"People say we need religion, when what they really mean is we need police"

First topic message reminder :

The above is a quote from HL Mencken, taken completely out of context purely as a starting point for this thread.

I've been watching the 'religion' themed threads for a while now, and my conclusion is that religion seems to bring out some very nasty traits in many people - the main activity on these threads has been squabbling, sniping, argument by assertion, and puerile point scoring.

This seems par for the course whenever religion is discussed, whether within small groups like this one, or on the wider world stage (I'm thinking Crusades, I'm thinking Jihad, I'm thinking abuse of women in some Muslim cultures, I'm thinking brutalisation of Muslim prisoners in Iraq and in Abu Graib)

Religion so often seems to be the excuse we use for hating, torturing and killing people who are 'different', and it seems that, even in a friendly discussion where little is at stake, religion continues its role as a fomenter of conflict.

Yet, when you look at religious texts, the rhetoric is about God's love, duties to one's neighbours, humane treatment of animals, children and all weaker individuals, sharing wealth and resources, giving to the poor and needy etc etc. I can't see anything wrong with any of that - in fact, I'm completely behind all of it.

Religion is at the core of all civilisation - it seems to have evolved within all cultures as a means of drawing the community together, collecting and preserving knowledge, teaching children, providing 'theatre' in the form of communal ritual observances, providing a sense of safety, through knowledge of the seasons, history of the community etc. In early times, heads of state would often have a priestly role, and might be sacrificed if the harvest was unsatisfactory to placate the gods.

It's clear, at least to me, that we would not be able to live within the social groups we do, and could not have made the material advances we have made, as a race, without the influence of religion in providing the ethical framework within which we can live close to each other without raw self interest undermining any attempt to create a community.
Without communities, we are only ourselves - within communities, we have access to the talents and gifts of others - the whole is definitely much greater than the sum of its parts. Mankind (and womankind) needs to live in communities - no man, as John Donne famously wrote, is an island.

So far then, religion is to be seen as a completely positive thing - religion=communities, communities=people getting access to knowledge and resources they would otherwise lack, and thereby achieving outcomes they could not even dream of alone. Looked at in this way, religion is a completely practical and very desirable thing.

Looking around the wibbly wobbly world for inspiration, I found this series of essays - i'm only posting the link to the first - you can easily find the others if you're interested.
http://theology.co.kr/whitehead/religion/1.html

This is interesting to me because it divides the concept of religion into 4 phases:
Ritual
Emotion
Belief
Rationalism
Seems to me, so far I have talked about the first two phases, and the conclusion here is that there is no problem at all with these two.
Ritual observance brings a community together, channels the emotional energy of community members, provides entertainment, access to knowledge, the foundation for a set of rules about behaviour - in short, a police presence.
I do it all the time with my dogs - 'look over here, here's a biscuit, behave in a certain way and you will have the biscuit'.
Dogs are happy, furniture remains unchewed, the household is a happy one.

When we move on to what the author of the piece would term the 'individual' aspects of religion, I think we start to get into problems, and this may be where the negative aspects of religion arise. Belief and rationalism (forming a personal code of practice based on belief, and attempting to convince others of the validity of this) are where the subjective, 'numinous' elements arise, and where the mischief can also begin.

Some religious figures have evolved what I might want to call benign beliefs - Elizabeth Fry for example, who believed that her God loved everyone, even convicted criminals, and who expressed that belief by working within the prisons of the time to provide the benefits of civilisation to those prisoners so far as she could.

Some religious figures have evolved much less benign beliefs - I might want to cite the priests of the Spanish Inqisition, whose revelation and belief was that God loved only Catholic Christians and that the use of torture and painful death would save the souls of those that fell below this high standard.(Sorry, this is VERY oversimplified, but I hope people get the gist)

In my own journey, I have found it preferable to avoid close connection to any religious movement, because I think once you get into those 'personal' aspects of religious belief and action, you do run the risk of getting involved in beliefs and attitudes that I would find morally repugnant (the belief, for example, that Baptists, Catholics, Muslims - fill in your own denomination - have the direct line to heaven the real gen, the absolute knowledge of right and wrong; and that everyone else is going straight to Hell)

I like having the concept of god - I don't care whether anyone can prove or disprove her/his/its existence. To me the truth is that we are all god's children - we all belong to the same family, we all have the right to live, to grow and to find our own truth.

Between the world's religions and belief systems, there are many more points of similarity than there are differences - we all have a moral compass, we all believe in something - what I would like to see is a proper discussion of our different beliefs, a friendly and sympathetic consideration of the points of view expressed, and a sincere attempt to reach a common understanding.
But, hey, that's just me - carry on squabbling if you like

Tosh wrote:Good evening Boatlady, just to help you get over your petted lip.

It's clear, at least to me, that we would not be able to live within the social groups we do, and could not have made the material advances we have made, as a race, without the influence of religion in providing the ethical framework within which we can live close to each other without raw self interest undermining any attempt to create a community.

I do not believe Classical Greek ideas such as ethics and democracy were inspired by religion, who says the world would not have been a better place if we hadn't dumped philosophy for mythology for nearly 2,000 years.

I don't accept we needed religion to create the spirit of humanity or community.

I have to agree, I'm always very dubious when theists suggest that atheists have nothing to measure their ethics or morals by. I always find myself having the same thought, "what on earth would these people turn into if they were suddenly stripped of their beliefs" and do they really accept that their belief is the only check on them degenerating into amoral nefarious sociopaths? My reasons for not breaking the law are many and vary I suspect according to the law, murder as opposed to speeding as an example. Now other than speeding my thought process is never to determine whether there is a policeman present to decide whether to break the law. In fact not even for speeding now, as I am 48 years old and make the effort to keep below the speed limit all the time.

We are well used to each others banter

Sorry, I didn't realise this was a private discussion.


I will of course withdraw immediately

Doc,

Religion in my opinion was a divine enforcer of morality, a carrot and stick tyrant that gave eternal life if you behaved, eternal damnation if you didn't, and in my opinion promising humans immortality in the future did little to alter behaviour in the present. Our behaviour started to change with the Reformation which led to the enlightenment, and the restoration of Classical philosophy to create the age of reason. One could argue civilisation and morality only began to progress after we got rid of the shackles of Catholicism and Puritanism, I would suggest universal human rights has more to do with Plato than Paul and more to do with Socrates than Saul.

If I was a woman I would argue civilisation and morality only really took off in the 20th century after women obtained equal status, compare 100 years progress with the advances made under thousands of years of misogyny, and who promoted gender inequality more than most, religion.

I will of course withdraw immediately

Boatlady my dearest, you are offending me, I have gone to great lengths to debate your " dead thread " and you walk away miffed, come here and have a hug.

What do you think about other vehicles for morality and community, ones that didn't deny death, would they have failed because they did not offer immortality?

boatlady wrote:We are well used to each others banter

Sorry, I didn't realise this was a prib=vate discussion.


I will of course withdraw immediately

This is of course taken out of context and from what I've been able to glean about you, you do know it. Therefore I really don't see the point of your comment.

People were taking your comments seriously and then you do that. We all make mistakes and I'm certainly included in that. I know it sounds cheeky to invite you back to your own thread but if that's what it takes then

"Please come back".

You certainly seem to be capable of adding to the standard of debate which you happened to view on one thread, your thread, while it was going through the doldrums.

Heretic

Dr Sheldon Cooper PhD wrote:I feel secular reason, eradication of poverty, and a decent education for all, along with universal human rights, and of course a well organised and well funded police force, observed vigilantly by an independent and objective body, can produce a decent society in which we could all live, love, and thrive, and no, I'm not a hippy.

You took the words right out of my mouth -- and I really didn't enjoy having your fingers in my mouth, I'm sorry to say. It's bad enough when dentists do it.  

Dr Sheldon Cooper PhD wrote:If we tie them to ancient religious dogma then how can they ever improve?

Fortunately, ancient religious dogma has improved to some extent. At least we're not eviscerating people for the crime of heresy anymore or going on witch hunts and executing women every time a disease hits.

But for ancient religious dogma to improve, morality and ethics must move outside the purvue of that dogma. In that sense, it's not really ancient religious dogma any longer. Modern ethics and morality is quite often contradicted by the Bible so that we're really not adhering to dogma.

A good example is the belief by many Americans that God gave us our rights. But did he? Let's look at our Bill of Rights ...

Amendment One: Freedom of religion? Seriously? Does anyone think the Bible promotes that? Nor does it promote freedom of speech given that blasphemy is the only unforgivable sin.

Amendment Two: Where in the Bible does God claim that gun ownership is a right? I've been waiting for an answer to THIS one for a loooong time.

Amendment Three: Where in the Bible does God talk about quartering troops inside private residences? Yeah ... nowhere. And why would an omnipotent god care anyway? He would just tell the soldiers to kill every man, woman, and child inside the house -- except for the virgin girls which they are free to rape.

Amendment Four: Where in the Bible does God address the right to be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects? After all, how could an omniscient and omnipresent God know anything about privacy?

Amendment Five: Again, where does God tell the Israelites they have the right to a trial by jury, that they can't be tried for the same crime twice, and that they can't be compelled to testify against themselves? God never gave a shit about trials. He just summarily killed people. You don't see anything in Leviticus or Deuteronomy about giving rebellious childen a trial before hauling them to the town square and stoning them to death. The same for adulterers, homosexuals, non-virgin brides ... and the usual suspects.

Amendment Six: As God obviously had no use for trials, he never bothered to inform us that we have the right to a speedy trial, to confront our accusors, and to have a lawyer. No, we only have the right to a speedy stoning if we violate one of his archaeic laws.

Well, you get the idea.  

Tosh wrote:Doc,

Religion in my opinion was a divine enforcer of morality, a carrot and stick tyrant that gave eternal life if you behaved, eternal damnation if you didn't, and in my opinion promising humans immortality in the future did little to alter behaviour in the present. Our behaviour started to change with the Reformation which led to the enlightenment, and the restoration of Classical philosophy to create the age of reason. One could argue civilisation and morality only began to progress after we got rid of the shackles of Catholicism and Puritanism, I would suggest universal human rights has more to do with Plato than Paul and more to do with Socrates than Saul.

If I was a woman I would argue civilisation and morality only really took off in the 20th century after women obtained equal status, compare 100 years progress with the advances made under thousands of years of misogyny, and who promoted gender inequality more than most, religion.

That last paragraph is brilliant, a crushing indictment of male dominated societies, both contemporary and historical.

[quote="Tosh"]

What do you think about other vehicles for morality and community, ones that didn't deny death, would they have failed because they did not offer immortality?

Even I have to admit that once you get passed the sheer idiocy of the claim, it has a certain pizazz.

That last paragraph is brilliant, a crushing indictment of male dominated societies, both contemporary and historical.

Most female mammals by necessity require more nurture genes than men, and less testosterone, nurture involves unselfishness, caring and most importantly the ability to understand the needs of offspring, the origins of empathy, to put oneself in the place of others. Testosterone blocks empathy, a natural difference given the survival tasks of men, too much empathy or compassion is not conducive to a successful competing male.

Civilization and morality are driven by the compassion we feel through empathising, there but for the grace of God go I sums it up, our society in the last 100 years has become more nurturing, this cannot be a coincidence.

Let's have a look at religion from the point of view of those that are already. How would or do the powerful regard religion?

I might quite reasonably argue that they might see it as a means of control. To control large nations would I suspect need a very large police force and religion could be seen as a means of getting the religious to police themselves. It even raises it's own money to cover it's own costs, what is there about religion that is no to like for the powerful? In western we have had what is called "the Divine Right of Kings" which means that Kings are in place because God chose them to rule. There is very little room in such a system for the rights of the common man. The English (in the west ) made the first chink in the armour of the religious system with the Magna Carta followed by the French Revolution. There is something in the English collective DNA that doesn't like revolution, we seem to prefer stability and slow change rather than revolution (it just seems to suit us better).

The English are taking a long while to throw off their shackles but it could be argued that they are doing it more effectively. We are one of the most secular nations on Earth, I can't see a nation on this planet where religion has less power than here. We still have a monarchy but it has no effective power left to it although I suspect that Queen Elizabeth has been a moderating influence on the more extreme polices of our elected officials. Nobody is told what goes on in the weekly meetings between our Head of Government (our Prime Minister) and our Head of State (the Queen) but the fact that they are required to attend this meeting at all is a healthy requirement in our system of democracy. I don't know what our friends across the pond think of our system.

I'll try and pick up my train of thought a bit later as I need to leave home in about 10 minutes.

Peace

Heretic

Heretic wrote:I might quite reasonably argue that they might see it as a means of control.

I often use this argument to counter the Christian claims that most wars are fought over land, resources, wealth, power, etc ... and NOT over religion.

