From: noye@midway.uchicago.edu (vera shanti noyes)
Subject: Re: When are two people married in God's eyes?
Reply-To: noye@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago
Lines: 51

i have a question for you all related to this.  jesus condemns divorce
several times in the new testament, and i have a hard time with this.
the catholic church (as far as i can tell) does grant annulments with
the statement that the marriage never really existed in God's eyes.
(please, if i am mistinterpreting, correct me.)  however, i have
witnessed marriages where two people were very much in love but
recognized that they were destroying themselves and each other by
staying in a marriage, and that the problems were due to personal
childhood issues that had never been resolved.  i ask you, is divorce
justified in such a case?  they knew who they were, what they were
doing, they were deeply in love, but in the end, it did not work out.
i must admit that i don't see jesus forcing them to live together, or
even condemning that they go and seek happiness with someone else
later on.  opinions?

vera
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I am your CLOCK!     |  I bind unto myself today    | Vera Noyes
I am your religion!  |  the strong name of the	    | noye@midway.uchicago.edu
I own you!	     |  Trinity....		    | no disclaimer -- what
	- Lard	     |	- St. Patrick's Breastplate | is there to disclaim?
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[This is a commonly discussed question, though it's been long enough
that I'll allow it to be asked.  As you might expect, there is a range
of answers.  Catholics and some others will say that divorce is never
justified.  (By the way, in situations where someone is being abused,
or for other serious cause, separation is allowed by all traditions
that I know.  No one should be forced to stay in a situation where
they are in danger.)  Others see it as a last resort in situations
that have fallen apart badly enough that the best we can hope for is
to choose the lesser of evils.  In some sense the difficult legal
question turns out not to be divorce, but remarriage.  That's because
of Jesus' statement in Mark 10:11-12 and par.  As with so many other
things, this turns on your approach to the Bible.  Conservative
Protestants tend to see statements like this as having no exceptions.
More liberal ones are willing to make allowances for situations where
a literal interpretation would lead to painful results.  (It is noted
that at the time it was possible for a man to divorce his wife almost
on a whim.  Thus a common explanation in the more liberal approach is
that Jesus was trying to protect people from this sort of thing, not
to establish an absolute rule to which there could never be
exceptions.)  Catholics, as is typical with Catholic ethics, take a
theoretical hard line, but allow for exceptions in practice through
the process of anullment.  In the last discussion most of our
non-Catholic readers seemed to accept with some reluctance that
in some cases there might be no good alternative, but there was a
feeling that the church should often be doing a better job of
helping people prepare for marriage and deal with problems that
come up during it, and that in a properly run church, divorce
should not be necessary.  --clh]
