Read what Freud (who was an atheist) had to say about homosexuality for starters.
You needn’t go as far back as Freud. Hell, read what Ayn Rand had to say about homosexuality (and she thought that God existing was metaphysically impossible and religion was the “negation of reason”).
I agree with the statements of fact but not with the inference drawn from them. While Jiro’s argument is poorly expressed, I think it is reasonable to say that opposition to homosexuality would not have been the default stance of the cultures of or derived from Europe if not for Christianity being the dominant religion in previous years. While the Communists rejected religion, they did not fully update on this rejection, but rather continued in many of the beliefs that religion had caused to be part of their culture.
I am not sure that “the atheists actually thought gay marriage was a sane idea but didn’t say so for fear of how they’d look to their religious neighbors” was Jiro’s position, but I think that it is a straw man.
...I think it is reasonable to say that opposition to homosexuality would not have been the default stance of the cultures of or derived from Europe if not for Christianity being the dominant religion in previous years. While the Communists rejected religion, they did not fully update on this rejection, but rather continued in many of the beliefs that religion had caused to be part of their culture.
Blaming lingering Christian memes for the illegality of gay marriage doesn’t seem right to me, because almost all countries that currently allow it are predominantly Christian or Post-Christian. Are there any countries that allow gay marriage that don’t have a longish history of Christianity?
There have been plenty of cultures where homosexuality was accepted; classical Greece and Rome, for example. Cultures where marriage is predominantly a governmental matter rather than a religious one are all, as far as I am aware, heavily influenced by the cultures of western Europe. One might also observe that all of these countries are industrial or post-industrial, and have large populations of young people with vastly more economic and sexual freedom than occured before the middle of the 20th century. One might also observe that China, Japan and South Korea seem to be the only countries at this level of economic development that were not culturally dominated by colonial states.
The fact that a history of Christianity is positively correlated with approval for gay marriage does not imply that Christian memes directly influence stances on homosexuality. Christianity spread around the world alongside other memes (such as democracy and case law). Those countries where European colonies were culturally dominant also received the industrial revolution and the immense increases in personal rights that came as a consequence of the increased economic and political power of the working class. One might also point out that thinking black people are inferior is a meme that arose from the slave trade in Christian semi-democracies.
There seems to be abundant evidence that the Abrahamic religions have strongly influenced societal views worldwide with regard to sexual morals; indeed, I cannot imagine a remotely plausible argument for this being untrue. I also wish to observe that Eastern Orthodox Christianity survived the USSR and still affects cultural values in Russia; it seems highly improbable that it did not influence Russian culture in the 1930s.
There have been plenty of cultures where homosexuality was accepted; classical Greece and Rome, for example.
And, as Vaniver pointed out, feudal Japan and imperial China as well. However, none of these societies allowed gay marriage, as far as I know.
Note that in all pre-modern, and in particular pre-industrial, societies, economic and military strength were constrained by population size. Also, social organization was centred around clans/extended families. Therefore, marrying and making lots of children was considered a duty of every man and woman towards both their clan and their country.
There seem to be some exceptions to the rule: the Catholic Church attempted to bar its priests from marrying, with little success until the 11th century, possibly to avoid priests spread in a multitude of countries, over which the Church had little control, to form dynastic lines. Priests still provided valuable services to their communities, hence the loss of fertility caused by the marriage ban was tolerated. I suppose that similar arguments can be made for Buddhist priests, but I’m not as knowledgeable of Asian history.
However, none of these societies allowed gay marriage, as far as I know.
You have to be careful with terminology here. Let’s say that in some society it’s acceptable for a man and a woman to live together and have regular sex. The society calls this relationship by the word X. In the same society it is also acceptable for a man and another man to live together and have regular sex. The society calls this relationship by the word Y.
Now, X and Y are different words but by itself that does not mean that this society does not “allow gay marriage”. It might mean that all it does is distinguish between two (or more) kinds of “marriage”.
To figure out whether a society “allows gay marriage” you probably need to taboo the word “marriage” and define what does your question mean—most likely in terms of a bundle of rights and obligations that comes with the declaration of some sort of a union between some people.
All known human societies, present and past, have heterosexual marriage: a man and a woman perform a ritual in front of their community and a religious figure or elder, throw a large party with lots of food, and then they go to live toghether and have regular sex, and the community will consider them a family, which entails a number of rights and obligations depending on the local laws and customs.
