Why atheists have weak relationships, Christians strong ones

[Caninope]

Obviously not blatant enough, because a lot of people thought the OP was serious.

As happens all the time. I think the OP is just doing random idiot checks, just to see how NSG is doing.

A lot of people failed.

[Big Jim P]

Obviously not blatant enough, because a lot of people thought the OP was serious.

As happens all the time. I think the OP is just doing random idiot checks, just to see how NSG is doing.

A lot of people failed.

They often do, including some regulars, who by now should know better. Of course, these reactions are often funnier than the original satire. Especially three or four pages into it, when several people have already given the game away.

[The Zion of Saalam]

George Barna, president and founder of Barna Research Group, commented:

"While it may be alarming to discover that born again Christians are more likely than others to experience a divorce, that pattern has been in place for quite some time. Even more disturbing, perhaps, is that when those individuals experience a divorce many of them feel their community of faith provides rejection rather than support and healing. But the research also raises questions regarding the effectiveness of how churches minister to families. The ultimate responsibility for a marriage belongs to the husband and wife, but the high incidence of divorce within the Christian community challenges the idea that churches provide truly practical and life-changing support for marriages."

[Xirria]

You sir, are an idiot.

Oh? Why so?

Well, you DID make a statement that was wholly inaccurate.

Yes, almost all his statements are complete bullshit.

agreed ^

[TWTDSurvivors]

You sir, are an idiot.

Not allot more needs to be said of the OP - that was produced by an obvious moron! Sorry if this offends any morons out there!

[Big Jim P]

You sir, are an idiot.

Not allot more needs to be said of the OP - that was produced by an obvious moron! Sorry if this offends any morons out there!

I REALLY gotta start keeping score.

[Sdaeriji]

Obviously not blatant enough, because a lot of people thought the OP was serious.

The people who count got it.

[Unhealthy2]

Not allot more needs to be said of the OP - that was produced by an obvious moron! Sorry if this offends any morons out there!

The irony is just hilarious here.

[Vimmini]

I understand this is a joke and u be trollin'. But I am atheist and offended not because of your statement, but because of all of you theists who say atheists will go to hell. Firstly, we don't have or believe in a such thing as hell. Second, you have likely met more atheists than you realize. You may have atheist friends. As far as I know, atheists are not open about the fact that they are irreligious. I have many friends, and as another way to say this is bullshit, my girlfriend is Muslim. A Muslim and an Atheist. You thought you'd never see that, didn't you?

You mean she is an atheist from a Muslim background? You can't simultaneously be atheist and Muslim. I would know.

I don't recall anyone saying in this thread that you are going to hell.

You recognize the satire in the OP but decided to take it seriously anyway and then went off tangent to rant about theists, why?

No actually I meant she is Muslim and I am Atheist. Your religious status does not matter when it comes to relationships, or pretty much anything. And for those of you who don't know, a lot of Muslims hate Atheists.

And by "all of you theists who say atheists will go to hell", I don't mean any of you, by those people in real life who say non-believers will go to hell. We are Atheists, not the Illuminati, not the Anti-Christ.
Not The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

And yes I know this is a joke, and you got tons of retards to post irrelevant shit, and flame wars and everything. I just wanted to point out the fact that we are not bad people. We are humans just like you. We don't worship Satan. (We don't even believe in Satan, but yet you Christians do?)

Oh and another thing. She is black, but not African American. She's Saudi Arabian, which is technically Asian. That fascinates me.

[Wolffbaden]

One of the many ways that Atheism is leading to the degradation of Western civilization and the decline of humanity in general is that Atheists have weak personal relationships, as opposed to the abiding and adamantine bonds between loving Christians.

For example, Christ commands us to love our neighbors, so we do. Christian history is replete with affable coexistence, and to this day, there is not a single border between Christian nations that requires armed guard. From Northern Ireland to the Maginot Line, from Germany to Poland, from Mexico to America, the peace of Christ has rained a fiery barrage of tranquility down upon the blacked-out fortified bunkers of our neighborhoods.

But on a far more important scale, Atheists have particularly failed at the second* most important relationship available to human beings: marriage. Marriage is what brings us together, today. And for Christians, it is a sacred bond, wherein a man is commanded to love and care for his wife and she is commanded to obey and make babies for him. If either fails in this most sacrosanct of duties, Jesus stands ready to punish them with eternal burning and flaying in hell, unless they have asked Jesus to forgive their sins, in which case Jesus just puts information on their credit report resulting in denial of financing for the purchase of appliances at Sears. This results in a truly loving bond.

