Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
Well, someone just upthread for a start.
I don't assert that everybody in every culture throughout all of history has had exactly traditional Christian beliefs on sexual morality. Demonstrably it is not universal human consensus that marriage is an objective reality constituted by the decision of a single man and single woman to form a faithful, sexually exclusive lifelong bond oriented towards the begetting and raising of new life; and I'd argue that there are some ways in which the early Christian understanding of sexual morality was revolutionary.
However, I assert that in broad strokes, it appears to be relatively universal that humans form monogamous male-female pair bonds in order to raise children, and while there are forms of alternative sexual behaviour that we often see in history (polygamy and homosexuality being likely the most common), the universality of the male-female parenting unit, and likewise its universal recognition in social institutions either equivalent or roughly analogous to marriage, is apparent. (It is perhaps also relevant that polygamous relationships typically have been understood as marriage, but same-sex relationships have not; the possibility of children is the most obvious explanation for that difference.) What the consequences of that observation should be for our understanding of sexual morality today is, of course, a controversial question, but I can see no way to evade the observation itself.
That is, for better or for worse, marriage, by which I mean sexually exclusive long-term male-female pair bonds, appears to not just be a quirk of Christian or Abrahamic culture. It's widespread enough that I think it must be understood as either part of human nature itself, or as an inevitable consequence of human biology and evolutionary history in the environmental context of this planet.
I doubt you disagree with me on that, but I might as well state it as clearly as I can in my own terms!
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