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>> 1) Divorce is common. In fact, it is more common amongst those who claim
>> to be religious. I guess words and preaching don't equate to actions.
>
> Not as common as you might think, they state that 50% of marriages end in
> divorce, which isn't a true statement. The way they arrive at that number
> is there are say 20,000 weddings every year, and 10,000 divorces, giving
> 50%. However those divorces are really amoung the married couples in the
> total pool of married people, which grew by 50,000 in the same year. So
> really given that size pool, the divorce rate isn't 50% but rather a
> significantly smaller number.
>
> Claiming to be religous, simply means to claim to follow the teachings of
> a belief system, that doesn't make you perfect, and the same factors that
> affect non-religious marriages, also affects religious ones. To be honest
> though, far too many people, are willing to give up on a marriage, far too
> quickly. Often if they worked on keeping it together and resolved the
> issue, that was causing the problem, they would save the cost of a
> divorce.
>
W,
You are correct. The divorce statistics (as well as most other sociological
statistics) can be construed a number of ways. Often, the sampling is
unscientific, the results are skewed to push an agenda (our current
government is very good at doing this), or the recurrance rate among some
individuals are taken as proof about the whole (ie. those that divorce once,
often divorce additional times as well, but both are counted as divorces).
Still, the so called "red states" tend to be about 27% above the national
average (and the statistics are taken using the same methodology across the
nation). This is more than a sampling error and does indicate a rather
unexpected result. Personally, I think it is a greater indicator of
hipocracy than the success of marriage, but that is beside the point.
Rick