Christians may be somewhat correct in this, but only for the elite, not for the common person. How does an emperor, a king, a president, a prime minister, or a dictator inspire young men to pick up a weapon and fight on behalf of the wealthy and the powerful? How is this done even when those who actually do the fighting and dying will benefit little (if at all) no matter what the outcome of the war?

Why, religion of course. It has been the whip of choice used by rulers since time immemorial. Notice you never see the likes of Osama bin Laden strapping on a suicide vest, but you'll see plenty of wide-eyed boys no older than 20 who will gladly give their life for Allah. The West is really no different, for even in the war against Iraq and the Taliban, our leaders were quick to mention God as often as possible, lending the impression that our leadership is fighting a war of religion while the people are duped into believing it is a war for democracy and freedom.

Tell an army that their God and religion is being threatened, tell them that God wants them to go to war, and people who would ordinarily NEVER take another's life suddenly start slitting throats without so much as a twinge of guilt.

If there is an upside to the thought that the threat of damnation inhibits bad behaviour, there is also a downside, many acts of bad behaviour are done in the belief they will be rewarded in heaven, the 9/11 terrorists are just one of many examples. As Voltaire once said" Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

To me the greatest inhibitor of bad behaviour is reciprocation, humans could not co-exist if we all applied utterly selfish and careless rules toward each other, as a social species the golden rule is but an extension of our genetic instruction to inhibit certain behaviours.

Well I got the op back yesterday yet no-one has really commented on the op since have they?

boatlady wrote:
I like having the concept of god - I don't care whether anyone can prove or disprove her/his/its existence. To me the truth is that we are all god's children - we all belong to the same family, we all have the right to live, to grow and to find our own truth.

Between the world's religions and belief systems, there are many more points of similarity than there are differences - we all have a moral compass, we all believe in something - what I would like to see is a proper discussion of our different beliefs, a friendly and sympathetic consideration of the points of view expressed, and a sincere attempt to reach a common understanding.

The problem is not different peoples beliefs. It's the only too natural desire to share that belief in a way that imposes it on others. In a way that is why we are here. To learn what others believe and to find a way of convincing them that what we think we know is what they should listen to and after minor squabbling accept as true. Religion relies on this instinct to spread itself around and to grow but other ideas, philosophies and moralities are seeking this part of our intellectual DNA as well. It can even be seen in atheism or at least in some atheists.

When different ideas meet head on the clash can can be seismic in scale. Three worldwide clashes are currently taking place and they involve Christianity, Islam and what I shall call secularism. The most dangerous is the clash of ideas, beliefs and cultures currently taking place between Christianity and Islam which has the potential to be the next world war (some see 'The Cold War' as a continuation of World War 2 and other see it as World War 3 - but I digress). The main points of contact seem to be Western Europe and the USA. Western Europe is handling it badly by trying to embrace Multiculturalism, an idea that has failed miserably and just formed ghettos, whereas the USA seems to of said to it's immigrants you are welcome to everything we have and are but only if you become Americans (At least this seems to be how they seem to present their approach [This I gleaned from TV so I am quite willing to be corrected]).

We Europeans have something to learn from Americans and their approach (not something you often hear from a Brit). We need to find a way to break up the ghettos, social mobility would be my first choice (by encouraging them to move out through education, and through economic growth). It is also I would think necessary to break up islands of separation such as faith schools where many Muslims are taught that they have cultural, moral and religious superiority [it reminds me of 1930's Germany] and that the rest of the world has no right to exist. However when Muslims integrate into the community Islamic radicalism is seen as anathema, dishonest and suspect.

If we don't find a way to address this clash we will all be losers. If you want to have a scary thought try and see a fundamentalist Muslim with Koran in hand talking, shouting and roaring at a fundamentalist Christian with a Bible in hand who is returning as good as he gets. I suspect that if we let them the extremists on both sides will be the death of us all.

The conflict between these two and secularism will be fought in large part only when Islam and Christianity have come to terms. Where is Hinduism and Buddhism in all of this? Apart from skirmishes on the India, Pakistan border (between Islam again and Hinduism) I see them as future rather than current protagonists and with their similarities in terms of meditation I cannot see them striking blows at each other any time soon.

Can we come together, in the long term I believe we can but only if we take power away from the extremists, and all the places they currently hide in (in plain sight such as Mosques and the Bible Belt).

Heretic

Morning Heretic,

The 3 monotheistic faiths are by definition evangelistic, they are supposed to spread the word and convert us all to their beliefs, fundamentalists are basically intolerant of opposing cultures that do not comply, in the past they used the sword and some will not put it down.

