Welcome to another installment of what Whitney and I are calling ‘collective blogging.’ To refresh everyone’s memory, we will both be writing blog entries on the same topic as an exercise to see how different our thought processes and memories are. Hopefully it will be good practice for an idea we have for NaNoWriMo 2009 – to write the same novel, but separately.

Today’s Topic:  Interfaith Marriage

A bit of background:

I was raised Catholic.  Attended Catholic school from pre-school through high school.  Went to church every Sunday, plus Holy Days of Obligation.  Et cetera, et cetera.  But by the time I was leaving high school, I was a bit turned-off by organized religion… or at least, by the organized religion in which I was raised.  By the time I entered college, it seemed rather hypocritical to me, the whole religion-thing.  Why did some people show up for church on Christmas and Easter, but none of the other days of the year?  Why should I tell a priest all my “sins” when in reality he is no less human than I am?  Were all the new friends I was making somehow wrong for not being Catholic?  Add in the fact that I was being trained as a scientist and experiencing all the questions about God vs. religion that come along with science, and it’s little wonder I eventually turned away from religion in general.

I don’t say this to make you think I’ve given up on the concept of a higher power.  I haven’t.  But I suspect my feelings on today’s topic might be better understood if you know what I think, in my life.   I have even mused about my feelings about religion in previous blogs, here.

All that said, I think it’s OK to now tell you that the reason I feel compelled to write a blog on interfaith marriage is that I am engaged to a man who was raised decidedly not Catholic.  He is, like me, a scientist, and therefore has trouble with organized religion (among other reasons for his issues with it).  So when it came time to begin envisioning our wedding ceremony, the decision to go non-denominational was pretty darn easy.  No one on his side getting annoyed by the Catholic traditions, no one on my side getting annoyed by his family’s traditions.  We’ve already discussed how we’d like to raise any future children, so we figured we had closed the book on people having problems with our wedding.  Right?

WRONG!

Apparently having a non-denominational wedding ceremony does not exempt you from the judgment and narrow-mindedness of those who believe their religion and their way is the only way.  Alex and I never even thought of our marriage as an “interfaith marriage” until this week!  Which led me to ask the question… what is the big deal about interfaith marriage?

To be able to answer this, I needed to first figure out what interfaith marriage means.  Is it just a marriage between two people of completely different traditions, like Islam and Judaism?  Or are the finer differences just as important, like when one person is Methodist and the other is Baptist?  Also, is it really that uncommon for people of different faiths to want to get married?  Are Alex and I truly part of an anomolous group of people?  So I started thinking, and digging.

The first thing I found out is that interfaith marriage is a much bigger deal than I ever gave it credit for.  A quick search on Google, or on Amazon.com for “interfaith marriage” reading material will tell you that much.  Then I found out that while it’s not quite as problematic for people within a major denomination, such as Protestantism, to marry, it is still considered an interfaith marriage when that happens.  And then there are the statistics.  27% of Americans are in interfaith marriages, and the number goes up to 37% when you start counting interdenominational marriages.

OK… 37% is a pretty large number.  So, what is the big deal, exactly?  There are so many people who clearly think this works out fine that it seems like it should create fewer social issues than it actually does.  If the couple doing the marrying is OK with it, I figure that should be all that matters.  Furthermore, in the US, marriage is more a legal contract than a religious one – that’s why you need a license from the state if you want to get married.  So if the state the couple lives in is OK saying they’re married, shouldn’t that be it?  I know that many people desire the blessing of their deity on their marriage – but that’s just it, it’s a blessing.  It’s not a sanction, at least not in this country.  Which is why I’d love to know how people get away with telling other people they disagree with a marriage on religious grounds – not on legal grounds, on religious grounds.  What gives?

And then I realized what gives.  The First Amendment.  That’s what gives.  It says every American has the right to freedom of religion – which means people who want to have an interfaith marriage and practice whatever religion they want, can, without having a problem – and it also guarantees the right to freedom of speech – which means if someone wants to stand up and oppose an interfaith marriage at the top of their lungs, they can.  In my experience the kind of people who would oppose an interfaith marriage are the kind of people who have no problems telling other people why they are right and everyone else is wrong.  Perhaps this is why it is such a big deal, even though maybe it ought not to be.

I am perfectly happy going into an interfaith marriage.  I don’t believe my children will be any worse for wear when they are exposed to more than one set of religious traditions.  And I don’t believe either one of us (or anyone else who has entered into an interfaith marriage) is condemned to eternal damnation for marrying outside any one religion.  I think the people who take issue with this type of thing are making a mountain out of a mole hill, and ultimately taking away from a day that is about the couple in question, and nobody else’s feelings or beliefs.

But that’s just my two cents.  Good thing I’m constitutionally protected to give them out.

If you want to read about Whitney’s take on interfaith marriage, go here !

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Welcome to another installment of what Whitney and I are calling ‘collective blogging.’ To refresh everyone’s memory, we will both be writing blog entries on the same topic every week as an exercise to see how different our thought processes and memories are. Hopefully it will be good practice for an idea we have for NaNoWriMo 2009 – to write the same novel, but separately.

Today’s topic: What is the meaning of life?
To be honest, my initial response to this topic was to give a joke answer and tell all my readers that the meaning of life was 42.  If you have never read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, you probably don’t know why 42 would be considered an answer to this particular question, nor do you follow why it’s a joke answer.  I recommend reading the books because they are fabulous, but in case you aren’t going to I will sum up why 42 would come to mind: a race of highly advanced beings in HGG create a machine to answer this very question – oh, and the machine is Earth.  The machine (Earth) is about to render its answer (42) to the question (what is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything) when it is destroyed by hateful Vogons.  Like I said, you should really read the books.

Obviously this question – what is the meaning of life – is a philosophical question for which there is no “right” answer.  Furthermore, it seems to me that you might need to define what life is to even begin to discuss what its meaning is.  The scientific definition of life is still a debated topic, and being that this is more of a philosophical question anyway, I will assume that to answer it there may be more importance in defining consciousness and self-awareness than in defining what is and is not alive.  I’m not sure I can define either of those things, but I will say I feel sure humans are both conscious beings and self-aware, and therefore alive and justified in asking the question, ‘what is the meaning of life?’

This question can also be a problem if you believe life exists anywhere else in the universe – another hotly debated issue that I will not delve into here, except to say I believe it probably does.  Carl Sagan explained the rationale for why I believe that better than I ever will:

“Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.” ~ Carl Sagan

If we are alone in the universe, then life is precious and therefore meaningful.  But if we aren’t alone, what we do here might be tiny and insignificant in the theater of the universe.  For anyone that looks up and thinks we might not be alone, that thought makes the question of the meaning of life rather esoteric.

This is why the joke answer of 42 would have been a much easier way to go with this topic!

I figure that all science and philosophy aside, humans pretty much want to feel like we matter, and that there is meaning to life.  The ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything may not be something we – the living humans on planet Earth – are meant to know.  I also figure that even if we don’t matter a whole lot to the universe, we matter quite a bit to the people in our lives.  Interpersonal relationships, the people we choose to let in, that we love, they are what give meaning to life.  We profoundly effect more lives than we probably realize.  I know a little bit about this – I recently lost someone who I did not realize touched me as much as he did until he wasn’t here anymore.  So I don’t think the meaning of life is about having the highest paying job, or being the most famous you can possibly be.  I think the meaning of life is to leave gentle footprints on the people who will remember we lived.

Although, I do still leave room for the meaning of life to turn out to be 42.  You never know.

If you want to read Whitney’s take on the meaning of life, you can read it here.

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.