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Statisticians Uncover What Makes For a Stable Marriage
HughPickens.com writes Randy Olson, a Computer Science grad student who works with data visualizations, writes about seven of the biggest factors that predict what makes for a long term stable marriage in America. Olson took the results of a study that polled thousands of recently married and divorced Americans and and asked them dozens of questions about their marriage (PDF): How long they were dating, how long they were engaged, etc. After running this data through a multivariate model, the authors were able to calculate the factors that best predicted whether a marriage would end in divorce. "What struck me about this study is that it basically laid out what makes for a stable marriage in the US," writes Olson. Here are some of the biggest factors:
How long you were dating: (Couples who dated 1-2 years before their engagement were 20% less likely to end up divorced than couples who dated less than a year before getting engaged. Couples who dated 3 years or more are 39% less likely to get divorced.); How much money you make: (The more money you and your partner make, the less likely you are to ultimately file for divorce. Couples who earn $125K per year are 51% less likely to divorce than couples making 0 — 25k); How often you go to church: (Couples who never go to church are 2x more likely to divorce than regular churchgoers.); Your attitude toward your partner: (Men are 1.5x more likely to end up divorced when they care more about their partner's looks, and women are 1.6x more likely to end up divorced when they care more about their partner's wealth.); How many people attended the wedding: ("Crazy enough, your wedding ceremony has a huge impact on the long-term stability of your marriage. Perhaps the biggest factor is how many people attend your wedding: Couples who elope are 12.5x more likely to end up divorced than couples who get married at a wedding with 200+ people."); How much you spent on the wedding: (The more you spend on your wedding, the more likely you'll end up divorced.); Whether you had a honeymoon: (Couples who had a honeymoon are 41% less likely to divorce than those who had no honeymoon)
Of course correlation is not causation. For example, expensive weddings may simply attract the kind of immature and narcissistic people who are less likely to sustain a successful marriage and such people might end up getting divorced even if they married cheaply. But "the particularly scary part here is that the average cost of a wedding in the U.S. is well over $30,000," says Olson, "which doesn't bode well for the future of American marriages."
How long you were dating: (Couples who dated 1-2 years before their engagement were 20% less likely to end up divorced than couples who dated less than a year before getting engaged. Couples who dated 3 years or more are 39% less likely to get divorced.); How much money you make: (The more money you and your partner make, the less likely you are to ultimately file for divorce. Couples who earn $125K per year are 51% less likely to divorce than couples making 0 — 25k); How often you go to church: (Couples who never go to church are 2x more likely to divorce than regular churchgoers.); Your attitude toward your partner: (Men are 1.5x more likely to end up divorced when they care more about their partner's looks, and women are 1.6x more likely to end up divorced when they care more about their partner's wealth.); How many people attended the wedding: ("Crazy enough, your wedding ceremony has a huge impact on the long-term stability of your marriage. Perhaps the biggest factor is how many people attend your wedding: Couples who elope are 12.5x more likely to end up divorced than couples who get married at a wedding with 200+ people."); How much you spent on the wedding: (The more you spend on your wedding, the more likely you'll end up divorced.); Whether you had a honeymoon: (Couples who had a honeymoon are 41% less likely to divorce than those who had no honeymoon)
Of course correlation is not causation. For example, expensive weddings may simply attract the kind of immature and narcissistic people who are less likely to sustain a successful marriage and such people might end up getting divorced even if they married cheaply. But "the particularly scary part here is that the average cost of a wedding in the U.S. is well over $30,000," says Olson, "which doesn't bode well for the future of American marriages."
Couples where one partner says, "Well yeah, but correlation doesn't equal causation" at least three times a day are almost 100% guaranteed to end up with the death of one spouse at the hands of the other.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
The first thing I thought when I saw the summary was "multiple comparisons". Then I read it. Basically they shovelled a heap of shit into R and picked out the biggest numbers. Yawn. NEXT!
