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Atheist/Agnostic/Religious Marriage
Passerbye
I am much older than you.in Beach CityRegistered User regular
I am much older than you.in Beach CityRegistered User regular
Mawidge…mawidge is what bwings us togewer today… Mawidge, the bwessed awwangement, that dweam wiffim a dweam…
Marriage is a complicated thing. Religions make statements about it, place limits on it, place meaning in it. People debate about whether or not it's a realistic set up. Some choose to get married, some don't. Some have huge preconceived notions, some don't. Even within the same religion, or non-belief as the case may be for agnostics/atheists, reasons for and against vary. So I've got some questions for you, D&D.
1) If you're married, why did you get married? Have those reasons stayed the same, have they changed? What made them change?
2) If you're not married but you someday want to be, why do you want to be married?
3) If you're in a committed, long-term relationship but chose not to get married, why not? What differences do you see, or not see, between having a marriage license and not having one?
4) How do your beliefs inform your views on marriage?
Edit - 5) Would you only marry someone who shared your beliefs or non-beliefs, or would this not make much difference to you? Why, why not?
Passerbye on
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2) N/A
3) N/A
4) My religious views didn't really enter into the marriage other then we had a priest marry us in vegas and he included god in the ceremony.
pleasepaypreacher.net
We got engaged because my fiance is about to graduate (though we're still a year and a half away from the tentative wedding time), and we've been able to hammer out some of the details of what we want our wedding to be like (still open to suggestions though, so I'm interested to see where this thread goes). We want to be married because it's such an established bundle of financial and legal benefits, it'll be easier to explain to our kid (don't have one yet), and the religious reasons I didn't want to be associated with don't have to apply. Oh and we want to spend the rest of our lives together, I guess that's a reason.
1. n/a
2. Taxes. And love.
3. Been in a relationship for 4 years now, we'll get married when the time is right but we just moved I jsut got my career started and she has a year of school left
4. TBH, an atheist having a problem with marriage seems a little like an atheist having a problem with christmas, they're missing the point. Perhaps it has religious trappings, but the idea behind it is something that can apply to everyone.
The hubby and I were both agnostic when we got married, we wrote our own ceremony. It started out with a poem which was significant for the both of us, we walked up together, then we recited our own vows to each other, traded rings, smooched, and that was it. The whole thing lasted 10 minutes with a small tent and chairs set up in our favorite local park. The officiant was an atheist friend of ours who is a marriage counselor (we went to a couple sessions with her before we got married, in fact, just to get a sort of third-party opinion on things) and who could legally perform marriages.
Face Twit Rav Gram
Like, you can get a ridiculous increase in free money if you and your partner have a paper that says that you are married. I think that this is very silly because I don't think there should be monetary incentives involved, people should marry each other if they want to - not potentially because it becomes necessary for them.
Also inheritance and stuff. One of you drops off - if you are married inheritance is little issue. If you are not married then expect to fight for it. The problem is mainly that the inheritance tax is much greater for unmarried couples. A hopefully less prominent problem would be if you and your partner didn't have any kids and your now deceased partners family hates you - be prepared to lose everything in your household that can be determined to have belonged to your partner.
Dependant on where you live of course, ymmv. Over here though this is certainly how it works with regards to taxing and inheritance when it comes to marriage.
Not believing in God also means not believing that participating in false rituals will anger some supernatural force. The beauty of agnosticism is that it doesn't matter.
There is a legitimate reason for government to encourage marriage. Strong stable families are good for society.
Unless you have a child, most first year marriage couples experience the opposite of a tax break, you actually get an increase.
pleasepaypreacher.net
See I don't think this has any bearing. If a couple don't feel the need to marry, they can be just as strong a couple regardless.
@Preach, I'm sure that differs a lot even among the different states. But yeah it is probably very dependent on where you live.
Really? Dyr and I didn't experience that. Maybe we're one of the exceptions. Why is it that most first year couples experience an increase?
Face Twit Rav Gram
Statistically not true.
Highly location dependent, I think.
As far as I'm aware my tax circumstances haven't changed at all since I got married.
One point is that it's cheaper to get married than to get a will drawn up. It doesn't quite cover the same amount of situations, but it gets the main ones.
We trusted the government and claimed each other (for a 1 deduction) on our w2s, that left us with a three thousand dollar bill come tax time. Was not a fine how do you do.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Ok, that's how. But why?
I suppose it could partly be because Dyr and I make less than you guys do.
Face Twit Rav Gram
Then the important questions would be:
Which location do the statistics concern, what is that locations recent historical culture surrounding marriage and what is that locations current culture around marriage.
Because practically marriage just means more actual work for a couple if they want to split up. If you consider it to be some higher level of binding force then it will affect you differently.
