Religion In Flux

Underlying the issue of marriage is the deeper issue of whether divine moral law is eternal and unchanging. Many conservative religious people oppose the redefinition of marriage because they believe that single-sex marriages violate eternal divine edicts. What is ignored in this controversy is one crucial and indisputable fact: that the human understanding of divine law has always been in a state of flux. It has never been the case that human understanding of divine law is eternal and unchanging. Consider a simple example like slavery. All major monotheistic religions sanctioned slavery in their early history and had religious laws about how to treat slaves. Today most of those religions consider slavery to be immoral. Whatever one’s view of the current redefinition of marriage, it should not be opposed on the grounds that it is a violation of an eternal divine law, since no one knows what that law is.