In many societies a man can marry multiple women, although usually only high status men do it. In very few societies a woman can marry multiple men, usually brothers or cousins. But even in a polygamous marriage the marriage relationship is largely intended to be binary: one party can be married with multiple parties, but these other parties aren’t married to each other. They have few mutual rights and obligations and are generally not expected to have sex with each others.
Traditionally, in socieites which accepted homosexuality, there was no equivalent of the marriage relationship for people of the same sex. Homosexual relationships were intended to be pre-marital and extra-marital, occurring aside heterosexual family-building marriage. Cohabitation and regular sex between unmarried people of the same sex may have been tolerated, but it was not encouraged, and certainly not given social or legal recognition.
Legally and socially recognized homosexual marriage only occurs in some modern Western societies.
I’m not sure this is true. In ~350 Emperor Constantius II ordered executions of people who were same-sex married, and outlawing it going forward. It seems this law would be unnecessary if legal, same-sex marriages weren’t rarely occurring and legally recognized in Republican Rome. Also, Nero famously married two men, so there were at least two legally recognized Roman same-sex marriages, if only legal by will of the emperor.
Also, many traditional societies (the Gikuyu and Nandi for instance) have same-sex or third-sex marriage as a legal practice to deal with inheritance. Its purpose is not sexual, but nothing stops it from becoming so. Native American tribes had marriages between berdaches and men. The fuijan, in China, also had religious same-sex marriages (I have no idea if they were legally, but according to Passions of the Cut Sleeve they were socially recognized).
Emperor Nero was known for being a weirdo, hence I wouldn’t consider him as representative of Roman culture.
Anyway, according to Wikipedia, stable or semi-stable same-sex relationships were given some degree of legal recognition in Rome and other ancient societies, hence it appears that my original claim should be weakened.
Traditionally, in socieites which accepted homosexuality, there was no equivalent of the marriage relationship for people of the same sex.
That sounds like a naked assertion not much supported by evidence. Since we were talking about Asia, here is a passage from Wikipedia talking about Japan:
From religious circles, same-sex love spread to the warrior (samurai) class, where it was customary for a boy in the wakashū age category to undergo training in the martial arts by apprenticing to a more experienced adult man. The man was permitted, if the boy agreed, to take the boy as his lover until he came of age; this relationship, often formalized in a “brotherhood contract”,[11] was expected to be exclusive, with both partners swearing to take no other (male) lovers. This practice, along with clerical pederasty, developed into the codified system of age-structured homosexuality known as shudō, abbreviated from wakashūdo, the “way (do) of wakashū”.[12] The older partner, in the role of nenja, would teach the wakashū martial skills, warrior etiquette, and the samurai code of honor, while his desire to be a good role model for his wakashū would lead him to behave more honorably himself; thus a shudō relationship was considered to have a “mutually ennobling effect”.[13] In addition, both parties were expected to be loyal unto death...
Looks like an “equivalent of the marriage relationship”, doesn’t it?
The man was permitted, if the boy agreed, to take the boy as his lover until he came of age
It doesn’t really look like a marriage relationship, it seems more like the master-disciple pederastic relationships of ancient Greece, although perhaps more formalized.
It doesn’t really look like a marriage relationship
That’s the thing, isn’t it? Whether it looks like one or not critically depends on your idea of what a “marriage relationship” is.
For example, there are a bunch of people who define marriage as a “union between a man and a woman”. Given this definition, of course the idea of gay marriage is nonsense. Given a different definition it may not be, though.
I repeat my suggestion of tabooing “marriage”. I suspect that talking about what kind of relationships should society recognize and what kinds of rights and obligations do these relationships give rise to could be more productive. If that’s possible, that is.
I suppose that similar arguments can be made for Buddhist priests, but I’m not as knowledgeable of Asian history.
Well, most strains of Buddhism don’t formalize a role like that of Catholic priests; there are ordained monastics, some of whom are also teachers, and there are lay teachers, but there isn’t a process of ordainment specifically for religious instructors. That monastic community is quite old and well-developed, though, and its members (monks, nuns) have generally been expected to be celibate.
Some strains do include variations that are less restrictive. The Dzogchen tradition in Tibet provides for noncelibate ngakpa, for example. Most Buddhist monks in Japan, and some in China and Korea, take vows that allow for marriage. Theravada traditions in Southeast Asia often encourage temporary ordination (generally for older male children).
One might also observe that China, Japan and South Korea seem to be the only countries at this level of economic development that were not culturally dominated by colonial states.
