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Weddings, God, and Human Nature
Nov. 6th, 2006 02:27 amI went to a wedding yesterday.
Well, actually I didn’t, I just found this on my hard drive yesterday, which I’d written up months ago and never got around to posting. But in an attempt to stop myself from writing a long ranting response to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lovecrafty’s post that manages to be part agreement, part denial, and part manifesto, I decided to seek it out and post it. So… instead, let’s imagine that I went to a wedding yesterday.
I’m not sure what my cousin, the bride, thought of my wedding, a couple of years ago, but I suspect it must have been something similar to what I thought of hers.
Do you really think that? Can you possibly, really think that?
I had a secular wedding. I cobbled together the twenty minute ceremony from bits and pieces I found on the Internet, then rewrote them, then my husband rewrote them, then I rewrote them, then he rewrote them again, until we had something that we both loved.
Since my husband and I are secular humanists, our ceremony, I suppose, was a humanist one. We vowed that although we would inevitably anger, burden, and hurt one another, doing so would never be our intent. We claimed that the fact that either of us could survive on our own made it all the more special that we were making a choice to be together. We promised to love one in many different ways, to make our lives together as friends, as companions, as lovers, as a family, and as husband and wife, and to hold on to that multi-stranded love through anything life could throw at us.
My cousin, clearly, believes something quite different. God is love. And since God is love, human beings are not love and cannot have any capacity to love. They are simply not capable of it! Instead, the most they can do is make themselves conduits to reflect God’s love to one another.
( Enter The Rant )
My six-year-old niece obviously followed at least some of the sermon, because when my sister was putting her to bed, she asked, “So was God the first one to get married?”
She was told that no, God wasn’t married. (Yes, I realise a more technically correct answer may have been that God’s married to the church. But my sister’s not a Christian either, so I think she did rather well on the whole with the simpler answer.)
“Oh,” frowned my niece and, without missing a beat, “she must be terribly lonely up in heaven all by herself, then.”
Out of the mouths of babes…
Well, actually I didn’t, I just found this on my hard drive yesterday, which I’d written up months ago and never got around to posting. But in an attempt to stop myself from writing a long ranting response to
lovecrafty’s post that manages to be part agreement, part denial, and part manifesto, I decided to seek it out and post it. So… instead, let’s imagine that I went to a wedding yesterday. I’m not sure what my cousin, the bride, thought of my wedding, a couple of years ago, but I suspect it must have been something similar to what I thought of hers.
Do you really think that? Can you possibly, really think that?
I had a secular wedding. I cobbled together the twenty minute ceremony from bits and pieces I found on the Internet, then rewrote them, then my husband rewrote them, then I rewrote them, then he rewrote them again, until we had something that we both loved.
Since my husband and I are secular humanists, our ceremony, I suppose, was a humanist one. We vowed that although we would inevitably anger, burden, and hurt one another, doing so would never be our intent. We claimed that the fact that either of us could survive on our own made it all the more special that we were making a choice to be together. We promised to love one in many different ways, to make our lives together as friends, as companions, as lovers, as a family, and as husband and wife, and to hold on to that multi-stranded love through anything life could throw at us.
My cousin, clearly, believes something quite different. God is love. And since God is love, human beings are not love and cannot have any capacity to love. They are simply not capable of it! Instead, the most they can do is make themselves conduits to reflect God’s love to one another.
( Enter The Rant )
My six-year-old niece obviously followed at least some of the sermon, because when my sister was putting her to bed, she asked, “So was God the first one to get married?”
She was told that no, God wasn’t married. (Yes, I realise a more technically correct answer may have been that God’s married to the church. But my sister’s not a Christian either, so I think she did rather well on the whole with the simpler answer.)
“Oh,” frowned my niece and, without missing a beat, “she must be terribly lonely up in heaven all by herself, then.”
Out of the mouths of babes…