[FUCK BETA]
Your marriage will "succeed" or "fail" based on why you're getting married, period. Things come up during any relationship, but reasoning keeps things going. Look at business relationships. Look at the cultures where they have arranged marriages. The thing is, when one side tries to make it work for the sake of the relationship itself, then the other side feels this and also tries. When both sides are trying, then success. Eventually true love develops out of the pure sacredness of the effort from the other side toward your side. Each side sees personal sacrifice and feels in debt.
There is no mathematical formula for this, for the same reason that pi cannot be pinned down to a certain number.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
That was 36 years ago.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
"Couples who elope are 12.5x more likely to end up divorced than couples who get married at a wedding with 200+ people.");"
"Whether you had a honeymoon (Couples who had a honeymoon are 41% less likely to divorce than those who had no honeymoon).""
Those two seem to be at odds with this one:
"How much you spent on the wedding (The more you spend on your wedding, the more likely you'll end up divorced.);"
Unless they mean that you should invite 200 people to a park wedding with no food, and then honeymoon in the alley behind Dunkin' Donuts to take advantage of their dumpster?
And how do you get rid of them before the wedding night?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I am a social scientist. The methodology employed in this paper; and the summary offered by OP is completely off. OP alludes to causality, but that isn't really possible with summary statistics. Please don't lump all of us in with this terrible methodology.
What about men caring for their wife wealth and women caring for their husband looks ? What about homosexual couple ? Also a lot of the reason given seems to boild down to the following :
* if you know somebody for a long time before getting married your marriage is more stable (less bad surprise)
* if you or your spouse has a lot of wealth invested either in the ceremony or yourself, you are less likely to "split" away and lose wealth
Not necessarily sexist. Maybe they asked both sexes the same questions and they found that the there was no significant correlation with whether women cared about men's looks or whether men cared about women's wealth.
I'm more interested in the "churchgoing" thing. It flies in the face of studies that show atheists don't have very different odds of getting divorced, whereas conservative Christians have higher divorce rates. Maybe the actual atheists are buried in a larger population of people that are nominally religious but don't go to church. I can see how the latter might be an interesting subgroup of religious people. These are people that think something is important but don't do it anyway. Atheists might be a lot more like the unfiltered population of religious people in that they are neither more nor less likely to do things they regard as important.
Also wealthier people simply have more resources to deal with financial trouble. They're not as likely to be split by external financial pressures, able to afford marriage counseling, possibly less likely to have been financially pressured into selecting a poor match and less likely to be looking to upgrade to a wealthier partner.
Better yet, just hire an indian couple to get married for you. MUCH MORE EFFICIENT!
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
"Source?"
This painting- http://www.essaysbyekowa.com/T...
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
My wife and I were together for 7 years and lived together for 6 months before we got married. We had to deal with a lot of things happening before we could even move in together. We got married because we wanted to and being married did not really change anything from the way it was before we got married.
8.5 years later things really haven't changed since before we got married. We still argue at times, sometimes fairly heated. We don't always make up after the arguments but we understand we are two different people who often see things differently but are committed to each other.
I think having a wife that is just like me would be more relaxing but probably a lot less interesting.
I would be really interested in a link for something like this because on the surface it seems intuitive that people why go to church may be exposed to more societal pressure to maintain an unhappy marriage than risk social shame for going through a divorce.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
'm more interested in the "churchgoing" thing. It flies in the face of studies that show atheists don't have very different odds of getting divorced, whereas conservative Christians have higher divorce rates.
In some places there is still quite a high stigma in divorce. There shouldn't be, a relevant quote is "Divorce isn't the death of a marriage. Divorce is the funeral", but still there are people who won't get divorced for some reason when there is no value in their marriage. This may be stronger among some Christians (and other religions where one of the couple isn't really asked about their opinion in the matter).
Source?
Marriage is a cultural universal practiced by almost all human societies. Even the most primitive tribes have some type of marriage ritual. The Mosuo society in Yunnan does not have a tradition of marriage, but AFAIK that is the only society that does not.
