by Gary C. Gibson

Created on: November 22, 2009

That 'most religions' prohibit premarital sex presupposes a particular finite set of religions as representative of all. There may be more religions that have no opinion about sex than those that do-its difficult say if we consider all of the historical pagan religions that have come and gone. However we shall attempt to consider the issue as it is given to us, and assume that contemporary world major religions are the reference intended.

Many religions outside our reference group had no concept of marriage of course. Then all of the feral people outside of civilizations had no organized religion. Religions tended to be socially developed institutions as were militaries and governents. Wit the female human gestation period being niine months it was reasonable that women prefered security during that time. Occassionally they found that in curde collectives-even in caves I would guess, yet dominant males perhaps preferred to have a harem or group of women to protect. I would think that custom required a little more establishment of states and of individual male power to emplyee retaiiners of war and harem defense. We see middle eastern desert patriarchs following that custom as they were animal herders outside of permanently civilized areas.

In England women demanded the legal protection of marriage so their 'husband' couldn't just run off. It was an important custom until recently when birth control enabled the freedom of women along with improving economic opportunities to labor for profit instead of just birth. At the end of the dark ages of Europe male-female conjugal relationships generally merged into sanctioned religious marriage. Church was dominated by state-after Hobbes and the eventual regicide of James II with the following ascension of Cromwell the monarch became head of the church in the isles and realms. It became convenient for churchmen and nobility to exclusively control lawful sexual assignations for breeding and taxation purposes. We find similar policies in slavery and serfdom, with the right for firsst intercourse reserved to the local nobility.

This essay is moving towards Christiandom of course, since it is that religion of a billion today-fair enough. Left-handed tantric Buddhists priests of course had sex with a different woman every day for some tantric reason I cannot recall. We will leave Buddhism out of our consideration therefor.

Muhammadans provide a believer may have three wives I believe, if he can afford them. It is a pastoral

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