You atheists have to base your marriages on the specious and tenuous connections of mutual respect, regard, attraction, and happiness in your daily lives. Without the supernatural chains of Heaven to keep you together in an unbreakable state of matrimony, you have to maintain your relationships with nothing but simple humane consideration, self-motivated co-operation, and sinfully experimental sex. You have to decide, every day, to really care for one another, in each moment, for yourselves and for each other. We Christians, on the other hand, stay together because God will spiritually ass-ram us if we divorce. THAT'S what you base a successful relationship on.

I urge all of you atheists here to abandon your willful and damning rejection of God, and if you're married, your spouse should do the same. For women, persuade your man that Jesus is the only way by respectfully requesting that he read the Bible to you. For men, just tell her you're both Christians now.

*(Remember, the most important relationship is between a person and Jesus Christ, their Lord and Savior. Scripturally, the relationship between Christ and his Church is like that of a Groom to his Bride, except Christ's love doesn't taper off a few years after the wedding, becoming emotionally distant and resentful as the Church gains weight (both literal and figurative) with the heaviness of unfulfilled expectation, and eventually Christ forgets to close his IM Chat session with an old girlfriend from high school, and the Church finds it and gets really pissed off, and even though Christ wasn't having an affair with her or anything, and hadn't even really touched her, the Church is angry because its still "emotional intimacy", so then Christ gets fed up with the Church's bullshit and really does have an affair with some 24 year old goth chick who works as a paralegal. Its not like that. Probably.)

Although this may work in theory, it fails in reality.

http://atheism.about.com/od/atheistfami ... ivorce.htm

(about.com is a general informational website; the atheism header is merely the link to the topic)

The Barna Research Group, an evangelical Christian organization that does surveys and research to better understand what Christians believe and how they behave, studied divorce rates in America in 1999 and found surprising evidence that divorce is far lower among atheists than among conservative Christians — exactly the opposite of what they were probably expecting.

11% of all American adults are divorced
25% of all American adults have had at least one divorce


27% of born-again Christians have had at least one divorce
24% of all non-born-again Christians have been divorced


21% of atheists have been divorced
21% of Catholics and Lutherans have been divorced
24% of Mormons have been divorced
25% of mainstream Protestants have been divorced
29% of Baptists have been divorced
24% of nondenominational, independent Protestants have been divorced


27% of people in the South and Midwest have been divorced
26% of people in the West have been divorced
19% of people in the Northwest and Northeast have been divorced

The highest divorce rates are in the Bible Belt: "Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama and Oklahoma round out the Top Five in frequency of divorce...the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average" of 4.2/1000 people. Nine states in the Northeast (Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Maryland) have the lowest divorce rates, averaging just 3.5/1000 people.

Barna isn't the only group to arrive at these numbers. Other researchers have also found that conservative Protestants get divorced more often than other groups, even more often than "mainline" Protestants. The fact that atheists and agnostics divorce less often than other religious groups was, however, surprising to many. Some have simply refused to believe it.

Credit should be given to George Barna, himself a conservative evangelical Christian, for at least trying to face up to these results and what they might mean: "We would love to be able to report that Christians are living very distinct lives and impacting the community, but...in the area of divorce rates they continue to be the same." According to Barna, his data raises "questions regarding the effectiveness of how churches minister to families" and challenge "the idea that churches provide truly practical and life-changing support for marriage."

Born again adults who have been married are just as likely as non-born-again adults who have been married to eventually become divorced. Because the vast majority of born again marriages occurred after the partners had accepted Christ as their savior, it appears that their connection to Christ makes less difference in the durability of people’s marriages than many people might expect. Faith has had a limited affect on people’s behavior, whether related to moral convictions and practices, relational activities, lifestyle choices or economic practices.

Barna should, however, acknowledge that the divorce rates for conservative Christians are higher than for liberal Christians. He also doesn't take the further step of acknowledging that perhaps conservative Christianity and conservative religion in general are unable to provide a sound basis for marriage — that perhaps there are other, more secular foundations for marriage that conservative Christians are missing. What might they be? Well, an obvious possibility is treating women like fully autonomous equals in the relationship, something which conservative Christianity frequently denies.

The difference in divorce rates is particularly interesting given the fact that the Christians getting divorced in the highest numbers are among the same Christians who are most likely to raise an alarm about the state of marriage in society. They also tend to be the same Christians who want to deny gays the right to marry on the assumption that gay marriage is a "threat" to the institution of marriage. If marriage is in any danger in America, perhaps the threat comes from the unstable marriages of conservative Christians, not the relationships of gays or the marriages of godless atheists.