A $9k wedding can be quite a treat in the U.S. as long as you dispense with the bullshit of playing dress-up and having a formal, overpaid party. Just go to a good restaurant, eat a good dinner, hit a club afterwards. Heck, if you want to look cute, $1k buys all the clothes, hairdo and makeup you'll need, if you wish to put a little bit of elbow grease into it.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Obtain visiting rights at hospital and for couples with widely different incomes, filing jointly is better. And then there's, of course, the lessening of the "When the hell are you guys going to get married?/Make an honest woman of her?" questions from rude relatives.
"Hey, why buy the cow when the milk is free?"
(Yea I heard that from her relatives fairly often)
[John]
Shit better not happen!
There are lots of correlated variables here, so it's difficult to pick out useful information.
The comment thread on the article includes lots of discussion about the impossibility of a wedding that is both cheap and large, but lots of people pointing out that weddings with lots of church and/or community support can be both cheap and large. But church and/or community support are also correlated with other elements of a very stable social structure.
For example, my wedding was both large (> 600 people attended our reception) and cheap (< $3000). How is that possible? We're Mormon, so the actual marriage ceremony was at the LDS temple, which is free, and allows limited attendance. Then we had a wedding breakfast for the ~50 people who attended the ceremony, but the breakfast was at the church (free) and the food was cooked and served by members of our congregation (ingredients cost: low; labor: free). The reception was at the church (free); the bridesmaids paid for their own dresses, best man rented his tux, etc.; the flowers were a wedding gift from a cousin with a flower shop; the table centerpieces and other decorations were handmade by friends and relatives, so we only paid for the materials (cheap); the cake was made by my aunt, who had a wedding business on the side, and cost us $200 for a large, beautiful and tasty cake; my aunt also provided backdrops and other decorations; and some other relatives who are professional photographers did the photos. I don't recall who did the music, but it was all free, using the church's sound equipment. Our biggest expense was the hors d'oeuvres which were actually made by my wife's sisters, so we paid only for the ingredients.
The common thread throughout that list is heavy support from friends, family and community. But I suspect that deep family and church/community support are strongly correlated with long-lasting marriages for lots of reasons which have nothing to do with the wedding day, which to me suggests that those are far more relevant and that wedding cost and attendance are mere proxies for those variables. Also related is the fact that if a lot of people attend, you also get a lot of gifts. So big/cheap weddings are financially beneficial to the couple (mine sure was; spontaneous cash gifts alone -- from the "money tree" -- were more than 2X what we spent, plus all of the gifts of housewares, etc.), while small/expensive weddings are a net drain on their finances.
Similarly, long-term dating tends to be more uncommon among those who get married very young, because it takes time to date someone for 2-3 years, and it's well-known that marriages of the very young are riskier.
Elopement is another one: Those who elope are generally people who decide to get married on the spur of the moment. Such impulsiveness doesn't bode well for future decisions if your goal is long-term stability.
It would be interesting to see a study on this done well, with lots of effort put into teasing apart the correlated variables. This one doesn't actually tell us much.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Yeah, but how do you get 200+ people there for the party, without the cost going up?
Just hire some locals to attend. The important thing is to get over the 200 guest threshold so you don't get divorced.
This can really be condensed to only three, since some are redundant if you know the underlying cause. It's not like a research study is needed if you know people with successful marriages. The factors they chose that have an impact really only reflect the relevance of the following factors:
1. Taking marriage seriously. Eloping or skipping a honeymoon says "I don't want to invest much in this." Even those with moderate income can have a modest wedding and inexpensive honeymoon instead of going all out. Any indicator of not taking the marriage seriously is a negative, no matter what form it takes.
2. Genuinely valuing the other person for who they are. Hence, this means to not be a gold-digger or care more about looks. Also, dating longer is just an indicator that "finding the right person" is the attitude the person is taking, which means they want the person as a person to be a good match. By contrast, looks and money can be identified immediately, so it doesn't require a long time to get engaged. Desperation is also not a good reason for marriage, and desperation doesn't need a long time to get engaged.
