Your son/daughter comes home with his/her boyfriend/girlfriend, and they announce they're getting married. However, he/she is not of the same religion (not just a different denomination) that you and your son/daughter are.

How would you respond?

Shalom,
Vern

I would ask them how they planned to raise their children. If they are in agreement on how to approach religion with the children and the family can experience a tolerance for other views, then I would give them my blessing.

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Religion should have nothing to do with whom my child loves and marries. Obviously, my child sees something in them beyond their religion, & so be it.

Unless the significant other seems to be harming my child in a physical , emotional, psychological, or mental way, then I will have something to say.

Issues with raising children can be dealt with by them when the time comes.

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- Wisdom comes when you stop looking for it. -
"If God were alive today, he'd be an atheist" - Kurt Vonnegut

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Vern,
Assuming they're adults, "my" ONLY response could be one of 100% support and unconditional love. How they live their lives is something I relinquished responsibility for the day they became an adult. I have faith that my stewardship of their up-bringing provided them with enough of the necessary experiences needed to make the choices that benefited them in the most positive ways. Give them the trust and freedom they've earned and deserve.

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Only Love Prevails,
Don

I agree with you folks. It would have been very interesting to have asked this same question about 50 or 60 years ago and compare the answers then with what we have here. Much has changed since then-- much to the chagrin of the fundamentalists.

Shalom,
Vern

The funny thing is, lots of people still actually have probklems with their in-laws-to-be when major religious differences intervene. This is espeically true if the couple have intentions of a family, since what way to raise the children causes many, many arguments, both between couples and between in-laws and partners.

For an atheist to blithely assert that "religion should be no problem" is fine as a debating stance, but when their son/daughter brings home a fundamentalist Christian, I am willing to bet that's not how they feel at all.... and vice versa (although I am also willing to bet that most fundie Christians would not be so dismissive of religion as a source of potential conflict!!)

I can state as a fact -- since i work with teens -- that despite the fact I live in an ethnicaly diverse city, in a fairly liberal city at that, in a liberal country, the fact is that young people dating outside their own ethnic group/race causes lots of conflict with parents. I think my doubts of people's confident predicitions of perpetual harmony are well founded, therefore.

In a larger sense, that isn't surprising that there is a disconnect between predicition and performance. People always want to present themselves in the best light and often make claims that are not things they could do or would do in real life. It's not hypocrisy, it's merely ego.

Truthfully, I do not know what I will do should this arise. I don't think it will be a problem, because marrying someone "of my faith" was not a big issue for me when I was searching for a relationship...that may be a good predictor or not. Ask me in 10 years or so, when it starts to be relevant to my relationship wiht my sons. ;)



"Be seeing you..."

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Grassaf, Eolas

Quite right. We too easily forget that marriage is about more than two people who love each other -- much more. Families are added to, and beyond that, communities are extended. It is not always easy to graft dissimilar things together!

But even for the couple, even if there were no children, we have to remember that holds a marriage together is usually not what got it started in the first place. Couples have to respect one another, but they must also share many of the most important things in life, which most definitely includes community. When one community or another is not accepting, that will cause stress to the marriage.

I don't say it can't be done, but I do think there are enough issues that a great deal of thought and care needs to go into it. Especially when, as you say Eolas, merging such widely divergent world-views as atheism and fundamentalist Christianity. I don't know if love is always a strong enough glue to hold those centrifugal forces together.

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evangelicalhumanist: Greek "eu"=good and "angelos"=messenger. Spreading the good news of Humanism.

My son inlaw is of a different "belief". He sees an avantage in having a boy circumsized. My daughter on the other hand raised in the "belief" that everything is perfect as it is : ) doesn't. I am not asked for my opinion : ( LOL

This is something they have to discover on their own. Both will experience what they need to experience (or they feel they need to expereince) and however the dice fall, I am there : )

Most of my family, and extented family is not of my "belief", yet I love them and see perfection in all of it. They are... as I am.

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May your awareness be perfection

My "children" are 40, 39, and the "baby" is 35 (I'm 29). My wife and I operate under this rule of thumb with them: we'll give advice because that's what parents do; however, it's their obligation to do that which they believe is right, even if we don't like it-- it's hard to find much worse things in life than demanding in-laws.

Shalom,
Vern

how straightforward & honest of an answer can be posted here without risk of getting oneself banned?

I'll decline to answer, based on that.