The problem is not monotheistic fundamentalism, the problem is the fundamentals of monotheism.

I have always thought that making an exception for Sikhs over crash helmets was the first serious mistake in law. It meant that special pleading on the grounds of religion was now OK. We should have said make a choice - ride a bike and wear a crash helmet or don't ride a bike.

From that time on any group can use the precedent to make their culture a 'special case'. Big mistake.

Morning Bellatori,

I remember watching a piece by the late great George Carlin about differing hat and shoe customs in places of worship, men uncovering their head and women covering their head in church etc etc. He makes a valid point, if God is everywhere and wearing a hat offends him, then why wear a hat at all?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNkkko4vlBs

VERY true Tosh, different cultures different gods again is it not?

I have always wondered why religion and indeed cultures are so misogynistic and anti-female, so here are my latest thoughts:

Urbanised religions obsession with females and sex is well documented, it almost blames them for male promiscuity and weakness, a lot of morality is about infidelity and paternity.

Anthropologist Pascale Boyer documents the main cause of conflict in primitive hunter-gatherer cultures is over women, the tribes in Papua New Guinea and the Amazon have changed little since we left Africa some 70,000 years ago. They consider women to be the biggest cause of male conflict, and blame them.

Going back even further we have this:

All the males in a community (group of chimpanzees that live in an area of forest though they don't always all travel together) will mate with each female when she is fertile. This way, any of them could be the offspring's father so none of them will kill the infant. The more dominant males tend to mate the closest to ovulation and therefore they father most of the babies. Thus, every male chimp in a community mates with every female chimp in the community whenever she is fertile (which only happens a couple times every 5 or so years when she's done being pregnant with and feeding the last baby). Chimps don't have "mates" like birds or humans where they are pair-bonded to a specific other chimp except in some rare cases at one research site where a male and female will go off together for a few days, but even then, the female still will mate with other males before/after that.

It is more than likely that pre-cognisant hominids had the same sexual practices as chimps, and then evolution turned on the light of self awareness. Once we became self aware we became aware of our life and death, and reproducing our genes got a cognisant turbo boost. However women were unaffected by this change in thinking, they know who the mother is, it is only the male who suffers paternity angst.

It obviously took woman a lot longer to adapt to the moral wishes of men, and this caused conflict amongst the men, morality is built around conflict avoidance and paternity, women's instincts caused men to come into conflict and cast doubt on whether they had reproduced their genes. It was hard enough to keep an eye on women in small tribes of 150-300 people, once we moved into groups of thousands and tens of thousands, it became impossible, time for some Laws to keep the peace.

Quite true actually Tosh, I think a lot of females these days the younger ones, sleep around a lot and if they got pregnant during that time would not know who the father was. It is only as females and males mature in the human race these days that they will look for a partner for long term so to speak.

stu,

Plucking out a divorce stat may muddy the waters but Women are twice as likely to divorce men than the reverse, seems like civilization cannot dilute all female genetic urges completely.

Very true i've had a 12year partnership with twin boys who are now 30 and a 14year partnership with my daughter whom I get access visits both times they have left me?

It's a personal choice obviously, but I can't understand why people feel the need to get married in the first place.

stu,

Knowing women, the first probably left you for being too bad, and the second for being too good, just no pleasing some folk, I try to resolve all of life's mysteries but I gave up on women decades ago. 

So have I now Tosh, i've got a four legged friend and she makes me laugh more than my last partner did the antics that she gets up to I assure you.

Dan Fante wrote:It's a personal choice obviously, but I can't understand why people feel the need to get married in the first place.

When it works out it can be very rewarding, there's a kind of stability that is worth the occasional disagreement. Children are most happy so we are told when they are brought up in a stable happy home with both parents.

Heretic

Dan Fante wrote:It's a personal choice obviously, but I can't understand why people feel the need to get married in the first place.

I remember in my 101 Sociology course the professor asking the class (mostly 18 and 19 year-olds) how many people wanted to get married. A smattering of hands went up, mostly female. Then the professor asked how many people thought they HAD to get married. Almost everyone's hand went up.

There is a huge societal push for people to marry. The adult world revolves around married couples; everyone assumes you're either married or in a serious relationship. Trust me from someone who knows all too well - if you DON'T get married, you will find yourself marginalized, disenfranchised, and hanging out on the fringes of society (unless you have a really big family).