3. Having a deterrent for divorce. Rich people, church-goers, and people with lots of people at their wedding have a lot of people to pressure you to stay together because you lead *public lives*. You don't get a private divorce, you get public embarrassment. Rich people have an additional deterrent in that it's a lot of money to lose if your ex-spouse wants to take you to the cleaners.
There might also be a sort of "reverse correlation" between divorce and going to church. If you go to a church where divorce is frowned upon and you get a divorce, you might be less likely to go to church (and deal with the whispers of "X got divorced... how SCANDALOUS!"). Thus, when the survey hits, they'd find that more people who go to church are still married. It could easily be the attitude of the parishioners keeping divorced people out, not the church keeping people married.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I would argue that larger weddings are evidence of a larger social support network of family and friends. More social support likely leads to improved psychology for both partners and perhaps better support when the marriage may encounter trying circumstances.
Cost in and of itself seems to be a function of narcissism and expectations that diverge from reality. Plus a lot of couples who spend freely on a wedding may burden themselves financially and face economic challenges early in a marriage when they may be younger and less capable of weathering them. Or it may indicate a lack of financial discipline which just repeats itself when married.
So what you're saying is that everyone considers you married already, so effectively you are. In your country it would be about publicly making a promise about the other person, and since that is assumed then probably no reason at all.
Other countries and social structures are different though, sometimes there's a legal benefit (ie some hospitals in the states have been preventing gay partners from visiting their other because they're not family, because they have no legal status and presumably the hospital staff have some bigoted beliefs, and without that 'bit of paper' they can enforce them), and sometimes there's a social or personal reason for making a public statement.
Look up Shinto Buddhists
Look up Hindu
Look up Taoists
Look up Buddhists.
Many of these religions had little or no contact with Christianity.
Christianity didn't even handle marriage until after the fall of the Roman Empire. Before that, marriage was tied to the state.
Place something witty here
The secret of successful marriage is beating off.
There, FTFY. You seem to have made a typo.
Irresponsible, immature, self-absorbed assholes who have a poor opinion of their spouse get divorced 500x more often than normal, nice, decent, reasonable people. Who would have guessed? At least this dispels the absolutely ridiculous myth that Christians have the same divorce rate as everyone else.
Obtain visiting rights at hospital and for couples with widely different incomes, filing jointly is better.
And then there's, of course, the lessening of the "When the hell are you guys going to get married?/Make an honest woman of her?" questions from rude relatives.
Funny, if you tell the nurse you are a family member or spouse, they let you right in. It's not like they do a background check. Plus, assuming the patient isn't comatose, they can give instructions to allow whomever in. As for taxes, unless only one spouse works or the other has minimal income, there is no real tax savings from being married.
As for rude relatives, well, you can't choose your relatives, but you can choose whether or not to be around them.
It is more than just pressure. There is also a support network of close friends and any good church will offer marriage counselling to try and sort out problems long before it gets to divorce.
Short men tend to get married later but stay married longer. Referenced
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
This is untrue. Married people always have the option to file taxes separately. You pick whatever way works out best. Here is a link that explains why there is a big tax benefit to being married, not a penalty.
I'm more interested in the "churchgoing" thing. It flies in the face of studies that show atheists don't have very different odds of getting divorced, whereas conservative Christians have higher divorce rates. Maybe the actual atheists are buried in a larger population of people that are nominally religious but don't go to church. I can see how the latter might be an interesting subgroup of religious people. These are people that think something is important but don't do it anyway. Atheists might be a lot more like the unfiltered population of religious people in that they are neither more nor less likely to do things they regard as important.
You have hit the nail on the head. There is a massive group of self identifying Christians who never attend church and never read the bible for themselves but call themselves Christians because their parents (or some family in the past) were Christians and since they outnumber Christians take their faith seriously, it has produced a lot of statistical noise and now we see clumsy attempts like this to work around the problem.
...writes aboutÂseven of the biggest factors that predict what makes for a long term stable marriage in America.
