What is marriage?

"I don't believe in divorce, that's why none of the women in my family are married."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2010/mar/01/religion

When I first saw this quote I thought that it had great potential for some fun: I don't believe in losing so I won't support a football team; I don't believe in failing, so I won't try; and so on...

But then I found myself reading the source article and questioning what has happened to the churches teaching on forgiveness when attitudes like that expressed above take hold?  Of course it is disappointing when marriages come to an end, but to not enter into them because of fear that they will not last?

The source article continues:

"They want to get married eventually, but they want to wait until they’re sure the marriage will last. And eventually, about 70 percent of women who ever give birth outside of marriage will indeed wed."
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/publications/insight/social/kathryn-edin

 So perhaps this is not about a fear of commitment, but an impatience in waiting for the right person.  This is perhaps more difficult today as I suspect that, just as one copy of the New York Times contains more information than people had in a lifetime in years gone by, people have so much wider a choice of partner than they ever used to have.

Religion's Responsibility

I read this story with a heavy heart.  At times like this I can almost side with Richard Dawkins when he talks about how religion can be evil.  My faith is one of life in all its fullness (John 10:10), one of forgiveness.  And yet I have to recognise that there is this punitive side to religion, that there are strands in most religions (I want to write all, but...) that "know" what is right and think that God wants them to punish those who disagree - for their own good you realise - and there is an internal logic to this.  If you believe that by misbehaving people are putting their immortal soul at risk then logically it makes sense to "save" them (funny how it always seems to be other people who end up suffering).

I want to use this tragic event to look at Christian behaviour - how do we treat people who behave differently from the way that we think that our faith demands?  Lets face it we all do it - our boundaries of what is acceptable may differ, but somewhere we will have a boundary that some people are over.  Do we condemn them, or do we love them, and leave them to God?

I know that some will argue that the loving thing to do is to persuade them to change their mind - unfortunately, more often than not the methods used aren't likely to be terribly helpful - people tend not to react to abuse and threats by agreeing with those threatening them.

Children's Society Research and Tory Marriage Policy

The difference between a young person's family getting along - and not - explained 20% of the variation in overall happiness with life, whereas differences in family structure only explained 2%

There have been a number of comments about the proposed Conservative tax breaks for married couples, and I had held back from commenting as I thought that others had done a better job than me at demolishing them:

I find it staggering that David Cameron thinks that he can keep couples together by a tax break and that this is a universally good thing, what about toxic and violent relationships?  Lesley's Blog

The standard argument for a marriage tax break goes like this. Children of married parents have better and more stable lives, therefore marriage is good, therefore the tax system should support marriage. While the correlation is true, there is no evidence that proves the causality runs in this direction. Only the most bone-headed reject the possibility that stable, well-meaning couples are likely both to marry and to raise children well.  Chris Giles, FT

However, I recently discovered this report from the Children's Society, which proves what most sensible people (no prejudice there then!) think - that what children need is good parenting, which can come from married or unmarried couples.
6MACS98SBPWA
Taken with the comments on the requirements for teachers (which I blogged/ranted earlier) I have to question what planet Cameron is on - I can only assume that these issues play well with focus groups, because there is no logic involved in them.