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Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster Now Can Perform Marriages In New Zealand (stuff.co.nz)
New submitter scrote-ma-hote writes: From stuff.co.nz, news comes that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is now able to solemnize marriages. The registration was listed in the NZ gazette yesterday. The Registrar-General decided that the Church met the criteria in New Zealand for solemnizing marriages, as per the Marriage Act 1955, namely that the "principal object of the organization was to uphold or promote religious beliefs, philosophical or humanitarian convictions."
The point was absolutely to join the ranks of the bullshit pedlars, to obtain the same benefits that they do because they wanted them to be exclusive to their beliefs.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Anybody can enter into a legal contract, overseen by standard contact law, to live together and share stuff.
THAT is not "marriage" in any normal sense, but it probably is the view of marriage that some secular humanists have. If humans are just evolved animals though, then there's really no more reason to have the institution of marriage than there is for any other evolved creatures. Whales do a perfectly good job of rearing offspring and hanging out in groups without any form of marriage.
Traditionally "marriage" presumes that humans are more than just animals, more than mere flash&blood, and in most cultures that there is a God or Gods involved in human existence (depending on the religion). As such, marriage is a binding agreement to stay together through thick and thin, in situations where normal contract law would happily support dissolution, with a reliance on, and an additional commitment to, some God/Gods. The fact that so many have in recent years succeeded in making modern marriage so cheap and easily undone that it now differs little from a secular legal commercial contract is very sad, and says more about those who have done this than about the institution itself. Now people walk out of marriages more easily than out of any other legal contract. Things like "no-fault divorce" were promoted as wonderful new "reforms" that would make people happier, but when I look around today I see very few people who are happily married after many decades where that was once the norm.
Talking of well-researched facts, The empire lasted just over 500 years, from 27BC to 476AD. Before the anti-Christian policies under Decius beginning in 250, there was no empire-wide edict against the Christians, and as you mention, the Edict of Milan put an end to that in 313 - so that makes 63 years. 63 years is nothing like 'the most of the time of the roman empire' - it's just under 13%.
What complicates early Christian history in rome is that for quite some time Christians offered themselves up for voluntary martyrdom, and this even became a bit of a problem, with Antoninus Pius ordering that Christians were not to be executed without proper trial.