Emphasis mine.
It would be interesting to see what the divorce rate of Hindus is after living in the US after 5, 10, 20 years. And what the differences are when one or both of the couple's parents live with them or close by vs. their families remaining a large distance away.
I'm sure the divorce rate would be much lower the average American marriage. But I would guess without the pressures of culture and family, it would go up.
The government has a good reason to favor certain lifestyles. Up until the last century, it was a lifestyle that had one person at home, raising the kids, and the other one out making money for them. And those were the same people who caused the children to come into existence.
The government doesn't give a shit if you love your partner, they just want to make sure that those who can breed are encouraged to control their spawn and provide for them.
The divorce rate and the whole "who can get married" debate is everyone missing the point about why you get married and why the government even gets involved. It's about the government providing convenience and some breaks in return for control.
Forget the stigma of divorce. In some places there are still different social values involved. These people aren't spineless or mere slaves to the apparent popular opinion of the local population (which would be a fragile situation circular, since they are the local population); they believe that marriage is a holy, sacramental bond which does things to your soul. If present, this conviction is a far stronger reason to avoid divorce than social pressure.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
According to my wife, its no poles in the right half plane.
No matter how much I beg.
Have gnu, will travel.
Marriage isn't necessarily like an overripe fruit which, once it goes bad, it is done. Relationships can be worked on, and when they are, you can overcome bad situations.
I won't suggest that all relationships can be repaired, nor should they be. Still, if you spend the time finding a good match, as opposed to going straight for the fat wallet or a nice pair of tits, you have a shot at picking someone who isn't necessarily perfect, but someone you have a fighting chance of having enough in common to mend a relationship, if you try.
Point being, there is a tendency to be dismissive of Christians (or whoever), who stick it out longer than others might due to community influence. Without effort put into working on the relationship, that may well just generate misery, but if the couple has a solid basis for a relationship, it can cause the couple to actually work on something when they might otherwise have decided to simply give up.
Marriage is one of those things where people are inclined to turn it into something disposable, where in reality, many of those people simply shouldn't have gotten married at all. The problem isn't with the ability to get divorced quickly or easily, the problem is with the people who think they should get married, but who really shouldn't have even left their number for the other person after the drunk sex.
If both party's motives are pure, they should have no problem with one.
Well, if someone asks for a pre-nup he or she is already considering divorce to be a event with a rather high likelyhood. Is it really smart to marry someone who considers divorce a likely event?
Jan
And shame the spouses if they consider divorce.
Up until the last century, it was a lifestyle that had one person at home, raising the kids, and the other one out making money for them. And those were the same people who caused the children to come into existence.
That's actually bullshit. The "woman stays home" model may have been an ideal for a long time (though certainly not the entirety of human existence), but that doesn't mean most people could afford it. Aristocrats might do so, but then aristocrats don't really need either partner to work and the wife was more likely to have servants care for house and children to make room for a busy social calendar. Which leaves us with the middle class, which until the 1950s wasn't very large in America. If you marry a doctor or a lawyer, you could stay home (and your egotistical husband probably would rather you didn't threaten to be successful like the big important doctor). Otherwise...well, you found other ways to make a living.
The poor unwashed masses don't have the luxury of consistent income able to support an entire family from just one job. They have always had every possible member of the family working, especially in the past when children older than toddlers were given a lot more freedom with much less supervision. Husband working a construction job, wife working in a textile mill, and if you're really lucky the two could do both at the same time for years. If you aren't, well then somebody will be home raising chickens or something and probably engaging in a local barter market.
Not every "tradition" actually goes back any farther than your grandparents. Know your history. Not just the "great events" version of history either; know how people lived and the kind of economic opportunities they had. There's a lot more interesting about the 1800s than all the wars. Don't let some 1950s sexist reaction after WW2 overwrite the reality of your ancestors.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
Too bad basic literacy isn't part of your religion. The original poster specifically called marriage a "Christian tradition."
