I disagree with almost everything you are saying here, but I don’t have time to debate you on all of the details. I will simply claim that marriage is primarily about human beings and the way we interact with each other
Marriage has come to mean whatever one wants it to mean, but I am talking about its origin. I am not talking about how people have adopted this concept and applied it in their lives while discarding the religious baggage. For theists it is a divine concept sanctioned by God. For atheists, it can be whatever they want it to be, and I have no problem with that.
and that its origin and nature is best explained by Sociology
Yes, humans are social creatures. But marriage is more than just socializing. It began as a divine concept. The earliest texts indicate as much. It is naïve to think humans would go the monogamous relationship route without some kind of outside influence (religious authority). Monogamy goes completely against human nature if history is any indicator. This is evidenced by the fact that most people are
not monogamous, even those who are married; and even the religious couples.
Further, a glance at the global divorce rates indicates that countries that are particularly religious, maintain lower rates. The US divorce rate is among the worse at nearly 5 per thousand whereas the lowest seven are Muslim or Catholic countries (all under .4 per thousand). The countries with least successful marriages are secular countries like Russia, Ukraine, Cuba, US, Finland, Czech Repulic, New Zealand, Australia and Canada.
The point is that there seems to be no reason for secularists to take marriage as seriously as theists do. If it is merely a social “symbol” made in the tradition of men, it is always viewed as an impermanent union. Whereas in religious contexts you’re tinkering with separating what God has joined together, so there is naturally more effort involved in trying to make it work. For temple Mormons the stakes are extremely high and divorce is almost never an option.
not about the contradictory things that diverse ancient cultures believed that their varied gods had to say about it.
Contradictory things? Whether they contradict at in certain texts is beside the point here. The earliest recorded histories define the origin of marriage as a divine institution. If you think these ancient religious authors were merely borrowing a sociological concept from their neighboring atheists, then I would be most welcoming to any evidence for this.
Marriage as a natural sociological human phenomenon would make more sense if it was something that generally worked. But it seems to work more in environments where religious authorities are constantly trying to keep the couple together.
“All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it...Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality." - Albert Einstein