a Kikuyu character into SLEEPY) and their woman-woman marriages (which, again, I'd encountered before, in a feminist SF story). OTOH, you can fit what I know about, say, sports into a matchbox, without first removing the matches. (Take the matches out and my knowledge of geography would fit. :)

Anywho, I suppose it depends on your definition of "dominant" and/or "small", especially given the population explosion and global colonisation in recent centuries, which makes comparisons a bit tricky. Right now, there are about 6 million Kikuyu living in Kenya, which is about 30 times the entire population of Sumer around 2500 BCE. Certainly the Kikuyu were a major, thriving culture before the arrival of European invaders. The Nayar caste were the royalty and nobility of their time. So some of these cultures were quite successful.

TBH, I have a sneaking suspicion that "the overwhelming majority" of cultures and religions have in fact been polygynous!

Date: 2008-12-28 01:16 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] stephen-dedman.livejournal.com
Thanks for this, Kate. I knew about the polygynous cultures and laughed when I read Warren's statement - but I hadn't heard about the others.

Date: 2008-12-28 02:06 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] thegameiam.livejournal.com
Hmm - Christianity no, Islam yes, Judaism not anymore*, Buddhism & Hinduism discouraged - that would be the majority from my perspective, and it looks inconclusive. Islam is the largest group which engages in Polygyny as a mainstream practice.

Also, it depends on whether you take the present teachings or the past ones - religions have evolved a great deal in 5000 years...

*(until 1030CE, with the takana of R' Gershom)

By "dominant" I meant "like the Zoroastrians in Iran, or like the Confucians in China."

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