Swifter

I'm currious as to where marriage originated from. Has there been marriage like cerominies in other cultures before the bible came around? Is there alot in the bible about marriage? Or as the person I'm debating claims, does marriage belong to the church?

starling

Generally in animals whose males are larger than the females, the purpose of the extra size is to resolve territorial rights over the female, as in moose, deer, seals, bison. It might be a tendancy solely characteristic of the ungulates though. No one is really sure why male weasels are so much larger than females, if not simply to be able to shake the latter into receptivity.

But you're getting into kin selection, when you start talking about relationships designed to bind people into the task of caring for their offspring. That is something that predates Bibles, and Churches, and even society itself. No church owns marriage--they have simply corrupted our natural instincts into a restrictive form that they only control because we let them.

The only reason for marriage as defined today, is to give church authority over who is allowed to pair with whom. Don't get married, agree to a committed relationship and leave the church on its butt in the dust of your wake. Or get married, but recognize that the only real reason for you to do so is to placate the church and the brainwashed community that supports it unto hating all who oppose it. The relationship is important, not whether it is church sanctioned. Government sanctioned perhaps, since it gets you extra rights from the oppressed single class.

Chili

It seems to me that you have this backwards in that life belongs to the mythology and we are just here to propagate it. Maybe you have noticed that we are temporal creatures who someday will die while life goes on untill the civilization dies and that will be the end of us.