Richard Shaver, for years the editor of Amazing, believed that malign "disintegrant energy robots" hidden in caverns beneath the Earth were using ancient pre-human technology to control the planet's surface dwellers and make war on one another.
Um, Ray Palmer was the editor of Amazing. It's at least arguable whether he actually believed Shaver's stuff, or had just found a reliable moneymaker.
Not to say that Shaver himself wasn't a loon. His paintings of the underworld, distinct from the ghastly prose, did show a fair amount of talent.
Jim, to show you that marriage - or any institution - always had such and such a property - whatever property we choose - I would have to demonstrate that the property was present in each and every moment of human history. I can't do that, and if that is to be the test, then I can't pass it.
Of course I don't expect you to prove such a thing. I'm glad you recognize that you can't. My complaint was that you were, and are, asserting it as if it had already been proven.
Fortunately, it's much simpler to dispose of the question from the other direction (hint: finding one is a much shorter search than finding none), and Kevin already addressed this a little while ago. Marriage is in many cultures not the most important thing in childrearing, nor childrearing the most important thing in marriage (google "alliance theory").
You might be on somewhat firmer ground to suggest that family exists to support the rearing of children, which would cover those cultures where, say, the "family" is a multi-generational group of women raising their children, and the "husband" lives with the other men aside from the odd "midnight hour". But, y'know, families serve a lot of other functions too, and there's a lot of families with homosexuals out there already.
Kevin --
Sure, I agree with all of that, that was sort of my point: what book is Dave reading from? When terms like "is and always was" start flying around, "personal opinion" is a small thing, unless the person himself "is and always was" (someone else this morning on another thread used the line "6000 years of recorded history") -- it leaves the realm of "what it is for me" and becomes something that requires some sort of backup. Was it really? Show me.
"I hold that marriage is a social institution the primary purpose of which is to provide the means to bring up the offspring of the sexual relationship which it includes. If that is true, then homosexual relationships cannot be marriages."
I'm wondering where, exactly, that primary purpose was explicitly stated. I thought I'd try Genesis 2, which seemed like a likely source, but all it says is
It is not good that the man should be alone
Well, yeah. I don't really want to be alone. Nothing about children there.
I will make a helper fit for him.
Yeah, I could use some help.
So what culture is it, exactly, that says that THE purpose of marriage is making children? How about a few centuries of the European ruling class? Oops, nope, that's an instrument of foreign policy. How about all those cultures where it's a means of securing peace with neighboring tribes, or forging clan alliances, or ...
Dave, where exactly does it say that again? And why should my culture take that culture's word for it?
Not quite the same set of functionality but extremely lightweight and cool: on that same extensions page for Firebird there's an item called "RSS Reader Panel". Basically you set up a separate folder in your Bookmarks for feeds, and point the extension to it; then you can select View/Sidebar/RSS Reader and the sidebar opens up with two panes, a feed selector and a list of titles from the selected feed ... the items open up in Firebird since, duh, you're already in Firebird.
Doesn't seem to highlight new items but it does mark the ones you've viewed already as visited links. Wish I had this for Opera.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 2 |
| 2004 | 3 |
| 2003 | 1 |
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