Atheists have a lower divorce rate than both Born-Again and non-Born-Again Christians... lower than Mormons, Protestants, and Baptists- on a more detailed note.

[Glorious Homeland]

One of the many ways that Atheism is leading to the degradation of Western civilization and the decline of humanity in general is that Atheists have weak personal relationships, as opposed to the abiding and adamantine bonds between loving Christians.

For example, Christ commands us to love our neighbors, so we do. Christian history is replete with affable coexistence, and to this day, there is not a single border between Christian nations that requires armed guard. From Northern Ireland to the Maginot Line, from Germany to Poland, from Mexico to America, the peace of Christ has rained a fiery barrage of tranquility down upon the blacked-out fortified bunkers of our neighborhoods.

But on a far more important scale, Atheists have particularly failed at the second* most important relationship available to human beings: marriage. Marriage is what brings us together, today. And for Christians, it is a sacred bond, wherein a man is commanded to love and care for his wife and she is commanded to obey and make babies for him. If either fails in this most sacrosanct of duties, Jesus stands ready to punish them with eternal burning and flaying in hell, unless they have asked Jesus to forgive their sins, in which case Jesus just puts information on their credit report resulting in denial of financing for the purchase of appliances at Sears. This results in a truly loving bond.

You atheists have to base your marriages on the specious and tenuous connections of mutual respect, regard, attraction, and happiness in your daily lives. Without the supernatural chains of Heaven to keep you together in an unbreakable state of matrimony, you have to maintain your relationships with nothing but simple humane consideration, self-motivated co-operation, and sinfully experimental sex. You have to decide, every day, to really care for one another, in each moment, for yourselves and for each other. We Christians, on the other hand, stay together because God will spiritually ass-ram us if we divorce. THAT'S what you base a successful relationship on.

I urge all of you atheists here to abandon your willful and damning rejection of God, and if you're married, your spouse should do the same. For women, persuade your man that Jesus is the only way by respectfully requesting that he read the Bible to you. For men, just tell her you're both Christians now.

*(Remember, the most important relationship is between a person and Jesus Christ, their Lord and Savior. Scripturally, the relationship between Christ and his Church is like that of a Groom to his Bride, except Christ's love doesn't taper off a few years after the wedding, becoming emotionally distant and resentful as the Church gains weight (both literal and figurative) with the heaviness of unfulfilled expectation, and eventually Christ forgets to close his IM Chat session with an old girlfriend from high school, and the Church finds it and gets really pissed off, and even though Christ wasn't having an affair with her or anything, and hadn't even really touched her, the Church is angry because its still "emotional intimacy", so then Christ gets fed up with the Church's bullshit and really does have an affair with some 24 year old goth chick who works as a paralegal. Its not like that. Probably.)

Why are you so unsure of your own relationships with people that you have to attack the relationships of people you have no understanding of? That's not something Jesus would condone and you bloody know it.

[Novikov]

...You atheists have to base your marriages on the specious and tenuous connections of mutual respect, regard, attraction, and happiness in your daily lives. Without the supernatural chains of Heaven to keep you together in an unbreakable state of matrimony, you have to maintain your relationships with nothing but simple humane consideration, self-motivated co-operation, and sinfully experimental sex.

So why exactly is it better to be bound to someone with the, "supernatural chains of Heaven," than to have a relationship based upon, "humane consideration, [and]... co-operation..." This strikes me as a very weak arguement. Relationships based upon mutual respect (i.e. consideration) are going to be healthy whereas relationships based upon teaching such as Col. 3:18's, "Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord" seem to breed unhappiness. Christianity teaches that women should submit unquestioningly to their husbands. They are treated like second-class citizens (or, to use the Christian metaphor, less important parts of the Body of Christ.) Surely it is preferable to advocate consideration for one's partner rather than silent obedience. I, at least, feel so and try to treat my girlfriend as an equal rather than as a subordinate.

[Jocabia]

One of the many ways that Atheism is leading to the degradation of Western civilization and the decline of humanity in general is that Atheists have weak personal relationships, as opposed to the abiding and adamantine bonds between loving Christians.

For example, Christ commands us to love our neighbors, so we do. Christian history is replete with affable coexistence, and to this day, there is not a single border between Christian nations that requires armed guard. From Northern Ireland to the Maginot Line, from Germany to Poland, from Mexico to America, the peace of Christ has rained a fiery barrage of tranquility down upon the blacked-out fortified bunkers of our neighborhoods.

