aquapub said:
1) Here's a blanket statement I can qualify by using this post: Liberals can't read. I didn't say my opinion was BASED on that person. I said that their comment represented my experience with liberals on this.
Looks like you're the one that can't read. I didn't say your OPINION was based on what that person said....I said don't make blanket statements based upon what one person has said.
Please don't make invalid criticisms based on nothing but emotional defensiveness.
Uh, sorry, if you somehow read some "emotional defensiveness" in there, I'd love to know where, because, well, you know, I'm the one that wrote the post, and I wasn't being emotional OR defensive. I was merely making a statement, refuting your own statement.
2) This is absolutely true. I was wondering when someone would point this out. They are called Agnostics, and they outnumber everyone from what I understand. But as I pointed out before, the vast majority of people-including agnostics-beleive there is SOME kind of higher power, which would definitely put them more towards the Christian category than the Atheist category. And I think doing studies on Agnostics would be harder than people think because, unlike the other two, there is a huge variation from Agnostic to Agnostic about why they are Agnostic. It makes studies on them less reliable.
No, they're not just called agnostics. There are also Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Wiccans, Mormons.....the list goes on and on. I said people that aren't atheist and that aren't Christian.....there are many more groups than just agnostics that don't fall into those two categories.
And don't assume that being agnostic puts someone closer to Christianity. I'm agnostic, and I don't believe in the Christian God or Jesus.
We're not debating why someone is agnostic. This whole thing stems from marriage and divorce rates, and someone pointing out that Christians have higher divorce rates.
3) Everywhere I looked, there was a recurring theme: Christians are no more immune to divorce, but the vast majority of the ones who get divorced are also born again. Those who usually have great turbulence in their lives and flee to Christianity to fix their problems, only to leave the church shortly after that are who make up most of the religious divorces. Regular, real religious people seem to have nowhere near the problem with divorce that secular people have. This may explain our widely different experiences.
http://www.divorcereform.org/mel/rreligion.html
http://www.divorcereform.org/cor.html#anchor613698
Something I did not expect to find that was shocking to me (which can be found by following that second link) was this:
Cohabitation Data:
There is a higher risk, 40 to 85%, of divorce between couples cohabiting before marriage than couples waiting until after marriage to share a home together. (Bumpass & Sweet 1995; Hall & Zhao 1995; Bracher, Stantow, Morgan & Russell 1993; DeMaris & Rao 1992 and Glen 1990) Cited in a posting on the Smart Marriages Listserv, Sep 28, 2004.
Hmmm....funny. I'm all about being secular, and yet, I have one of the strongest marriages out of anyone I know.
You didn't know that stuff about cohabitation? They've been doing studies on that for years. Heck,
Cosmopolitan does a story on it every few months.....