It certainly is a Christian tradition, but it is clearly not a exclusively Christian tradition. Just like "Honour your father and mother" is clearly a Christian value, it clearly is not a value that is exclusive to Christianity.
Jan
If both party's motives are pure, they should have no problem with one.
Well, if someone asks for a pre-nup he or she is already considering divorce to be a event with a rather high likelyhood. Is it really smart to marry someone who considers divorce a likely event?
It means nothing of the sort. It means they understand that life isn't a fairy tale, that anything is possible in human relations and that includes divorce, like it or not. Is it really smart to marry someone who lives in a fantasy land where bad things like divorce don't happen? Or worse, just don't happen to them because they're somehow special? Likelihood isn't the issue. Possibility is. Its always possible.
I remember reading something about Christians having higher divorce rates than atheists a while back. I myself am Christian, but not in the annoying way that many are. Just based on personal experience, it wouldn't surprise me because so many Christians that I've known were very judgmental two-faced people that tended to top it off with a "do as I say, not as I do" mentality. I was amazed that two people like this could live together for an extended period of time.
Statistically, the Bible Belt has the highest divorce rate, along with many other problems, like highest teen pregnancy rates, violent crime rates, etc. I would lump these people into the "conservative Christian" group. Maybe if they read the Bible instead of just thumping it around as a tool to scare people, they would have higher quality lives.
I read that as there being a lot of miserable souls stuck in failed marriages because they fear the social stigma of being divorced that rains down from their church/cult. These are the sort of people who let their sense of social worth be impressed upon themselves by others rather than come from within. Meanwhile the rest of the secular world has wised up to the stupidity of wasting the remainder of one's life with the wrong person.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
First off that 30k average for a wedding is based off a survey in a high end bridal magazine. So the people who answered that are exactly the sort who would be in the market to spend 30k on wedding. http://resultzdigital.com/wall...
Second, this church going statistic needs a bit more elaboration. Because atheists and agnostics have the lowest rate of divorce in the U.S. while fundamentalist Christians have the highest. http://www.religioustolerance..... So do they mean to imply that Christians divorce less or is it that lazy Christians divorce more?
Other than that interesting statistics.
Duration of dating before marriage would be a good predictor, as would female desire for wealthy spouse (negative) and male desire for pretty spouse (negative), in that duration will allow a couple to get past the "in love" phase to the "love" phase, and looks and wealth fade.
Sunk costs of giant weddings and social pressures account for most of the rest.
The question is, are you happy? What do you define as happy?
My grandparents all got married with an expectation that their spouse was their partner. Marriage used to be more about family and stability than about other stuff.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
... and think that generating all these factors will give them a more long-term marriage. People routinely do not understand the difference between correlation and causation, and, more importantly, that causation has a _direction_ that is all-important.
Basically, all the study says is that the more serious you take marriage, the longer it is likely to last. It does not say anything about happiness or achievement of personal goals (unless the number of years is a goal for you).
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Stats regarding who is / isnt Christian and what theyre like are all over the road depending on your criteria:
* Do Jehovah's Witnesses / Mormons (who deny pretty core tenets) figure into the stats?
* Is belief in the deity of God / Christ required?
* Is any particular personal conviction required, or just an upbringing by professors?
etc.
I recall a poll (Gallup?) that had some 75% of responants claiming to be christian, but only something like 50% believed in the deity of Christ (pretty much required for anything resembling Christianity), and the number goes down when you ask about a personally knowable God vs a transcendent watchmaker. The word Christian may just be the most ambiguously used word in the english language; when someone tells me theyre Christian, it tells me basically nothing at all except that they dont think theyre atheist (but some actually are).
Actually, I thought about it, and you're actually right, and I am somewhat ashamed about that particular statement. Contrary to your belief, I know quite a bit of economic history, but I can totally see why you might think I didn't. That's what happens when my brain gets detached from my fingers.