But on a far more important scale, Atheists have particularly failed at the second* most important relationship available to human beings: marriage. Marriage is what brings us together, today. And for Christians, it is a sacred bond, wherein a man is commanded to love and care for his wife and she is commanded to obey and make babies for him. If either fails in this most sacrosanct of duties, Jesus stands ready to punish them with eternal burning and flaying in hell, unless they have asked Jesus to forgive their sins, in which case Jesus just puts information on their credit report resulting in denial of financing for the purchase of appliances at Sears. This results in a truly loving bond.

You atheists have to base your marriages on the specious and tenuous connections of mutual respect, regard, attraction, and happiness in your daily lives. Without the supernatural chains of Heaven to keep you together in an unbreakable state of matrimony, you have to maintain your relationships with nothing but simple humane consideration, self-motivated co-operation, and sinfully experimental sex. You have to decide, every day, to really care for one another, in each moment, for yourselves and for each other. We Christians, on the other hand, stay together because God will spiritually ass-ram us if we divorce. THAT'S what you base a successful relationship on.

I urge all of you atheists here to abandon your willful and damning rejection of God, and if you're married, your spouse should do the same. For women, persuade your man that Jesus is the only way by respectfully requesting that he read the Bible to you. For men, just tell her you're both Christians now.

*(Remember, the most important relationship is between a person and Jesus Christ, their Lord and Savior. Scripturally, the relationship between Christ and his Church is like that of a Groom to his Bride, except Christ's love doesn't taper off a few years after the wedding, becoming emotionally distant and resentful as the Church gains weight (both literal and figurative) with the heaviness of unfulfilled expectation, and eventually Christ forgets to close his IM Chat session with an old girlfriend from high school, and the Church finds it and gets really pissed off, and even though Christ wasn't having an affair with her or anything, and hadn't even really touched her, the Church is angry because its still "emotional intimacy", so then Christ gets fed up with the Church's bullshit and really does have an affair with some 24 year old goth chick who works as a paralegal. Its not like that. Probably.)

Although this may work in theory, it fails in reality.

http://atheism.about.com/od/atheistfami ... ivorce.htm

(about.com is a general informational website; the atheism header is merely the link to the topic)

The Barna Research Group, an evangelical Christian organization that does surveys and research to better understand what Christians believe and how they behave, studied divorce rates in America in 1999 and found surprising evidence that divorce is far lower among atheists than among conservative Christians — exactly the opposite of what they were probably expecting.

11% of all American adults are divorced
25% of all American adults have had at least one divorce


27% of born-again Christians have had at least one divorce
24% of all non-born-again Christians have been divorced


21% of atheists have been divorced
21% of Catholics and Lutherans have been divorced
24% of Mormons have been divorced
25% of mainstream Protestants have been divorced
29% of Baptists have been divorced
24% of nondenominational, independent Protestants have been divorced


27% of people in the South and Midwest have been divorced
26% of people in the West have been divorced
19% of people in the Northwest and Northeast have been divorced

The highest divorce rates are in the Bible Belt: "Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama and Oklahoma round out the Top Five in frequency of divorce...the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average" of 4.2/1000 people. Nine states in the Northeast (Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Maryland) have the lowest divorce rates, averaging just 3.5/1000 people.

Barna isn't the only group to arrive at these numbers. Other researchers have also found that conservative Protestants get divorced more often than other groups, even more often than "mainline" Protestants. The fact that atheists and agnostics divorce less often than other religious groups was, however, surprising to many. Some have simply refused to believe it.

Credit should be given to George Barna, himself a conservative evangelical Christian, for at least trying to face up to these results and what they might mean: "We would love to be able to report that Christians are living very distinct lives and impacting the community, but...in the area of divorce rates they continue to be the same." According to Barna, his data raises "questions regarding the effectiveness of how churches minister to families" and challenge "the idea that churches provide truly practical and life-changing support for marriage."

Born again adults who have been married are just as likely as non-born-again adults who have been married to eventually become divorced. Because the vast majority of born again marriages occurred after the partners had accepted Christ as their savior, it appears that their connection to Christ makes less difference in the durability of people’s marriages than many people might expect. Faith has had a limited affect on people’s behavior, whether related to moral convictions and practices, relational activities, lifestyle choices or economic practices.

Barna should, however, acknowledge that the divorce rates for conservative Christians are higher than for liberal Christians. He also doesn't take the further step of acknowledging that perhaps conservative Christianity and conservative religion in general are unable to provide a sound basis for marriage — that perhaps there are other, more secular foundations for marriage that conservative Christians are missing. What might they be? Well, an obvious possibility is treating women like fully autonomous equals in the relationship, something which conservative Christianity frequently denies.

