Hi Hyroglyphx,
Hyroglyphx writes:
What I am saying is that the government should never have given the church power to legally marry people in the first place.
Let me say as one who has performed several of these ceremony's the state does not give the church power to legally marry people.
Anyone who wants to be married must go to the court house and get a marriage licensee. Then they present that licensee to someone authorized by the state to perform the ceremony. That person along with two witnesses must sign the certificate and then send it to the state for recording. The marriage is not official until the marriage is recorded at the courthouse. The same as a deed, or mortgage.
Now let me wade into this debate just a little.
The first recorded union between a man and woman was recorded some 3500+ years ago about an event that took place some 6000 years ago.
From that time until now the descendants of Abraham have practiced marriage of a male and female as a religious ceremony.
According to Wikipedia found
Here
"In Ancient Greece, no specific civil ceremony was required for the creation of a marriage - only mutual agreement and the fact that the couple must regard each other as husband and wife accordingly."
"Like with the Greeks, Roman marriage and divorce required no specific government or religious approval."
"With few local exceptions, until 1545, Christian marriages in Europe were by mutual consent, declaration of intention to marry and upon the subsequent physical union of the parties.[34][35] The couple would promise verbally to each other that they would be married to each other; the presence of a priest or witnesses was not required."
"One of the functions of churches from the Middle Ages was to register marriages, which was not obligatory. There was no state involvement in marriage and personal status, with these issues being adjudicated in ecclesiastical courts."
"As part of the Counter-Reformation, in 1563 the Council of Trent decreed that a Roman Catholic marriage would be recognized only if the marriage ceremony was officiated by a priest with two witnesses. The Council also authorized a Catechism, issued in 1566, which defined marriage as, "The conjugal union of man and woman, contracted between two qualified persons, which obliges them to live together throughout life."[39]
In England, under the Anglican Church, marriage by consent and cohabitation was valid until the passage of Lord Hardwicke's Act in 1753. This act instituted certain requirements for marriage, including the performance of a religious ceremony observed by witnesses.[40]
As part of the Reformation, the role of recording marriages and setting the rules for marriage passed to the state. By the 1600s many of the Protestant European countries had a state involvement in marriage."
Lord Hardwicke's Act in 1753 is the first I can find of any government dictating what constituted marriage.
From the beginning of modern man marriage was determined by the participants and their religion.
It is an institution of the participants and their religion being hijacked by government authority.
So now the government wants to decide what marriage is.
I will tell you my relationship with my wife and let you decide when we were married.
I met my wife in 1954 at recess in the rec room. I was 14 and she was 13. She had cut her hair against orders from her boyfriend not to get it cut. So she was trying to make him think she had other interests than just him. He happened to be looking on from the ag building. We talked for 10 minutes and then went to our separate classes. As I enter my class her boyfriend (my classmate) said "I saw you sitting with my girl". I said Louis you can forget her I am going to marry her.
From that time until now I have been committed to that woman. We became an item around school and before long everywhere else. Upon my graduation from high school we applied for and received a marriage certificate with the ceremony being performed by a justice of the peace.
Now I believe we have been married since the day I first met my wife. One day death will take one of us away from the other but until then we are husband and wife.
The state says we were married June 3, 1957. Some folks say we were never married, go figure.
There are very few married people in the world.
There are a lot of people living together with and without the sanction of government or church.
Then there are a lot of people living together because the state gave them a piece of paper that gives them legal rights to sleep together and have sex.
But most people today don't want to be tangled up with the government so they don't bother to get married. They just move in and out as they please and live with whomsoever they choose.
So what is the big problem?
The 2000 census tells us that ... there are 105.5 million households in the USA; 5.5 million of these consist of unmarried partnerships; of these, 595,000 consist of same sex partners. This can be interpreted as there being nearly 1.2 million gay people living with a same sex partner in America."
We got 9.8 million people in America who don't want to get married.
We got 1.2 million people who want to get married if all the gays living together wanted to get married.
Out of the 105.5 million households in America 51.5 have unmarried heads of the household.
Almost half the heads of households in America are divorced, or unmarried.
It just seems like when the government gets involved in anything they just mess it up big time.
God Bless,
"John 5:39 (KJS) Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."
™ Version 4.2