By and large, I think there would be a lot fewer married couples and more "swingin' singles" if people didn't feel they would be horribly lonely if they eschewed traditional marriage. I see all kinds of miss-matched couples around, and I know that they're together more to avoid being alone than because they truly love each other. It's a shame that society must be that way, and it's a bigger shame that the behavioral protocols of marriage make it such an unappealing prospect to so many people.

I see all kinds of miss-matched couples around, and I know that they're together more to avoid being alone than because they truly love each other.

I suggest if we all had no fear of being alone, true love would not exist, true love requires need, without need there would be no NEED for compromise, respect, tolerance and sacrifice.

We are social primates, no man is an island, the opposite of love is not hate, it is loneliness.

I am in agreement there Tosh, except maybe the opposite of love is both hate and loneliness.

Tosh wrote:We are social primates, no man is an island, the opposite of love is not hate, it is loneliness.

The opposite of love is apathy.

I once told someone - I'm lonely only because no one else is lonely. In other words, I wasn't lonely because I didn't have a lover. I was lonely because everyone else had one, and so there was no one to chum around with, no one to hang out with, no one to do things with.

I think that's what is so nasty about marriage and romantic love. People in love become self-absorbed with each other and begin behaving in self-indulgent ways. All the rest of the people in their lives get a big boot to the curb. What's worse is that society encourages this behavior and finds it "sweet" and "beautiful."

Moreover, people are so territorial and paranoid about their lovers that it becomes a matter of property and ownership. As someone single, I can no longer, say, call up a married male friend whom I've had a platonic relationship with for years, and ask, "Hey, doing anything? No? Wanna go see a movie?" Nooooo, can't do that because of these ridiculous rules (shackles) society has placed on the conduct of married couples. This is why single people end up becoming disenfranchised, and this pushes them into marrying people they ordinarily wouldn't just to avoid being alone all the time.

All of my life, I have enjoyed the camaraderie of friends much more than I've enjoyed the romance of a relationship, but there isn't much room for that. Granted, I understand what you mean by all of us having a need, but because of the territorial nature of primal, animalistic insticts, singles and non-singles are pretty much prohibited from mixing - at least not without the hawkeyed supervision of the spouse. It's all so silly to me, but then again, I've been disenfranchised long enough to see the human race from a detached perspective, and once you get where I am, you begin to see just how absurd so much of our behavior actually is.

Tosh wrote:We are social primates, no man is an island, the opposite of love is not hate, it is loneliness.

I like that and reserve the right to quote it 'Ad nauseam'.

Heretic

So very true Shirina, only, over here in the uk it's called jealousy basically. As you cannot even speak to a female friend if now she has found herself a lover.

Shirina wrote:Moreover, people are so territorial and paranoid about their lovers that it becomes a matter of property and ownership. As someone single, I can no longer, say, call up a married male friend whom I've had a platonic relationship with for years, and ask, "Hey, doing anything? No? Wanna go see a movie?"  Nooooo, can't do that because of these ridiculous rules (shackles) society has placed on the conduct of married couples.

When I met my wife I already had a large number of female friends and we were not immediately attracted to each other. She saw the way I interacted with them in an entirely platonic way, it was natural. When we did form a relationship neither of us felt the need to separate from that circle of friends or have need to have a chaperone. She trusted me with them because she knew the nature of those relationships. This never changed, I trusted her and she trusted me. I'm not saying we didn't have problems but that wasn't one of them. My friends didn't have problems either as nothing had changed.

It did turn out that one of our friends was asked on the day of her wedding by her fiancée if they would be getting married if my wife and I hadn't got married some months earlier. She replied "No" and they then got married anyway. I only found this out years later after her divorce but it didn't matter anyway as I was quite content and she knew it.

Jealousies only seem to occur when they are preceded by other unresolved problems but all problems can be resolved if both halves of a relationship really want it to be.

After many years I am now single and I sense that I am now regarded with suspicion in some quarters, a position I have never been in before and to be honest it made me angry. I had the partner of a close friend show up at my door demanding to see her, this was just because she refused to answer the phone to him. I let him in and let him look around, I then told him to never come around again like that again as he would not get in the door. When he got home she refused to let him in the house for three weeks (he still has his own place). She felt that he had 'cheapened' her by behaving as he had, especially as he has exhibited the behaviour that he had suspected her of even though she had never given him cause.