The difference in divorce rates is particularly interesting given the fact that the Christians getting divorced in the highest numbers are among the same Christians who are most likely to raise an alarm about the state of marriage in society. They also tend to be the same Christians who want to deny gays the right to marry on the assumption that gay marriage is a "threat" to the institution of marriage. If marriage is in any danger in America, perhaps the threat comes from the unstable marriages of conservative Christians, not the relationships of gays or the marriages of godless atheists.

Atheists have a lower divorce rate than both Born-Again and non-Born-Again Christians... lower than Mormons, Protestants, and Baptists- on a more detailed note.

This is beautiful. How could you put in so much effort to refute a post you did not actually read?

[Jocabia]

Obviously not blatant enough, because a lot of people thought the OP was serious.

As happens all the time. I think the OP is just doing random idiot checks, just to see how NSG is doing.

A lot of people failed.

What amuses me is the number of people who recognized Hammy and made fun of people for not recognizing satire while simultaneously falling for some of the meta-satire in this thread. They already know it's a satire thread. They took the time to read through the replies and make fun of them. It didn't occur to them to look at a post that even sounds a bit satirical and say, "hey, are you kidding here?"

[Copenhagen Metropolis]

My God! Why can no one recognize satire this obvious?

Maybe because satire and religion looks so similar.
Sometimes it's hard to see when people are actually religious, and when they're just acting stupid.

[The EuropeanFederation]

In the United Kingdom for the teenage class - this can be quite true.

[Basementees]

That opening piece was jokes.

I found the particularly funny bit was the second paragraph: "For example, Christ commands us to love our neighbors"

The last major holy war was CAUSED by Christians, as well as lost by them. They have also entered another holy war with Islam, which could go either way. But it won't be won by the Christians probably, though, by the western countries.

[Brandenburg-Altmark]

That opening piece was jokes.

I found the particularly funny bit was the second paragraph: "For example, Christ commands us to love our neighbors"

The last major holy war was CAUSED by Christians, as well as lost by them. They have also entered another holy war with Islam, which could go either way. But it won't be won by the Christians probably, though, by the western countries.

Could you try again? Think really hard about what is being said.

[EnragedMaldivians]

I understand this is a joke and u be trollin'. But I am atheist and offended not because of your statement, but because of all of you theists who say atheists will go to hell. Firstly, we don't have or believe in a such thing as hell. Second, you have likely met more atheists than you realize. You may have atheist friends. As far as I know, atheists are not open about the fact that they are irreligious. I have many friends, and as another way to say this is bullshit, my girlfriend is Muslim. A Muslim and an Atheist. You thought you'd never see that, didn't you?

You mean she is an atheist from a Muslim background? You can't simultaneously be atheist and Muslim. I would know.

I don't recall anyone saying in this thread that you are going to hell.

You recognize the satire in the OP but decided to take it seriously anyway and then went off tangent to rant about theists, why?

No actually I meant she is Muslim and I am Atheist. Your religious status does not matter when it comes to relationships, or pretty much anything. And for those of you who don't know, a lot of Muslims hate Atheists.

And by "all of you theists who say atheists will go to hell", I don't mean any of you, by those people in real life who say non-believers will go to hell. We are Atheists, not the Illuminati, not the Anti-Christ.
Not The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

And yes I know this is a joke, and you got tons of retards to post irrelevant shit, and flame wars and everything. I just wanted to point out the fact that we are not bad people. We are humans just like you. We don't worship Satan. (We don't even believe in Satan, but yet you Christians do?)

Oh and another thing. She is black, but not African American. She's Saudi Arabian, which is technically Asian. That fascinates me.

Lol, you come off as a little hostile, I am atheist too and I don't hold any grudges. Chill out a little man.

[Wolffbaden]

One of the many ways that Atheism is leading to the degradation of Western civilization and the decline of humanity in general is that Atheists have weak personal relationships, as opposed to the abiding and adamantine bonds between loving Christians.

For example, Christ commands us to love our neighbors, so we do. Christian history is replete with affable coexistence, and to this day, there is not a single border between Christian nations that requires armed guard. From Northern Ireland to the Maginot Line, from Germany to Poland, from Mexico to America, the peace of Christ has rained a fiery barrage of tranquility down upon the blacked-out fortified bunkers of our neighborhoods.