I get the impression that both China and Japan (I’m less familiar with Korea) are accepting of homosexual desire and activity, and assumed that bisexuality (of some sort) was normal, and almost all opposition to it stems from Christian influences in the 1800s. I think that none of them have gay marriage, or any sort of serious movement towards gay marriage, because of a conception of marriage as family-creating, rather than bond-creating, and under such a view obviously sterile marriages are a bad idea. (Why not just marry a woman and have a male lover?)
This was certainly the attitude of ancient Greece, to a first approximation anyway (they didn’t even have a social category for gay relationships between two men of equal status).
I’m not sure how much this was the case in China. Given how fashionable it is in certain parts of academia to retroactively declare historical people gay, I’d take this claim with a grain of salt.
This was certainly the attitude of ancient Greece, to a first approximation anyway (they didn’t even have a social category for gay relationships between two men of equal status).
This is the way it was in Japan and China, and seems to be the societal default. Male-male relationships were typically between older and younger men, with some between two young men.
Given how fashionable it is in certain parts of academia to retroactively declare historical people gay, I’d take this claim with a grain of salt.
Which claim? The evidence for existence of socially acceptable sexual relationships between men seems as good for ancient China and Japan as it is for ancient Greece.
(Agreed that individual claims of sexuality- was Buchanan gay, or just asexual?- are dubious, because it’s hard to get anything more definite than a “maybe,” but it’s much easier to be confident about aggregates: at least some of the historical figures suspected to be gay were gay.)
I’ve heard one suggestion that it might not even make sense to talk about people in societies with different sexual morals, such as the ancient Greeks or the Chinese and Japanese in these examples, as being “gay” or “straight” in the sense that modern Western countries talk about it. They certainly didn’t see themselves that way. It’s clear from examples like pederasty that cultural values have a lot of impact not only on how people act sexually, but on how they conceive of sexuality.
On the other hand, it’s clear from the existence of “homosexuality” even amidst Christian moral values that humans also have innate tendencies on this that differ from person to person for some reason.
But I’m not sure if we really know enough to say what those innate tendencies are like on a statistical level; we don’t have any large data on a society with minimal enough influence on both sexual mores and the conception of sexuality that we can see how humans act as a result.
Maybe studying a large number of hunter-gatherer societies would give us something similar; they’d all have societies with specific conceptions of sexual morals, but we’d avoid most arbitrary distinctions and get at some things that actually relate to natural human tendencies, even if they aren’t the pure expression of them.
And as far as I can tell, they didn’t have a very high opinion of European intelligence, customs, or capacity for civilization either—though ibn Fadlan might have been excused, considering who he was dealing with.
I’ve read it. Views about black people in the Islamic Golden Age were not the cause of views about black people in the nations participating in the transatlantic slave trade; a quick check of Wikipedia confirms that slavery as a formal institution had to redevelop in the English colonies, as chattel slavery had virtually disappeared after the Norman Conquest and villeinage was largely gone by the beginning of the 17th century. One might as well argue that the ethic of recipricocity in modern Europe owes its origin to Confucian ren.
Views about black people in the Islamic Golden Age were not the cause of views about black people in the nations participating in the transatlantic slave trade;
I never said they were. It’s possible that both views had a common cause, e.g., blacks actually being less intelligent.
Firstly, that explanation has a very low probability of being true. Even if we assume that important systematic differences in IQ existed for the relevant period, we are making a very strong claim when we say that slavery is a direct result of lower IQ. As you yourself point out, Arabs also historically enslaved Europeans; one might also observe that the Vikings did an awful lot of enslaving. Should we therefore conclude that the Nordic peoples are more intelligent than the Slavs and Anglo-Saxons?
Secondly, your objection now reduces to “other people in history were predjudiced against blacks, so modern prejudice is probably not a consequence of slavery”. Obviously it reduces the probability, but by a very small amount. Other people have also been angry with Bob; nevertheless, it remains extremely probable that I am angry because he just punched me.
Are you seriously trying to argue that the prejudice against blacks in Europe and the USA is not a consequence of the slave trade?
we are making a very strong claim when we say that slavery is a direct result of lower IQ.
I meant the views on black people.
Secondly, your objection now reduces to “other people in history were predjudiced against blacks, so modern prejudice is probably not a consequence of slavery”. Obviously it reduces the probability, but by a very small amount.
True, we better evidence that modern “prejudice” against blacks is due to the “prejudices” largely being accurate. Namely the fact that the prejudices are in fact accurate, in the sense that (whether because of nature or nurture) blacks are in fact less intelligent and more prone to criminality than whites.
