Posted on 08/01/2007 6:56:01 AM PDT by average american student
Missing the Mark With Religion, Part 7
As a child growing up in New York, I was attracted to the opposite sex. When I saw a pretty little girl flash a smile, my heart fluttered, my cheeks blushed, I shuffled my feet and shyly looked the other way.
I always liked girls. No one had to tell me that I should. I just did.
When I became a teen, little changed. I still adored them, though when I thought of females, I began to think of marriage. Holy matrimony seemed like a prerequisite to happiness and completeness. Don't ask me why. It was instinct. I knew I was born to be married; and fortunately, no man, woman or institution stepped in to pervert nature's instincts.
Public schools, you see, and even television, still defended traditional values and helped reinforce what nature had implanted.
Benjamin Franklin Ben Franklin, a man from a value-laden era, and a man who was not the philanderer anti-American historical revisionists make him out to be (he firmly believed in the law of chastity, for instance), (1) expressed long ago what I by nature felt as a teen. In an attempt to persuade a young friend to reject the idea of a mistress and embrace the institution of marriage, Franklin wrote:
Marriage is the proper remedy. It is the most natural state of man, and therefore the state in which you are most likely to find solid happiness. Your reasons against entering into it at present appear to me not well founded. The circumstantial advantages you have in view by postponing it are not only uncertain, but they are small in comparison with that of the thing itself, the being married and settled. It is the man and woman united that make the complete human being.
(Excerpt) Read more at libertyletters.mensnewsdaily.com ...
Having just lost my husband of 49 years to cancer, I agree that this is an excellent article.
Proper marriages are the answer to most of this world’s problems.
I have not read the entire article, but I can tell you that marriage in Franklin’s day was a true covenant and people who made the committment and gave their word before God and many people remained true and loyal. Truth, loyalty, and committment are not seen as virtues by many progressive liberals today. Times have changed and not necessarily for the better.
May I offer my condolences. I will keep you, your family and your husband in my prayers.
Sadly this generation seems bent in going exactly in the opposite direction with the obvious results to follow.
In basic conception, marriage is superior to just "the biological imperative", as a system.
By this, I mean that marriage imparts advantages to the man, and the woman, and especially to their children, that basic biology doesn't convey.
To the man, marriage is the assurance that the female's offspring are his. To the woman, a double advantage that the male will help her raise her children, and the assurance that the male won't make children with other women, thus dividing his resources as a provider. And finally, we are all very familiar with the advantages to children of being raised in a two parent family.
The problems with marriage began when artificial cultural restrains were placed on it. Things such as forced and arranged marriage, dowry, and polygamy are so destructive to the concept of marriage that most civilizations outlaw them. But there are many more subtle cultural, and sometimes governmental conditions placed on marriage, many now forgotten, that in past were also onerous.
This caused a reaction, even a complete rejection of marriage as an institution, equating the very useful and desirable institution with the cultural corruption overlaying it.
In turn, those who completely rejected marriage tried to return to "the biological imperative" as an alternative to it, and even after endless and repeated failures and disasters from it, often still reject marriage as a sensible improvement.
Today, the most important true weakness associated with marriage is that it is no longer an "enforceable contract", respected by the community. But since society no longer enforces it, to some extent the government has seen fit to indirectly enforce some of its benefits.
This is mostly spousal support--alimony, and in the interests of the children. There are also "marriage benefits" in the law, with the recognition of the value of marriage to society.
It is clear where this will evolve in the future, if it is to recapture the value of the basic marriage contract.
Already today, when a child is born, some governments are requiring that the mother indicate the name of the child's father on the birth certificate, in case child support ever becomes an issue.
But in future, it will mandate that the hospital retain a sample of the mother and child's DNA from the umbilical cord, for the purpose of determining who the father is.
This has several purposes. First is to prove to the father that he is indeed the child's biological father. If this is the case, he automatically is responsible for the welfare of the child. Second, if he is NOT the father of the child, then he has the choice to either immediately divorce the woman, or to accept responsibility for the welfare of the child. Then the onus is on the woman to produce the real father, and serves as a deterrent to sexual cheating by either partner.
This reproduces the value of the marriage contract to him, while at the same time, firmly establishing responsibility for the welfare of the child.
If he refuses the test or responsibility, he may still be compelled at some point, through a paternity test, to assume responsibility. Or not, if the mother is financially sound and needs no assistance.