But on a far more important scale, Atheists have particularly failed at the second* most important relationship available to human beings: marriage. Marriage is what brings us together, today. And for Christians, it is a sacred bond, wherein a man is commanded to love and care for his wife and she is commanded to obey and make babies for him. If either fails in this most sacrosanct of duties, Jesus stands ready to punish them with eternal burning and flaying in hell, unless they have asked Jesus to forgive their sins, in which case Jesus just puts information on their credit report resulting in denial of financing for the purchase of appliances at Sears. This results in a truly loving bond.

You atheists have to base your marriages on the specious and tenuous connections of mutual respect, regard, attraction, and happiness in your daily lives. Without the supernatural chains of Heaven to keep you together in an unbreakable state of matrimony, you have to maintain your relationships with nothing but simple humane consideration, self-motivated co-operation, and sinfully experimental sex. You have to decide, every day, to really care for one another, in each moment, for yourselves and for each other. We Christians, on the other hand, stay together because God will spiritually ass-ram us if we divorce. THAT'S what you base a successful relationship on.

I urge all of you atheists here to abandon your willful and damning rejection of God, and if you're married, your spouse should do the same. For women, persuade your man that Jesus is the only way by respectfully requesting that he read the Bible to you. For men, just tell her you're both Christians now.

*(Remember, the most important relationship is between a person and Jesus Christ, their Lord and Savior. Scripturally, the relationship between Christ and his Church is like that of a Groom to his Bride, except Christ's love doesn't taper off a few years after the wedding, becoming emotionally distant and resentful as the Church gains weight (both literal and figurative) with the heaviness of unfulfilled expectation, and eventually Christ forgets to close his IM Chat session with an old girlfriend from high school, and the Church finds it and gets really pissed off, and even though Christ wasn't having an affair with her or anything, and hadn't even really touched her, the Church is angry because its still "emotional intimacy", so then Christ gets fed up with the Church's bullshit and really does have an affair with some 24 year old goth chick who works as a paralegal. Its not like that. Probably.)

Although this may work in theory, it fails in reality.

http://atheism.about.com/od/atheistfami ... ivorce.htm

(about.com is a general informational website; the atheism header is merely the link to the topic)

The Barna Research Group, an evangelical Christian organization that does surveys and research to better understand what Christians believe and how they behave, studied divorce rates in America in 1999 and found surprising evidence that divorce is far lower among atheists than among conservative Christians — exactly the opposite of what they were probably expecting.

11% of all American adults are divorced
25% of all American adults have had at least one divorce


27% of born-again Christians have had at least one divorce
24% of all non-born-again Christians have been divorced


21% of atheists have been divorced
21% of Catholics and Lutherans have been divorced
24% of Mormons have been divorced
25% of mainstream Protestants have been divorced
29% of Baptists have been divorced
24% of nondenominational, independent Protestants have been divorced


27% of people in the South and Midwest have been divorced
26% of people in the West have been divorced
19% of people in the Northwest and Northeast have been divorced

The highest divorce rates are in the Bible Belt: "Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama and Oklahoma round out the Top Five in frequency of divorce...the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average" of 4.2/1000 people. Nine states in the Northeast (Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Maryland) have the lowest divorce rates, averaging just 3.5/1000 people.

Barna isn't the only group to arrive at these numbers. Other researchers have also found that conservative Protestants get divorced more often than other groups, even more often than "mainline" Protestants. The fact that atheists and agnostics divorce less often than other religious groups was, however, surprising to many. Some have simply refused to believe it.

Credit should be given to George Barna, himself a conservative evangelical Christian, for at least trying to face up to these results and what they might mean: "We would love to be able to report that Christians are living very distinct lives and impacting the community, but...in the area of divorce rates they continue to be the same." According to Barna, his data raises "questions regarding the effectiveness of how churches minister to families" and challenge "the idea that churches provide truly practical and life-changing support for marriage."

Born again adults who have been married are just as likely as non-born-again adults who have been married to eventually become divorced. Because the vast majority of born again marriages occurred after the partners had accepted Christ as their savior, it appears that their connection to Christ makes less difference in the durability of people’s marriages than many people might expect. Faith has had a limited affect on people’s behavior, whether related to moral convictions and practices, relational activities, lifestyle choices or economic practices.

Barna should, however, acknowledge that the divorce rates for conservative Christians are higher than for liberal Christians. He also doesn't take the further step of acknowledging that perhaps conservative Christianity and conservative religion in general are unable to provide a sound basis for marriage — that perhaps there are other, more secular foundations for marriage that conservative Christians are missing. What might they be? Well, an obvious possibility is treating women like fully autonomous equals in the relationship, something which conservative Christianity frequently denies.

