> Outside of religion, marriage has no real meaning, and to the extent that it is promoted by government, it is a fragment of how everyone had a religion up unt

> Outside of religion, marriage has no real meaning, and to the extent that it is promoted by government, it is a fragment of how everyone had a religion up until the 20th century. I think this is making too much of a distinction between religion and government. For most of human history, most humans were not privy to clearly-defined centralized institutions (like our modern state bureaucracies). Religious traditions were decentralized emergent phenomena that codified ways of perpetuating a functioning society in a low-trust, low-organization environments. As far as marriage specifically goes, it evolved as a practice in order to make the process of material inheritance simple, nonviolent, and easy for anyone to execute. This is where the notion of "legitimate" children comes from: legitimate in the sense of being eligible for inheritance, specifically because your parents were married. When strong centralized states started emerging, they codified this practice and built new structures on top of it.