With this change in the law, the circle is complete, and marriage is once again guaranteed as superior to "the biological imperative", as a system, it providing advantages to the man, the woman, and especially the children.
Thanks!
I would not hold up Franklin as a poster child for marriage. He had more affairs than a good caterer.
To the man, marriage is the assurance that the female’s offspring are his. To the woman, a double advantage that the male will help her raise her children, and the assurance that the male won’t make children with other women,
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
That is how it is supposed to work but there is no real ASSURANCE of either these days. Now it is “mama’s baby, papa’s maybe” and papa is liable to be doing anything except working hard to support his legitimate offspring! He may expect mama to support the kids and him as well!
Franklin’s affairs are way overstated. The historical record does not support this contemporary view.
Covenant marriages are available in Arkansas, Arizona, and Louisiana. I don’t know of any others.
Actually I was referring to his Autobiography, wherein he tells his son in a letter to have affairs with ugly women, because they don’t complain,....and it goes on.
I am not disparaging his name, simply recalling his own words.
There’s no reason to believe he had more affairs than any of the other guys of his day.
We tend to put the founding fathers on pedestals. In fact, they were just a bunch of guys. Whether the fact that they were “human” diminishes or makes their achievement all the more great depends on who is reading history.
Actually, you and I are NOT in disagreement. There are some folks that I would hold up as role models for marraige. He ain’t one of them.
Great mind? Sure. Statesman? Yup. Excellent businessman and self promoter? Yes...and there isn’t anything wrong with that either.
Poster boy for fidelity? Nope.
“they were just a bunch of guys”
Right, DaVinci, Edison, Volta, and Patton were just a bunch of guys. You sound like the local 4th grader.
They were “just guys” — including those you mentioned — and not gods or beings of some different ilk. In my view that makes their achievements all the more remarkable.
Did any of you read the footnotes?
1. Franklin was in his 80s, beset with several incapacitating physical maladies – gout, boils and huge (some have said softball size) gall bladder stones (during the time he was supposedly philandering!) – and was thought of by the ladies in France, and the French in general, as “harmless,” “sober,” “a Quaker,” a man of “simplicity and innocence,” one of the “paragons of the age,” “beloved Papa,” and was proclaimed in the title of a portrait of Franklin commissioned in France as a “Man of Character.” It was true, at this age, that women enjoyed his company, and he theirs. Especially appealing to him was that French women were educated.
But the accusations against him as a philanderer were made by political enemies, denied by Franklin and those who knew him best (teaching on the principle of chastity, he counseled his son ‘to avoid the very appearance of evil,’ as a result of these political charges), and were, besides slander and libel, at his advanced age and particularly in his medical condition, nonsense as well. The one charge that might honestly be held against him was that he fathered a child in his youth, which today’s revisionist ‘historians’ mention in such unkind ways as “he fathered a bastard child,” but they rarely, if ever, tell the full story, that Franklin was quick to rectify his mistake and took good care of his obligations to mother and child the rest of his life, even finding honorable and profitable employment for the boy as he grew older.
This helps us understand why Franklin counseled so strongly against the same weakness in others. He learned the hard way, and wished to prevent others from sharing in the same fate. In light of all this, here’s a point to ponder: To the Christian who repents, God remembers the sin no more, but ‘historians,’ particularly those who wish to destroy America’s heritage, unveil just how un-Christian, how ill-motivated, they truly are by drudging up old mud, again and again – indeed, conjuring up new mud while they’re at it.
Do yourself a big favor and don’t trust revisionist historians as to who or what Franklin was. One of you guys noted his biography ... and yet the quote was one of humor, which Franklin had plenty of.
Further, as to “self-promoter,” where do you get that? Here’s a guy who often didn’t even seek credit for his discoveries, often all that mattered to him is that they were useful to his fellow man.
Further, had he been a self-promoter, the English government had on kinds of wealth and opportunities for power for him, guaranteed. He turned it down. He was principle driven, not driven by a lust for power and wealth.
Somewhere I read that Franklin’s biggest disappointment was in the people who by default turned his free lending library into a book-less series of dusty shelves.
Rather than what we see today, where fines for non-return are issued and enforced, he simply decided the lousy scofflaws weren’t ready for such a “progressive” idea and closed the shop.
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