The difference in divorce rates is particularly interesting given the fact that the Christians getting divorced in the highest numbers are among the same Christians who are most likely to raise an alarm about the state of marriage in society. They also tend to be the same Christians who want to deny gays the right to marry on the assumption that gay marriage is a "threat" to the institution of marriage. If marriage is in any danger in America, perhaps the threat comes from the unstable marriages of conservative Christians, not the relationships of gays or the marriages of godless atheists.

Atheists have a lower divorce rate than both Born-Again and non-Born-Again Christians... lower than Mormons, Protestants, and Baptists- on a more detailed note.

This is beautiful.

Why thank you.

How could you put in so much effort to refute a post you did not actually read?

Although this may work in theory, it fails in reality.

Must have missed that part. Which, on that note, I did read it, and, again, while it may work in theory, this really fails in reality. The divorce rates are proof of that. Atheists actually have stronger relationships than Christians do. Which, for the record, it only took me about 45 seconds to pull this link out of my favorites folder, copy & paste the data here, and type up my own personal opinions separate from the statistics which refute his absurd argument- rather flipping it to the advantage and favor of his contrary, the Atheist clique.

[Saint Clair Island]

Why thank you.

How could you put in so much effort to refute a post you did not actually read?

Although this may work in theory, it fails in reality.

Must have missed that part. Which, on that note, I did read it, and, again, while it may work in theory, this really fails in reality. The divorce rates are proof of that. Atheists actually have stronger relationships than Christians do. Which, for the record, it only took me about 45 seconds to pull this link out of my favorites folder, copy & paste the data here, and type up my own personal opinions separate from the statistics which refute his absurd argument- rather flipping it to the advantage and favor of his contrary, the Atheist clique.

She understands. She doesn't comprehend.

[Urcea]

Interesting. Next thread.

[Dungeyland]

^ Same.

[Caninope]

One of the many ways that Atheism is leading to the degradation of Western civilization and the decline of humanity in general is that Atheists have weak personal relationships, as opposed to the abiding and adamantine bonds between loving Christians.

For example, Christ commands us to love our neighbors, so we do. Christian history is replete with affable coexistence, and to this day, there is not a single border between Christian nations that requires armed guard. From Northern Ireland to the Maginot Line, from Germany to Poland, from Mexico to America, the peace of Christ has rained a fiery barrage of tranquility down upon the blacked-out fortified bunkers of our neighborhoods.

But on a far more important scale, Atheists have particularly failed at the second* most important relationship available to human beings: marriage. Marriage is what brings us together, today. And for Christians, it is a sacred bond, wherein a man is commanded to love and care for his wife and she is commanded to obey and make babies for him. If either fails in this most sacrosanct of duties, Jesus stands ready to punish them with eternal burning and flaying in hell, unless they have asked Jesus to forgive their sins, in which case Jesus just puts information on their credit report resulting in denial of financing for the purchase of appliances at Sears. This results in a truly loving bond.

You atheists have to base your marriages on the specious and tenuous connections of mutual respect, regard, attraction, and happiness in your daily lives. Without the supernatural chains of Heaven to keep you together in an unbreakable state of matrimony, you have to maintain your relationships with nothing but simple humane consideration, self-motivated co-operation, and sinfully experimental sex. You have to decide, every day, to really care for one another, in each moment, for yourselves and for each other. We Christians, on the other hand, stay together because God will spiritually ass-ram us if we divorce. THAT'S what you base a successful relationship on.

I urge all of you atheists here to abandon your willful and damning rejection of God, and if you're married, your spouse should do the same. For women, persuade your man that Jesus is the only way by respectfully requesting that he read the Bible to you. For men, just tell her you're both Christians now.

*(Remember, the most important relationship is between a person and Jesus Christ, their Lord and Savior. Scripturally, the relationship between Christ and his Church is like that of a Groom to his Bride, except Christ's love doesn't taper off a few years after the wedding, becoming emotionally distant and resentful as the Church gains weight (both literal and figurative) with the heaviness of unfulfilled expectation, and eventually Christ forgets to close his IM Chat session with an old girlfriend from high school, and the Church finds it and gets really pissed off, and even though Christ wasn't having an affair with her or anything, and hadn't even really touched her, the Church is angry because its still "emotional intimacy", so then Christ gets fed up with the Church's bullshit and really does have an affair with some 24 year old goth chick who works as a paralegal. Its not like that. Probably.)