Are you seriously trying to argue that the prejudice against blacks in Europe and the USA is not a consequence of the slave trade?
They are an indirect consequence of the slave trade in the sense that the slave trade resulted in large numbers of blacks in the United States (and also possibly contributed to the difference in intelligence).
Cultures where marriage is predominantly a governmental matter rather than a religious one are all, as far as I am aware, heavily influenced by the cultures of western Europe.
My understanding of non-Christian cultures is that this claim is dubious. Of course the notion of a separation of religion and state is itself a modern western notion, so it’s hard to say what this means for most cultures.
The modern West treats marriage as being primarily about romantic love, which is an idea not shared by earlier cultures. A culture which does not see romantic love as the essential component of marriage would be unlikely to come up with the idea of gay marriage. There may be some convoluted connection between Christianity and the Western ideal of love-based marriage, but it seems likely that if there were a culture that had the same overriding love-marriage association without any religious objections to homosexuality, that culture would endorse gay marriage.
You needn’t go as far back as Freud. Hell, read what Ayn Rand had to say about homosexuality (and she thought that God existing was metaphysically impossible and religion was the “negation of reason”).
I agree with the statements of fact but not with the inference drawn from them. While Jiro’s argument is poorly expressed, I think it is reasonable to say that opposition to homosexuality would not have been the default stance of the cultures of or derived from Europe if not for Christianity being the dominant religion in previous years. While the Communists rejected religion, they did not fully update on this rejection, but rather continued in many of the beliefs that religion had caused to be part of their culture.
I am not sure that “the atheists actually thought gay marriage was a sane idea but didn’t say so for fear of how they’d look to their religious neighbors” was Jiro’s position, but I think that it is a straw man.
Blaming lingering Christian memes for the illegality of gay marriage doesn’t seem right to me, because almost all countries that currently allow it are predominantly Christian or Post-Christian. Are there any countries that allow gay marriage that don’t have a longish history of Christianity?
No. There are 17 countries that allow it and 2 that allow it in some jurisdictions. A list may be found here: http://www.pewforum.org/2013/12/19/gay-marriage-around-the-world-2013/
There have been plenty of cultures where homosexuality was accepted; classical Greece and Rome, for example. Cultures where marriage is predominantly a governmental matter rather than a religious one are all, as far as I am aware, heavily influenced by the cultures of western Europe. One might also observe that all of these countries are industrial or post-industrial, and have large populations of young people with vastly more economic and sexual freedom than occured before the middle of the 20th century. One might also observe that China, Japan and South Korea seem to be the only countries at this level of economic development that were not culturally dominated by colonial states.
The fact that a history of Christianity is positively correlated with approval for gay marriage does not imply that Christian memes directly influence stances on homosexuality. Christianity spread around the world alongside other memes (such as democracy and case law). Those countries where European colonies were culturally dominant also received the industrial revolution and the immense increases in personal rights that came as a consequence of the increased economic and political power of the working class. One might also point out that thinking black people are inferior is a meme that arose from the slave trade in Christian semi-democracies.
There seems to be abundant evidence that the Abrahamic religions have strongly influenced societal views worldwide with regard to sexual morals; indeed, I cannot imagine a remotely plausible argument for this being untrue. I also wish to observe that Eastern Orthodox Christianity survived the USSR and still affects cultural values in Russia; it seems highly improbable that it did not influence Russian culture in the 1930s.
And, as Vaniver pointed out, feudal Japan and imperial China as well. However, none of these societies allowed gay marriage, as far as I know.
Note that in all pre-modern, and in particular pre-industrial, societies, economic and military strength were constrained by population size. Also, social organization was centred around clans/extended families.
Therefore, marrying and making lots of children was considered a duty of every man and woman towards both their clan and their country.
There seem to be some exceptions to the rule: the Catholic Church attempted to bar its priests from marrying, with little success until the 11th century, possibly to avoid priests spread in a multitude of countries, over which the Church had little control, to form dynastic lines. Priests still provided valuable services to their communities, hence the loss of fertility caused by the marriage ban was tolerated.
I suppose that similar arguments can be made for Buddhist priests, but I’m not as knowledgeable of Asian history.
You have to be careful with terminology here. Let’s say that in some society it’s acceptable for a man and a woman to live together and have regular sex. The society calls this relationship by the word X. In the same society it is also acceptable for a man and another man to live together and have regular sex. The society calls this relationship by the word Y.
