Judeo-Christian Marriages

Man + Woman “Nuclear Family” (Genesis 2:24)

• Wives subordinate to their husbands.
• Interfaith marriages forbidden.
• Marriages generally arranged, not based on romantic love.
• Bride who could not prove her virginity was stoned to death.

Man + Woman + Woman’s Property (Genesis 16)

• Man could acquire his wife’s property including her slaves.

Man + Brother’s Widow “Levirate Marriage” (Genesis 38: 6-10)

• Widow who had not borne a son required to marry her brother in law.
• Must submit sexually to her new husband.

Male Slave + Female Slave (Exodus 21:4)

• Slave owner could assign female slaves to his male slaves.
• Female slaves must submit sexually to their new husbands.

Male Soldier + Prisoner of War (Deuteronomy 21:11-14) & (Number 31:1-18)

• Under Moses’ command, Israelites kill every Midianite man, woman child; save for the virgin girls who are taken as spoils of war.
• Wives must submit sexually to their new owners.

Rapist + His Victim (Deuteronomy 22:28-29)

• Virgin who is raped must marry her rapist.
• Rapist must pay victim’s father 50 shekels of silver for property loss.

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In the Aztec language, the words for sun and eagle are the same – so are the words for moon and rabbit.

In 2011, ASAPS (American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery) surgeons performed 316,848 breast-augmentation procedures.

If you drilled a tunnel straight through the Earth and jumped in, it would take you exactly 42 minutes and 12 seconds to get to the other side.

In Cambodia, male prostitutes outnumber female prostitutes by a ratio of three to one.

Iran is one of the few countries in the world where a couple can have a “temporary marriage” in order to facilitate sex within wedlock – essentially prostitution. These so-called marriages can be valid for as short as an hour.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts

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Anthropologies believe that man has known how to use fire for 500,000 years, but only learned how to make it himself 12,000 years ago.

Prior to 1962, sodomy was illegal in every US State.

The flag of Paraguay is the only current national flag whose obverse and reverse sides are neither identical nor mirrored.

Legendary Cuban Communist revolutionary Che Guevara was born in Argentina.

Until 1857, in the UK, a husband wishing to end an unhappy marriage could sell his wife. The cost was about £3,000 – roughly £223,000 in today’s money.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts

On Non-violence

“I first learned the concepts of non-violence in my marriage.”

– Mohandas Gandhi

Anna Karenina Principle

In his book Guns Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond uses the Anna Karenina Principle to explain the success of certain societies as opposed to others by explaining how some animals could domesticated and some could not.

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina (1948 film)

The first line of Tolstoy’s great novel tries to explain why some relationships work and others fail. According to Diamond, this also applies to the process of domesticating animals.

Just like relationships fail for many different reasons, certain societies failed to domesticate the animals in their respective geographic regions for different reasons.

There are many contributing factors which make a family, or a marriage happy; however, if one of those key components fails, the whole thing falls apart or loses its ability to be considered happy – the same is true for the successful domestication of animals.

Diamond tries to explain how some species of mammals were not domesticated because they were not a good fit with man.

“The Anna Karenina principle explains a feature of animal domestication that had heavy consequences for human history, namely that so many seemingly suitable wild mammal species, such as zebras and peccaries have never been domesticated.” – Jared Diamond, Guns Germs and Steel

According to the Anna Karenia principle – which says that if one of the basic factors of a good relationship fails, the marriage or the relationship will not succeed – applying this to the domestication of animals goes like this: if the animals in an environment were not a good fit for domestication than the society could not access this resource in the same way that the successful Eurasians did because they had animals in their geographic region that were easy to domesticate.

For example, just like happy marriages that have certain factors for success, domesticating animals also have to fit into certain categories in order to succeed in becoming domestic and therefore assisting man in his survival.

1. Diet; It matters what they eat and how much, if the animal eats too much than it isn’t worth the effort to domesticate.

2. Growth Rate; To be worth keeping or domesticating, animals must grow quickly.

3. Problems of Captive Breeding; The animals must be able to successfully breed in captivity, have live births.

4. Disposition; If the animal is nasty or capable of killing humans and are really dangerous, that disqualifies them for domestication.

5. Tendency to Panic; Some species of large animal tend to get nervous and run, this is counter productive to domestication.

6. Social Structure; If the animal lives in groups then it tends to be more easily domesticated, rather than animals who live alone and prowl.

Assortative Mating‏

In human genetics, assortative mating‏ is a form of non-random mating in which pair bonds are established on the basis of phenotype i.e. observable characteristics, which is thought to underlie mate selection in a variety of animal species as well.

“I had a patient once who dreamed she kept her husband in the deep freeze except for mating. Lots of men feel that way.” – Robert Johnson

Two Coccinella Septempunctata, or Ladybirds mating

In human relations, the assortative mating‏ process may lead a person to choose a mate according to religious, cultural, or ethnic preferences, professional interests, or physical traits.

Positive assortative mating, or homogamy, exists when people choose to mate with persons similar to themselves; this type of selection is very common.

Negative assortative mating is the opposite case, when people avoid mating with persons similar to themselves.

“All nature’s creatures join to express nature’s purpose. Somewhere in their mounting and mating, rutting and butting is the very secret of nature itself.” – Graham Swift

Marriage in Ancient Greece

‘Among the citizen population in the Athens of Plato and Aristotle boys and girls were reared separately, and the boys attended school but the girls did not. Polygamy was forbidden but flourished informally as concubinage practiced by married men. For this and other reasons, including a shortage of women because of female infanticide, girls married young and the husband usually was considerably older than the wife. As a result of this age difference, the low average age of marriage for girls (about 16), the prevalence of arranged marriage, the practice of sequestering women, and the difference in educational attainments between the spouses, marriage was not companionate. Spouses were not good friends, united by bonds of love and trust and by shared interests, values, and experiences. They did not socialize together, did not even take meals together. And there was no expectation that the husband would be faithful to his wife–just that he would not bring his concubines into the marital home. Remember that one function of sex is to cement relationships. The thinner the relationship between husband and wife, the less demand there is for the cement of sex.’

– Posner. R.A. 1992. Sex and Reason Cambridge, United States: Harvard University Press (1992) p. 146

Non-monogamy

For centuries, the Judeo-Christian moral code has defined the official relationship standard in western-society – the monogamous relationship:

• monogamy, an exclusive relationship with one partner.

There are quite a number of variations on the ‘standard’ monogamous relationship. The blanket term is non-monogamy. This phenomenon is also defined as polyamory, in which participants have not one but multiple romantic and/or sexual partners. Forms of non-monogamy include:

• infidelity, in which a person has a sexual ‘affair’ outside of an otherwise monogamous relationship;
• casual relationship, an emotional relationship between two unmarried people who may also have a sexual relationship;
• open marriage, in which one or both members of a committed couple may become sexually active with other partners;
• swinging, several open relationships which are commonly conducted as an organized social activity;
• ménage à trois, a sexual (or sometimes domestic) arrangement involving three people of either sex;
• orgy (also known as, a sexual relationship involving more than two sexual participants at the same time;
• polyfidelity, in which participants have multiple partners but restrict sexual activity to within a certain group;
• polygynandry (also known as a group marriage), in which several people form a single family unit, with all considered to be married to one another;
• polygamy, in which one person in a relationship has married multiple partners;
• polyandry, in which women have multiple husbands;
• polygyny, in which men have multiple wives;
• plural marriage, a form of polygyny associated with the Latter Day Saint movement in the 19th-century and with present-day splinter groups from that faith.