Although this may work in theory, it fails in reality.

http://atheism.about.com/od/atheistfami ... ivorce.htm

(about.com is a general informational website; the atheism header is merely the link to the topic)

The Barna Research Group, an evangelical Christian organization that does surveys and research to better understand what Christians believe and how they behave, studied divorce rates in America in 1999 and found surprising evidence that divorce is far lower among atheists than among conservative Christians — exactly the opposite of what they were probably expecting.

11% of all American adults are divorced
25% of all American adults have had at least one divorce


27% of born-again Christians have had at least one divorce
24% of all non-born-again Christians have been divorced


21% of atheists have been divorced
21% of Catholics and Lutherans have been divorced
24% of Mormons have been divorced
25% of mainstream Protestants have been divorced
29% of Baptists have been divorced
24% of nondenominational, independent Protestants have been divorced


27% of people in the South and Midwest have been divorced
26% of people in the West have been divorced
19% of people in the Northwest and Northeast have been divorced

The highest divorce rates are in the Bible Belt: "Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama and Oklahoma round out the Top Five in frequency of divorce...the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average" of 4.2/1000 people. Nine states in the Northeast (Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Maryland) have the lowest divorce rates, averaging just 3.5/1000 people.

Barna isn't the only group to arrive at these numbers. Other researchers have also found that conservative Protestants get divorced more often than other groups, even more often than "mainline" Protestants. The fact that atheists and agnostics divorce less often than other religious groups was, however, surprising to many. Some have simply refused to believe it.

Credit should be given to George Barna, himself a conservative evangelical Christian, for at least trying to face up to these results and what they might mean: "We would love to be able to report that Christians are living very distinct lives and impacting the community, but...in the area of divorce rates they continue to be the same." According to Barna, his data raises "questions regarding the effectiveness of how churches minister to families" and challenge "the idea that churches provide truly practical and life-changing support for marriage."

Born again adults who have been married are just as likely as non-born-again adults who have been married to eventually become divorced. Because the vast majority of born again marriages occurred after the partners had accepted Christ as their savior, it appears that their connection to Christ makes less difference in the durability of people’s marriages than many people might expect. Faith has had a limited affect on people’s behavior, whether related to moral convictions and practices, relational activities, lifestyle choices or economic practices.

Barna should, however, acknowledge that the divorce rates for conservative Christians are higher than for liberal Christians. He also doesn't take the further step of acknowledging that perhaps conservative Christianity and conservative religion in general are unable to provide a sound basis for marriage — that perhaps there are other, more secular foundations for marriage that conservative Christians are missing. What might they be? Well, an obvious possibility is treating women like fully autonomous equals in the relationship, something which conservative Christianity frequently denies.

The difference in divorce rates is particularly interesting given the fact that the Christians getting divorced in the highest numbers are among the same Christians who are most likely to raise an alarm about the state of marriage in society. They also tend to be the same Christians who want to deny gays the right to marry on the assumption that gay marriage is a "threat" to the institution of marriage. If marriage is in any danger in America, perhaps the threat comes from the unstable marriages of conservative Christians, not the relationships of gays or the marriages of godless atheists.

Atheists have a lower divorce rate than both Born-Again and non-Born-Again Christians... lower than Mormons, Protestants, and Baptists- on a more detailed note.

This is beautiful.

Why thank you.

How could you put in so much effort to refute a post you did not actually read?

Although this may work in theory, it fails in reality.

Must have missed that part. Which, on that note, I did read it, and, again, while it may work in theory, this really fails in reality. The divorce rates are proof of that. Atheists actually have stronger relationships than Christians do. Which, for the record, it only took me about 45 seconds to pull this link out of my favorites folder, copy & paste the data here, and type up my own personal opinions separate from the statistics which refute his absurd argument- rather flipping it to the advantage and favor of his contrary, the Atheist clique.

We've got a new winner! *Ding, ding, ding*

[Meoru]

You said: "Christians don't eat fish on Fridays".
...
This is undisputable

Moving on to making you say more stuff that's wrong...Did I say that Christians don't eat fish on Fridays?

Yes, you did.

You stated "Christians don't eat fish on Fridays".

The error where you're teaching about grammar structures because I said "Christians don't eat fish on Fridays"? That one.

The error where you're teaching about grammar structures because I said "Christians tell you not to eat fish on Fridays"? That one.

Fixed for accuracy.

Oh, RIsottia, come out and plaaaaaay.

Risottia, you're not going to reply? Porque no?