However, the point is still that you have marriage for a state objective of maintaining order. That is why the state even cares. Those who do not breed do not produce children. Maintaining a stable family unit, whether that be an extended family or a nuclear one, or something different, is useful to a state because it creates order for relatively low cost. Today, we attempt to replace that with programs, but they are not as well developed as order generated by clan or family relationships.
State sponsored marriage is not about love, for the state it is about the exploitation of love to maintain order. And well that it is, because I don't want the state telling me what "love" is. Now that we're expecting the state to legitimize "love", we're walking down a path we might not realize we are going down.
While I find arranged marriages horrifying personally, a friend (not Hindu) was married that way and at least their process was interesting to say the least. The families selected potential partners based on their knowledge of their (adult) childrens' personalities. He went on dates with the suggested women and, the third one was apparently compatible. They have been together for 20 years now.
But maybe that is just the old-fashioned version of a modern online dating service's compatibility algorithm.
My wife and I spent less than $2K on our wedding and reception. Yes, we had an actual reception, with good food, a dance floor, and a DJ for about 100 guests. Ordering the gown over the internet instead of going to a ripoff bridal boutique helps a lot. So does actually comparison shopping, instead of just seeing something and buying it immediately.
Meanwhile, my sister-in-law spent at least 5K-- excuse me, she ran up over 5K on credit cards, which she never paid off-- and has never been financially stable, even when living rent-free with her husband's uncle. I make several times more than she does, yet she simply had to have a (relatively) fancy wedding and, I presume, hope fairies would fly carrying gold coins to pay for it. And trust me, having a wedding she couldn't afford wasn't the begging or the end of her financial troubles.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
It's more than just shame -- the Catholic Church has a number of hoops its members have to jump through before it will recognize a divorce. In fact, you cannot get divorced as a Catholic. From the state's perspective, of course you can, but the Church will require that you get the marriage declared annulled retroactively, so that from the Church's perspective, the marriage never happened (or was, more accurate, never valid from the start).
Why do you think your irrational belief in ghosts is less annoying than someone else's?
Ultimately, the willingness to believe things because "someone said so" is what leads to the ills of religion in its many forms. Your religion is no less irrational or annoying than someone else's.
As an atheist, I'm obviously a non-believer as well, and I think you need to stop with the belittling. The combative, militant atheist is just as annoying as the Westboro member. Well. Maybe not quite so much. But you will convert no one with such tactics, and you drive away the people in the middle who may just come to the conclusion "man... atheists are a bunch of assholes."
I would describe me being "Christian" as more of a practical application of aspiring to being "Christ like", as in forgiving, non-judgmental, etc; To the best of my human ability.
I also have this hard time "accepting" that what I experience as consciousness is not only just a collection of particles interacting with each other, but that the Universe is essentially a static n-dimensional crystal that is fixed and non-changing, which is the logical conclusion of accepting a purely deterministic Universe.
I use the word "accepting" loosely. I logically accept that I am a deterministic bag of carbon, but I can't easily fight the perception of "free will" that I experience. It is a very hard thing to reason away. All of our logic is based on our perceptions, and when logic and perception conflict, it's hard to be somewhat non-logical about it. Our sense of self is really the only thing that keeps us alive, yet it conflicts with the logic that our lives are meaningless in an already determined Universe. "Meaning" is not a real thing, it is something artificial created in our minds. A bit depressing. Whatever.
All of that being said, science is our best form of truth. I love science and I find it fun to attempt wrapping my head about the Big Bang and how time came into existence and when it will end, if it will end. My personal thought is that that "Big Freeze" will eventually leave the entire Universe in a quantum state and time stops because it's at a maximum entropy state, where an infinite possibilities may happen at once, at which point one of those possibilities will become reality, and another "Big Bang" may happen again, and the process repeats itself as a "New Universe" with a new minimum entropy moving forward in time,yet again, towards it's maximum. I don't know, but it's an idea.
Or it could be church goers on the whole have a better attitude to marriage. Like 1cor13, exposing the selfless virtues of love, and the many endorsements of sticking with the partner you have chosen.
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