Marriage? (split from do/date/marry)

The farther our society falls away from religion the more acceptable non marriage relationships are accepted. Right or wrong I am not one to say.
Just a point .

Quote:

---

Originally posted by PhowaBoy
whooooww.... easy everybody. *No need to get nasty on such an interesting and informative thread.

---

FWIW, I didn't take any offense - not that it would matter much either way. I hold very strong beliefs that would cast me in a lot more questionable light than this particular one - beliefs based on direct personal experience that has contradicted my reasoning time and again.

It would take a complete reboot to convince me otherwise. Meanwhile, I am really enjoying this discussion.

1 Cor 2:14

I think the mind and the brain are indeed separate things. Simply put, the brain is the hardware, the mind is the software. That's the scientific approach. A spiritual approach still includes a separation between mind and brain.

Sure, you could say that love is nothing more than a chemical reaction and the playings-out of hormones and neurotransmitters, but I don't think that takes anything away from it at all. If that's the way you look at it, then love isn't any less real than any thought, any action, any feeling that you experience in life. Unless you don't believe in life itself, I don't see the point of marginalizing the emotion with the strongest reality-distorting capabilities of them all as being just some neurological process. If you want to detach yourself from your feelings, don't say it as if you typing on your keyboard or intellectualizing this idea is any more significant than being in love, because it just isn't.

As for youth and self-realization affecting your views on marriage, I don't entirely agree. Which is to say I don't exactly disagree. I know that the only thing I've wanted since I was fairly young was a long-term relationship. Of course, I never got it. I think long vs short term relationships is just a matter of personal preference. Seeking impermanent relationships doesn't necessarily mean that a person isn't self-realized. Maybe he's so bored with himself that he needs something to change in the external, because the internal is too-well understood, too static to offer any excitement. By the same token, if someone has a knack for understanding and reducing people, he's just as likely to seek new partners because of his thorough understanding.

I just don't know. Marriage is just a societal construct, but it's a long-lasting one that is part of most cultures. Some form of marriage is an essential part of human nature, I think. So it's not for everyone, who cares? some like it hot, some like it cold. I like it in the pot, 9 days old.

That oft-cited 50% divorce rate is just the sensationalist result of a poorly constructed statistical analysis. It really is nonsensical and meaningless. The way they get 50% is to take

(#divorces filed for and obtained in a year X) / (#marriages filed for and obtained in a year X)

The numerator expresses the number of divorces that occur out of a pool of people containing all current marriages - those obtained stretching back some 75 years or so. Let's say that there are 500,000 married couples in Country A on 1 January 2005. These include old couples who've been married for 75 years, young newlyweds, and all in between. By 31 December 2005, 1500 more couples have gotten married, and 750 couples have gotten divorced. The 750 couples who divorced did not come from the same sample group as the 1500 who got married. They came from that pool of 500,000 married couples (the sum of all new marriages over all years minus the number of marriages broken by death minus the total number of divorces over all years). It makes no sense to divide 750 by 1500 and call that a divorce rate. It's not the same people involved. Very, very few of the couples who were married in 2005 got divorced in 2005, and a couple who were married in 1976 and got divorced in 2005 would, using the above expression, be contributing to "the terrible divorce rate of 2005 caused by the degrading of family values yadda yadda..." despite the fact that their marriage was born, grew, and matured long before any of the proposed deleterious effects of 21st century living on long-term relationships. A true divorce rate for a given year could be attained either through interviews of an appropriately constructed sample or by taking

(total # of divorces of couples who were married in year X) / (total # of marriages in year X)

which gives the percentage of people married in year X who later divorced - the most meaningful interpretation of a divorce rate.

In reality, the divorce rate is much less than 50%.

People are soo eager to believe in what the media says.
One really has to be aware of how the results of these polls are obtained.

Any group or affiliate can represent any group of people they wish. Then conduct a poll of either the people they want or in the other case the people they want to look bad.
I think this is a very corrupt topic. Unfortunately all it would take is some scrutiny of the press or the pollsters.

ugh, freakin' press. Is there some rule about statistics being the only facts that don't have to be true?

Statistically speaking, statistics aren't true. LOL get this, there are so many random factors, due to the fact that we can't possibly no the reasons for any given occurence, that all statistics, while likely (In that during the time they were tested, occured about that much) are also just a generalizaiton.

OR, more literally, an impossibility is something that cannot succeed, IE probability ratio of 0.

Since any fraction whos denominator is infinately unknowable has the possibility of being zero, then it is asusmed to be so. Therefore:

Amount of knowledge we do have
---------------------------------------------- = 0
Total Knowledge EVER about EVERYTHING

Therefore, even by our own logic system, everything we know is completely wrong. :)