Over at Ebonmuse's Daylight Atheism is a post reflecting on the current right-wing hysteria over gay marriage...It's a long post - too long to summarize with justice. But it's a well-written, well-argued, and (I think) important post.

Please go a...

And while we're at it, just what does it take to inaugurate a marriage?

Gen 24:67 Then Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah's tent, and he took Rebekah, and she became his wife, and he loved her; thus Isaac was comforted after his mother's death.

Read it in context. No license. No ceremony. No governmental conferring of rights. (Okay, the omission of the wedding cake is sad.) Why, if Isaac and Rebecca are our example to follow, every cohabiting couple is "married."

Psa 127:3 Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.
Psa 127:4 As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth.
Psa 127:5 Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.

All God was (supposedly) trying to say was, "Rely on me, not what you can do yourself."

Nowhere in the Bible is polygamy even condemned. Solomon was admonished because of his wives, but not because he had so many. It was just that they led him astray religiously.

Even in the New Testament the strongest language we hear is in a couple of places in I Timothy and one in Titus where church rulers were to be "the husband of one wife." No one else is ever mentioned as being forbidden polygamy.

And the I Corinthians 6 verse Quath pointed out is always hard to get around:

1Co 6:16 What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh.

If somebody has slept with a prostitute, does that make them married? I doubt many Christians would say so. Yet here we see the kind of language supposedly reserved for marriage.

This is all very curious in light of the fact that the Bible is said to have issued from God's Holy Spirit.

The usually first talk of Adam and Eve and say they became one flesh. But the Bible also says a person becomes one flesh with a prostitute. So this is not about marriage. Then they usually talk about how God said that kings should not multiply wives. his has two problems. The first is it is about kings, not regular people. The second is that "do not multiply" means not to have too many such as horses. It does not mean "just one."

So the next time a Christian wants it the Biblical way. Agree and congratulate them for supporting polygamy.

Good question. I'm not sure that anyone has done that study (I doubt it, because this requires either finding (or genetically-engineering) autistic monkeys---not sure that can be done...or else obtaining the brains of deceased autistic persons, taking samples, and making a guess at whether they have less mirror neurons (or smaller cell sizes, less dendritic branching, etc.) vs. brains of deceased controls---not sure that mirror neurons are distinct based on their structure alone).

The role of mirror neurons in autism has at least been theorized upon; by now there may be even some neuroimaging studies examining this question. One could make an approximate estimate of cell counts based on the size of the critical regions of activation, providing that the methods used could accurately distinguish the mirror neurons from the regular neurons. The researchers could then examine the correlation between the degree of autism (or specific factors of it) and the estimated number of mirror neurons.