Practically thought there is nothing that would make a married family more stable than a non-married one. Such statistics I would consider misleading if the factors behind it are not extremely clearly painted out.
Our tax preparer even suggested having a child so that we'd get more money back, way to encourage fiscal responsibility government.
pleasepaypreacher.net
We got married because we knew we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together. She was admittedly much more focused on the actual, official marriage thing than I was.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
There have been volumes written on how marriage makes relationships stronger by codifying and formalizing commitment, making it more difficult to just walk away when something is wrong.
It makes children more confident in the stability of their parent's relationship, something which is incredibly important to the development of a child.
I'm not saying that marriage is best for everyone, or that you can't raise kids as a single parent or unmarried couple perfectly well, I'm just saying that statistically it makes for stronger families and I'm not even sure how that's debatable with all the data supporting it.
Ahhh. Yeah, we filled out extra forms and jumped through some extra hoops when we got married. A friend of ours is a tax attorney, so we followed his recommendations rather than what the forms told us to do.
Face Twit Rav Gram
We got married because we love each other and it was the best way to be able to stay together through all my moves without screwing her over.
My girlfriend is a liberal christian (probably similair to a Unitarian, very live and let live, love everyone etc) and I'm a moderate atheist.
It's never been a problem for us, though there isn't much of an ideological clash.
We even managed to swing a non-religious ceremony by marrying ourselves Quaker style.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
What effect has sharing religious views had for you? Does having that common ground add something to your marriage? Do you draw any ideas of marriage from those views?
I know D&D is sometimes a little harsh on religious people (well, religion in general), but I'm hoping for this thread that we can just assume sincerity so that the religious people here can explain about their reasons for marriage a little more openly without worrying about being jumped on for it. Don't be timid.
Face Twit Rav Gram
So really, I don't know how much help I can be with your question, unfortunately.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Well, I guess that question still applies for people with more clearly defined religious views. :^:
Face Twit Rav Gram
pleasepaypreacher.net
Its worth noting there is just as much variance among atheists as there is among Christians are far as personalities go.
In my experience the personality of most atheists conflicts with mine after a period of time.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Face Twit Rav Gram
To go more into the motivations behind this though:
Say you have a couple that care nothing about marriage as a ceremony and cultural thing, they get married though only because of the tax benefits. They are still the same couple as before only married out of monetary motivation. The marriage might be more likely to keep them together come rough times only for the hassle of breaking it up. I would not consider that a good thing because it is a practical limitation imposed on courses of action on such a thing as a relationship.
Basically what I am saying is that, if you consider marriage to be right for you it may very well strengthen you in a relationship. If you do not, however, it is simply a thing on paper that might keep a couple together only for the hassle of ending it.
2. N/A
3. If it gets to that point with someone, sure.
4. I view it as the natural next step when you find someone you honestly want to spend the rest of your life. I think that far too many people view it as a goal is all sorts of fucked up and plays a significant role in divorce rates. I also don't view it as a religious thing, regardless of whether it's done in a church or not.
5. It would wholly depend on what their beliefs were. However if their beliefs were a big enough issue that it would prevent me from marrying them I'm farily sure I wouldn't be in a relationship with them in the first place.
As has been said, keeping couples together is GOOD for our society. Couples have a larger disposable income, for instance, because they share some survival costs.
That's pretty much the argument I made to my mom when she asked me why we weren't getting married before moving in together. She thought that marriage strengthens a relationship, but I don't think it does unless the people in the relationship already value what marriage is going to give them. And getting married so it's harder to break up is definitely not a good reason to do it. I don't want to stay in a relationship if the only reason for not leaving it is red tape.
I have a pathological inability to take anything on faith, this tends to cause conflict.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Yeah its why I hate when people point out the 50% divorce rate, since that counts people who are on their 5th marriage etc. You can tell whatever story you want with the proper number, but it really doesn't mean shit with regards to subjective things like "love" "committment" and "Freaky Sex".
pleasepaypreacher.net
I think I could manage being married to some one with strong Orthodox Jewish views, provided that they didn't expect too much out of me in that arena.
I couldn't married anyone who believed deeply in any other religion that required faith, though.
@Evander, when you put it like that it is basically impossible to disagree, but only from society's perspective. It does not account for the individuals.
Seriously, though, the reason for the individual is that it professes a commitment. What you are saying to your partner is that you will make a public declaration of your commitment in such a way that you will be bound to them. If it's not for you, then whatever. Knowing that your partner is willing to make such a commitment DOES have a subconscious effect on a person, though, even if we want to use our big human brains to try to rationalize it away. Married homes breed better children because they feel more stable, and feelings matter, even if they aren't rational.
Useful for tracking societal trends
Fucking useless for actual relationships