Rick Warren's Other Lies: "One Man One Woman For 5000 Years In All Societies!"

Tell It To Solomon and See Him Laugh!

Typical of Rick Warren to latch on to a phrase and milk it for what it's worth (hey, "Whatever It Takes") even if it's not true. Not in the slightest.

"This is one thing, friends, that all politicians tend to agree on. Both Barack Obama and John McCain, I flat-out asked both of them: what is your definition of marriage? And they both said the same thing -- it is the traditional, historic, universal definition of marriage: one man and one woman, for life. And every culture for 5,000 years, and every religion for 5,000 years, has said the definition of marriage is between one man and a woman.

"One man one woman ... and every culture for 5,000 years, and every religion for 5,000 years." First of all, let's get a stupid error out of the way: if Warren believes in creationism as much as he says he does, it's 6000 years, not 5000. Actually - as of this writing - 6012 years, 167 days. Back in the 17th century a Bishop James Ussher calculated the age of the earth by totaling all "begats" from Adam through Christ and beyond. And he was VERY specific: it was October 23, 4004 BCE (AM - Ussher didn't have a Rolex so he couldn't tell us hours, minutes and seconds, but he did know it was sometime in the morning!)

Now let's go on to the more obvious error: "One man one woman." Not "one man, 300 women" or one man, 150 concubines." If Warren is such an inerrantist (he professes to be) he totally negates polygamy. Totally. According to Jewish law and the stories of the Bible, polygamy was legal and, for Israelite leaders, even necessary. Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines.

Now let's get to the "every society in history." Of the 1250 societies studied by various archeological and anthropological entities, only about 400 were heterosexual and/or monogamous. Four were actually polyandrous (women could have more than one man - the guys had to share!)

From wikipedia:

Polygamy may be polygyny (one man having more than one wife at the same time) or polyandry (one woman having more than one husband at the same time) and it has been practiced throughout history in almost all cultures and sanctioned by various religions where necessary to meet population or economic needs.

What about love? Yeah, so what about it. It wasn't until several hundred years ago that love began to be recognized as a basis for marriage. The two didn't "go together like horse and carriage" simply because marriage was looked upon as a legal expedient: dowry and legitimacy of offspring were really the only two reasons for marriage. The ancient Greeks (always the front runners to good breeding), did not even have the same concept of marriage as we have today: a woman was considered more of a "sister" to the husband than a "wife" and taken in as such by the husband's family.

So is Rick Warren openly lying about marriage? Yes. Why? Because he would have had to learn SOMETHING in his 5th rate Baptist College about marriage. Anyway, all he had to do was read the Bible to know that "one man one woman" would have been a joke to ancient societies. With "One man one woman for 5000 years in every culture, every religion", Warren depends heavily on the fact that Americans have always hated history in the classroom and not much of it ever sank in. Yeah, Americans really suck when it comes to knowing history - theirs or anyone else's.

But taking advantage of the historigraphical illiterati is WRONG. Warren knows it. Dobson knows it. Robertson knows it. Parsley knows it. Hagee knows it. Copeland knows it. Even Hinn knows it (but doesn't care - at least not when he's choreographing 20 people to fall down in sequence!).

So every one of Rick Warren's pronouncements should come with a disclaimer:

"All statements subject to fact-checking. Consult your local historian."