Trust, it's a killer. Those that let others down will always suspect others of the same behaviour back. They seem to think that everyone else is like them, or they want to point the finger as though it somehow justifies their initial behaviour.

Heretic

Heretic wrote:

Dan Fante wrote:It's a personal choice obviously, but I can't understand why people feel the need to get married in the first place.

When it works out it can be very rewarding, there's a kind of stability that is worth the occasional disagreement. Children are most happy so we are told when they are brought up in a stable happy home with both parents.

Heretic

I agree with all that about the kids but don't see why you need to be married for that.

Dan Fante wrote:It's a personal choice obviously, but I can't understand why people feel the need to get married in the first place.

Heretic wrote:When it works out it can be very rewarding, there's a kind of stability that is worth the occasional disagreement. Children are most happy so we are told when they are brought up in a stable happy home with both parents.

Heretic

Dan Fante wrote: I agree with all that about the kids but don't see why you need to be married for that.

Ok, I do understand that it is not necessary and that a larger and getting larger proportion of the population does not see it as necessary to having a long and productive relationship (that probably means having and raising children).

To me it was all about commitment. When I asked Vickie to marry me I was asking her to spend the rest of her life with me, a heady ask when she was seventeen and I was twenty. But she knew that I meant it, that's what I wanted was for to spend the rest of her life with me and I with her. We got married without parental blessing from either family and we just got on with it. We even had to drag two witnesses off the street into the registry office. That symbolic act however resented by our families, marked the end of hostilities from them. Though they didn't help us in any way setting up home they didn't want to be seen as the reason why we failed at playing grown up, because they knew how much resentment that would cause.

So commitment is the name of the game and as I said earlier trust.

I have seen friends get together, some got married and some didn't. Most of their relationships failed but some survived and whether they were married or not and whether they had children or not didn't seem to impact on whether their relationship survived. I think that because divorce is so messy that perhaps married couples possibly put more effort into trying to rescue a relationship but that didn't seem to be a hard and fast rule either.

What is important then? I think that is what you see when you look into each others eyes. If you see love as well as lust I would suggest go for it, but slowly, a partnership is a heady deal, whether you get married or not, and one that may last for life.

I am happy that I got married and you might just be so too.

Heretic

I've been with my partner for nigh on 20 years so I don't think marriage is something that would make any difference to my relationship. I didn't mean it to come out as a criticism of other people who have gotten married though. It's a very personal thing and whatever works for you is what matters. I was just expressing my personal view on it. What I do find absolutely crazy is people spending in excess of £20k on their 'big day' when they can't even put together the deposit for a flat. That's a different, but related, issue though.

I leave the choice of marriage or not, to other people these days.I WAS married at eighteen years old, divorced at twenty. my fault. screwed around. then the other two relationships were their fault they ran off with someone else first one a kraut after 12 years. then the last one a stuck up dominating so and so after 14years who also had money,money?

Dan Fante wrote:What I do find absolutely crazy is people spending in excess of £20k on their 'big day' when they can't even put together the deposit for a flat. That's a different, but related, issue though.

Agreed!!

Heretic

One of the benefits of a free society is the ability to squander money on follies, as long as you can afford it, do with money as you will.

I have gambled for 42 years, and hate it when people say I am wasting money, money is only a means to an end, the end being " well being ", gambling enhances my well being.

I have a genetic predisposition for " near misses ", evolved from my hunter ancestors who risked and missed every day, the biggest rush from gambling is not winning or losing, it is the near misses, that is why slot machines are so addictive, they provide a near miss every few seconds.

I'd have to find quite an oddball were I ever to get married. Things would have to be quite different from a traditional marriage. I don't mind committing - I'm not a "player" and never was. But there are certain things that I couldn't stand, especially not for the rest of my life. Having someone else in my bed while I'm trying to sleep is a real nuisance; I tried it once for awhile when I had a live-in boyfriend (cohabitation before marriage *gasp* I'm doomed to hell!) but it just didn't work. I couldn't sleep a wink. Plus I've seen way too many marriages where couples placed curfews and bedtimes on each other, and having to ask permission to do basic things is a big no-no. If I'm going to be treated like a child, then I want all the benefits of being a child ... like summer vacations and not having to pay bills.  

Whatever gives you a rush Tosh, it is entirely up to yourself. ok.