Now, X and Y are different words but by itself that does not mean that this society does not “allow gay marriage”. It might mean that all it does is distinguish between two (or more) kinds of “marriage”.
To figure out whether a society “allows gay marriage” you probably need to taboo the word “marriage” and define what does your question mean—most likely in terms of a bundle of rights and obligations that comes with the declaration of some sort of a union between some people.
All known human societies, present and past, have heterosexual marriage: a man and a woman perform a ritual in front of their community and a religious figure or elder, throw a large party with lots of food, and then they go to live toghether and have regular sex, and the community will consider them a family, which entails a number of rights and obligations depending on the local laws and customs.
In many societies a man can marry multiple women, although usually only high status men do it. In very few societies a woman can marry multiple men, usually brothers or cousins. But even in a polygamous marriage the marriage relationship is largely intended to be binary: one party can be married with multiple parties, but these other parties aren’t married to each other. They have few mutual rights and obligations and are generally not expected to have sex with each others.
Traditionally, in socieites which accepted homosexuality, there was no equivalent of the marriage relationship for people of the same sex. Homosexual relationships were intended to be pre-marital and extra-marital, occurring aside heterosexual family-building marriage.
Cohabitation and regular sex between unmarried people of the same sex may have been tolerated, but it was not encouraged, and certainly not given social or legal recognition.
Legally and socially recognized homosexual marriage only occurs in some modern Western societies.
EDIT:
Apparently, some ancient societies did give some degree of legal recognition to same-sex unions, although not equivalent to heterosexual marriage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_same-sex_unions
I’m not sure this is true. In ~350 Emperor Constantius II ordered executions of people who were same-sex married, and outlawing it going forward. It seems this law would be unnecessary if legal, same-sex marriages weren’t rarely occurring and legally recognized in Republican Rome. Also, Nero famously married two men, so there were at least two legally recognized Roman same-sex marriages, if only legal by will of the emperor.
Also, many traditional societies (the Gikuyu and Nandi for instance) have same-sex or third-sex marriage as a legal practice to deal with inheritance. Its purpose is not sexual, but nothing stops it from becoming so. Native American tribes had marriages between berdaches and men. The fuijan, in China, also had religious same-sex marriages (I have no idea if they were legally, but according to Passions of the Cut Sleeve they were socially recognized).
Emperor Nero was known for being a weirdo, hence I wouldn’t consider him as representative of Roman culture.
Anyway, according to Wikipedia, stable or semi-stable same-sex relationships were given some degree of legal recognition in Rome and other ancient societies, hence it appears that my original claim should be weakened.
That sounds like a naked assertion not much supported by evidence. Since we were talking about Asia, here is a passage from Wikipedia talking about Japan:
Looks like an “equivalent of the marriage relationship”, doesn’t it?
It doesn’t really look like a marriage relationship, it seems more like the master-disciple pederastic relationships of ancient Greece, although perhaps more formalized.
That’s the thing, isn’t it? Whether it looks like one or not critically depends on your idea of what a “marriage relationship” is.
For example, there are a bunch of people who define marriage as a “union between a man and a woman”. Given this definition, of course the idea of gay marriage is nonsense. Given a different definition it may not be, though.
I repeat my suggestion of tabooing “marriage”. I suspect that talking about what kind of relationships should society recognize and what kinds of rights and obligations do these relationships give rise to could be more productive. If that’s possible, that is.
For starters, compare it to marriage in the society in question.
The religious leader is not actually required in marriage cerimonies for all religions.
Well, most strains of Buddhism don’t formalize a role like that of Catholic priests; there are ordained monastics, some of whom are also teachers, and there are lay teachers, but there isn’t a process of ordainment specifically for religious instructors. That monastic community is quite old and well-developed, though, and its members (monks, nuns) have generally been expected to be celibate.
Some strains do include variations that are less restrictive. The Dzogchen tradition in Tibet provides for noncelibate ngakpa, for example. Most Buddhist monks in Japan, and some in China and Korea, take vows that allow for marriage. Theravada traditions in Southeast Asia often encourage temporary ordination (generally for older male children).
I get the impression that both China and Japan (I’m less familiar with Korea) are accepting of homosexual desire and activity, and assumed that bisexuality (of some sort) was normal, and almost all opposition to it stems from Christian influences in the 1800s. I think that none of them have gay marriage, or any sort of serious movement towards gay marriage, because of a conception of marriage as family-creating, rather than bond-creating, and under such a view obviously sterile marriages are a bad idea. (Why not just marry a woman and have a male lover?)
