Bingo. You get a sense that "you'll be okay, that you will make it" and it makes you less willing to go through the worse when it happens, marriage vows notwithstanding. I know that there are atheists and agnostics who commit to marriages or other relationships and are faithful to their partners no matter what. But for me, it took my Christian faith to give me the standing to bear with my (current and for life) husband through some very tough and on-going challenges to our relationship.
May God bless your conception efforts and make you very fruitful!
"May God bless your conception efforts and make you very fruitful!"
Lordy, we have five, and one more on the way. I knows all about birthin' babies.
"I know that there are atheists and agnostics who commit to marriages or other relationships and are faithful to their partners no matter what."
I have no personal knowledge of any such relationships of more than two decades standing. That doesn't prove there aren't any, of course, but...
"But for me, it took my Christian faith to give me the standing to bear with my (current and for life) husband through some very tough and on-going challenges to our relationship."
I think that's true of most people, most emphatically including myself. Even in non-Christian societies, faith in an absolute moral code seems to be necessary.
As Will and Ariel Durant wrote, "Does history warrant the conclusion that religion is necessary to morality -- that a natural ethic is too weak to withstand the savagery that lurks under civilization and emerges in our dreams, crimes, and wars? ... There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion."