re: #14 Fourth Football of the Apocalypse

This is actually about the worst argument a religious or Christian conservative should try to advance.

In the gospel accounts, towards the end of his ministry Jesus is asked by the Sadducees about the resurrection. Specifically they pose the question of what happens in the resurrection in a case where a man dies without having produced an heir and the widow marries the deceased man’s brother to produce an heir for the original husband, and where this repeats for seven brothers, etc. So the Sadducees ask whose wife this woman will be assuming all the deceased men have been resurrected.

Jesus responds, in part, that in the resurrection, there is no marriage or giving in marriage, that men and women are like the angels (meaning, presumably, that there is no longer any marriage or reproduction, etc, although scholarly interpretations differ, blah blah blah).

There’s not a lot of attention in Christian circles to this passage, I think for obvious reasons. But at a minimum it certainly raises some troubling questions for people who assume that human reproduction is so important it should dictate marriage policy. If at some point the whole reproduction business ends anyway….

And I would wonder if this was a question about marriage, or property rights? (Which, to a degree, are the same thing.)