This was certainly the attitude of ancient Greece, to a first approximation anyway (they didn’t even have a social category for gay relationships between two men of equal status).
I’m not sure how much this was the case in China. Given how fashionable it is in certain parts of academia to retroactively declare historical people gay, I’d take this claim with a grain of salt.
This is the way it was in Japan and China, and seems to be the societal default. Male-male relationships were typically between older and younger men, with some between two young men.
Which claim? The evidence for existence of socially acceptable sexual relationships between men seems as good for ancient China and Japan as it is for ancient Greece.
(Agreed that individual claims of sexuality- was Buchanan gay, or just asexual?- are dubious, because it’s hard to get anything more definite than a “maybe,” but it’s much easier to be confident about aggregates: at least some of the historical figures suspected to be gay were gay.)
I’ve heard one suggestion that it might not even make sense to talk about people in societies with different sexual morals, such as the ancient Greeks or the Chinese and Japanese in these examples, as being “gay” or “straight” in the sense that modern Western countries talk about it. They certainly didn’t see themselves that way. It’s clear from examples like pederasty that cultural values have a lot of impact not only on how people act sexually, but on how they conceive of sexuality.
On the other hand, it’s clear from the existence of “homosexuality” even amidst Christian moral values that humans also have innate tendencies on this that differ from person to person for some reason. But I’m not sure if we really know enough to say what those innate tendencies are like on a statistical level; we don’t have any large data on a society with minimal enough influence on both sexual mores and the conception of sexuality that we can see how humans act as a result. Maybe studying a large number of hunter-gatherer societies would give us something similar; they’d all have societies with specific conceptions of sexual morals, but we’d avoid most arbitrary distinctions and get at some things that actually relate to natural human tendencies, even if they aren’t the pure expression of them.
Read Arabian Nights, blacks are portrayed pretty negatively there as well.
Arabs had been enslaving Africans since medieval times.
They were also enslaving Europeans.
And as far as I can tell, they didn’t have a very high opinion of European intelligence, customs, or capacity for civilization either—though ibn Fadlan might have been excused, considering who he was dealing with.
I’ve read it. Views about black people in the Islamic Golden Age were not the cause of views about black people in the nations participating in the transatlantic slave trade; a quick check of Wikipedia confirms that slavery as a formal institution had to redevelop in the English colonies, as chattel slavery had virtually disappeared after the Norman Conquest and villeinage was largely gone by the beginning of the 17th century. One might as well argue that the ethic of recipricocity in modern Europe owes its origin to Confucian ren.
I never said they were. It’s possible that both views had a common cause, e.g., blacks actually being less intelligent.
Firstly, that explanation has a very low probability of being true. Even if we assume that important systematic differences in IQ existed for the relevant period, we are making a very strong claim when we say that slavery is a direct result of lower IQ. As you yourself point out, Arabs also historically enslaved Europeans; one might also observe that the Vikings did an awful lot of enslaving. Should we therefore conclude that the Nordic peoples are more intelligent than the Slavs and Anglo-Saxons?
Secondly, your objection now reduces to “other people in history were predjudiced against blacks, so modern prejudice is probably not a consequence of slavery”. Obviously it reduces the probability, but by a very small amount. Other people have also been angry with Bob; nevertheless, it remains extremely probable that I am angry because he just punched me.
Are you seriously trying to argue that the prejudice against blacks in Europe and the USA is not a consequence of the slave trade?
I meant the views on black people.
True, we better evidence that modern “prejudice” against blacks is due to the “prejudices” largely being accurate. Namely the fact that the prejudices are in fact accurate, in the sense that (whether because of nature or nurture) blacks are in fact less intelligent and more prone to criminality than whites.
They are an indirect consequence of the slave trade in the sense that the slave trade resulted in large numbers of blacks in the United States (and also possibly contributed to the difference in intelligence).
My understanding of non-Christian cultures is that this claim is dubious. Of course the notion of a separation of religion and state is itself a modern western notion, so it’s hard to say what this means for most cultures.
The modern West treats marriage as being primarily about romantic love, which is an idea not shared by earlier cultures. A culture which does not see romantic love as the essential component of marriage would be unlikely to come up with the idea of gay marriage. There may be some convoluted connection between Christianity and the Western ideal of love-based marriage, but it seems likely that if there were a culture that had the same overriding love-marriage association without any religious objections to homosexuality, that culture would endorse gay marriage.