...quite right. What the government accepts as "marriage" does not have to conform to how religious groups use the term.
Which is the way it is right now. For example, if you are Catholic, and divorced without jumping through the hoops and paying (=bribing) the Vatican to have your marriage annulled by the church, then when you remarry, that marriage is not recognized as a marriage. You are living in sin just as you would be if you cohabited without beng married. The state recognizes your remarriage, but the Catholic Church does not. Strictly speaking, you are not entitled to the sacraments if you do this.
[The Catholic Church is not going to refuse your tithes if you are living in sin
, and they probably will look the other way if you don't flaunt it in their faces. So basically, Catholic parishioners and priests practice a kind of "don't ask, don't tell" policy outside of confessional. As the Church does with priests in sexual relationships in Africa; the church needs priests, priests need sex, so the Church looks the other way, as it did for eons. (You didn't think that priestly, or popely, celibacy was a strict rule, did you? Remember that after the decline of Rome, there were two thriving industries in Rome, the Church and prostitution. Choice of male, female, or child prostitutes of course. "We cater to all specialties.")]Free choice. Thousands of gallons of ink have been spilled over how a perfect creator could create an imperfect thing. Which is stupid, because to the idealist, imperfection is all around us and not only in humankind. The dodge that theologians have employed to get around that logical dilemma is to say that God created man with free choice. But it's just a dodge, a verbal escape hatch, a cheat.
Because, you see, in theory there is no such thing as chance or free will.
When a gambler at Vegas blows on the dice and hurls them away, is it chance that dictates what numbers will come up? Of course not. If you could measure all the vectors and the forces involved and had a good enough computer, you could predict the result of the roll as soon as the dice left the gambler's hand. You would need perfect information and a perfect computer.
What we think of as "chance" is nothing of the sort. It is just a way of saying, "My ruler and protractor are not accurate enough, and I am not smart enough or fast enough to calculate what will happen before it happens, so instead I treat it statistically, and pretend it all happens by chance, which it doesn't.
According to theology, God has perfect knowledge. Is omnipresent and omniscient. Which means that God, assuming there is such a thing, could predict the roll of the dice. Even before the gambler took the dice in hand. Because God would have knowledge of the neurons buzzing away in the gambler's head and muscles. God would know what the gambler was going to do before the gambler did, would know exactly what force vectors were going to be involved in the roll of the dice.
So, if you posit perfect knowledge and perfect calculation -- God, if you will -- there is no such thing as chance or free will. God, with the qualities theologians give Her, even bypassess Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which is the only scientific basis for supposing there is anything like chance or free will.
So from the moment God created a human being, God would have kown exactly what that human being would do each and every minute of it's life, and what it's offspring would do a hundred generations hence. Assuming God is omniscient. All-knowing, all-powerful.
Therefore, if God created imperfect man, then God is either not perfect, all-knowing, or all-powerful, or God intentionally created an imperfect being, in which case it is God that broke God's rules and not man.
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