>I don't think that's the full story. I suspect that religious marriage existed long before nation states and most of the current legal distinctions associated with marriage.

I suspect that marriage - a man/wife pairing (or 1-to-N grouping) recognized by the tribe/village with respect to all those legal distinctions related to property, children, etc... - existed long before the religion.

That would require humans to have existed before religion, which is frankly quite ridiculous.

Are we supposing religious monkeys now? It wouldn't surprise me if earlier hominids were religious as well, but to call any other possibility "quite ridiculous" is really overstepping.

Not if you've ever met a human.

You don't think that there were humans that existed before any form of codified spirituality? I'd be willing to believe that explicit ritual bonding (marriage) didn't predate religion, but find it hard to believe that the first words we uttered went along with some sort of priestly social class or referenceable rules for living.

I don't know what the current state of research on this is, but I find it entirely plausible that rituals and social control existed before language.

Well, even creatures as low as termites and sardines exhibit mechanisms for social control - but it's not codified.

Why does it have to codified?

I do not follow?

It's not a very long sentence. What part is confusing?

It seems to me that the words 'humans' and 'religion' are inverted?

Not at all. Religion was born the first time a thinking creature looked up at the sky. Most likely some pre-homo sapiens hominid.

> I suspect that religious marriage existed long before nation states

Do you have any actual evidence? Because here in reality-land, the evidence shows that the English legal tradition considered marriage a civil institution long before the churches tried to claim it.

Forget the English, marriage has been along longer than even the Anglo-Saxons in general.

Englang went from pre-history into history in 42 A.D. when the Romans came there. It didn't even have written history before that [check Wikipedia if you don't believe this].

Hardly the place to look for the origin of ancient traditions...

Well, nation states have only existed for 500 years or so, and marriage is mentioned in the Bible and plenty of Ancient Greek writings. I'm not sure if that counts as evidence here in reality-land.

With so narrow a definition of "nation state", I am left wondering what relevance "religious marriage existed long before nation states" has to the broader discussion.

> Well, nation states have only existed for 500 years or so

Wat.

States have existed far longer. "Nation state" refers specifically to a state which coincides with a cultural or ethnic group. If you had to choose a starting point for the idea of the nation state, the Treaty of Westphalia is one of the more reasonable.

Again, it depends on your definition of "state." If you're using the term interchangeably with the much broader term "government," which can include even the smallest and most primitive family or tribe power structures, then you can probably consider the state to be older than marriage (I actually think there's still room for debate even then, depending also on the definition of "marriage").

In reality-land, marriage is far older than English legal tradition.

Common law is the basis for US law, and drew on pre-English tradition. Crack a liberal arts book open some time.

I'm fully aware of that, but it's irrelevant to the claim that the poster suspects "that religious marriage existed long before nation states" being disputed with "the evidence shows that the English legal tradition considered marriage a civil institution long before the churches tried to claim it".

The simple fact is marriage easily predates all the English (pre or not) legal traditions. English (pre or not) traditions at best drew on the earlier concepts and practice of marriage.

Crack a world history book open sometime. Or just use google.

Humanity has definitely been around long before the current crop of judeo christian religions that our country's concept of religion is based upon. "Religion" is not a single entity, and not all religion defines marriage the same way conservative Christian sects do.

Marriage as a practical matter exists in all societies everywhere, in the absense of any institutions of organized religion or the political state. Read any ethnography of any stone-age people from the past several hundred years and you'll find social pair-bonding without any religious or state sanction. There is frequently family sanction, but that is clearly not what you are talking about.

For example: http://www.amazon.com/Anxious-Pleasures-Sexual-Amazonian-Peo...

And historically in the West, marriage as a sacrement didn't get off the ground until the late Middle Ages: the Council of Verona in 1184 if memory serves. And even long after that it was still mostly a practical matter for most people.