It’s absurd that Americans still quote the Bible at weddings and believe marriage is holy because the Bible says so. America’s beliefs and laws regarding marriage are so starkly different from the authors of the Bible, they’re irreconcilable.
In America, marriage usually works like this:
Two people of any gender, who are over the age of 18, pick someone freely, get to know them, have sex, fall in love, and move in together. One person then asks the other to marry them, and they go to a courthouse where they pay for a marriage certificate, pay someone with marriage-granting credentials to preside over a ceremony where vows are exchanged, and then both parties’ assets become legally tied to each other. If the marriage is heterosexual, the woman will usually replace her last name with her husband’s last name, though she’s under no obligation to. They can get divorced for any reason, but they have to apply for a divorce license and jump through so much legal red tape they have to hire a lawyer to manage all the paperwork until they finally stand in front of a judge who legally terminates their marriage and often sets new laws for one or both parties to follow such as child visitation schedules, child support, alimony, etc. Courts tend to rule in favor of women more than men.
In ancient Jewish culture and the Torah, marriage works like this:
Any woman who has sex before marriage is stoned to death. Depending on the circumstances, any man who has sex before marriage will either be stoned to death or he’ll have to pay the girl’s father a bunch of shekels of silver. If a man rapes an unwed virgin, he has to buy her for fifty shekels of silver and may never divorce her.
There’s no legal age of consent. When a man wants to marry a girl or woman, he goes to her father and asks if he will sell his daughter to him. They agree on a price, and the groom pays the father. There is a ceremony, after which the husband takes his wife to his home and has sex with her. If she is a virgin, her hymen will bleed when it’s broken. After consummating the marriage, the husband will bring the bloody bed sheet out of the house for the community to see, and they’ll parade it through the streets in celebration. If it’s found that the bride is not a virgin, she’ll be brought in front of her father’s house and stoned to death by the community. Then the bride’s father will have to return the groom’s money and pay him more shekels of silver to make amends for selling a used product that was advertised as new.
Men are allowed to buy multiple wives, and they can own female slaves who aren’t their wives and have sex with them legally if their wife is barren. When the baby is born, the mother lays under the slave as she gives birth so that the wife is giving birth symbolically. If you’re the king of the theocracy God intended to rule the world, you can own as many wives and sex slaves as the nation’s taxes will pay for… as long as your wives and slaves are of Jewish descent.
Also, if a man has sex with a woman who is on her period, then they both have to be exiled. If anyone has sex with an animal or a member of the same sex, they’re to be put to death.
There are a few circumstances where divorce is legal, like adultery. Though, it’s not really divorce since the adulterer will be stoned to death. But if a woman manages to leave her husband, she probably won’t be able to remarry since she’s no longer a virgin, and since she’s a second-class citizen with almost no rights, this pretty much leaves her with only two career paths: forager or slave.
So when Americans say marriage is holy because the Bible says so, they prove two things: One, they don’t know what the Bible says about marriage. Two, their moral code is an un-researched, unconsidered assimilation of pop culture, which is ignorant but still better than Biblical dogma.
American Christians can try to justify their apostasy by saying Jesus made the Torah obsolete, but just because he forgave us for breaking the law, doesn’t mean he abolished the law. The only two things Jesus changed about marriage are that you shouldn’t kill adulterers anymore, and the only justification for divorce is adultery. He and his followers did, however, reconfirm that slavery is still the natural order of life.
Dozens of passages from the Old and New Testament that condone slavery
American Christians only follow the rules in the Bible that coincide with their modern beliefs. They ignore and excuse the rest. The fact that they believe in customs and laws that contradict the Bible proves they don’t believe in the Bible.
Not only is it possible to use common sense and secular reasoning to create moral rules outside of divine intervention, but Americans have been doing it all along. That’s how our modern customs and culture evolved from the primitive barbarism of Jewish theocracy, and the world is better since Jews and Christians stopped obeying the Bible. The less they pretend to, the better the world gets. Imagine how much better life would be if they just dropped the whole charade altogether and let us all be free to do whatever works best for us.
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