There is too much pressure on people to get married and have kids, and too little pressure on people who are married to stay married and have more kids.
This is what is wrong with the world.
Discussion
I will add this to my #ThingsCatholicsWereRightAbout folder.
I don't think having children is an expectation of young adults anymore by the general culture (or lack thereof), nor gettingeing married, nor especially both in the correct order.
We pressured everyone to get married and have kids, including people who weren't called to it or suited to it, and the inevitable circus erupted. The Boomers broke all records in marital meltdown and made a mockery of the institution.
Marriage became something everyone just did, like buying a toaster or learning to tie their shoes, instead of purposefully choosing it to be the focus of their life and the hill they're willing to die on.
Now the marital stats look terrible and the children born of the circus are just shacking up or cycling through marriages like they really are just a piece of paper, so our entire society is becoming a gigantic, rundown ghetto.
Alright, I do agree with that. Different time scale.
There is plenty of pressure. Its called family court.
Doesn't seem to be very effective pressure, seeing as how so many people end up divorced.
How about we just outlaw remarriage to anyone other than someone you're divorced from, and we all call it a day?
I've never seen anyone suggest this, but it's the painfully obvious solution. Most people get divorced so that they can remarry. If they couldn't remarry, then divorces would become something only for people who are just really miserable and want a clear separation of goods and whatnot.
Since divorce rates increase dramatically with each remarriage, and a surprising number of people are actually remarrying their own spouses, you could cut the effective divorce rate down to 10% or lower, with this one neat trick.
Nah. Scripture allows for (two) biblical grounds for divorce, and remarriage (only "in the Lord") after (biblical) divorce is permissible.
But if we're talking about State involvment in a religious institution then no thanks either way.
CCC 2384 Divorce is a grave offense against the natural law. It claims to break the contract, to which the spouses freely consented, to live with each other till death. Divorce does injury to the covenant of salvation, of which sacramental marriage is the sign. Contracting a new union, even if it is recognized by civil law, adds to the gravity of the rupture: the remarried spouse is then in a situation of public and permanent adultery:
If a husband, separated from his wife, approaches another woman, he is an adulterer because he makes that woman commit adultery, and the woman who lives with him is an adulteress, because she has drawn another’s husband to herself.
CCC 2385 Divorce is immoral also because it introduces disorder into the family and into society. This disorder brings grave harm to the deserted spouse, to children traumatized by the separation of their parents and often torn between them, and because of its contagious effect which makes it truly a plague on society.
http://www.catholic-catechism.com/ccc_2380-2391.htm
#catholic #biblestr #christian
Protestant here. Scripture trumps the writings of men:
See [Matt. 19:3-9](https://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/mat/19/1/s_948004) (fornication/adultery) and [1 Cor. 7:15](https://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/1co/7/1/) (abandonment).
but we don't need to rehearse the reformation argument over sola scriptura here ✌️
😂 I had the same thought, but you offered me the perfect run-up to drop that, so I took it.
Its a one-way pressure: for women to spurn chaos and divorce their husbands
30% of USA divorces are initiated by men. That's 230k divorces in 2023.
Too many movies end with the storybook wedding. We need entertainment where the married folk aren't supporting characters or on the verge of divorce.
The Office (American) did this well!
Atomization of society and increasing individualism. The sapiens population doesn’t (yet) „feel“ the evolutionary pressure to increase itself even further, but it might flip soon as the crude birth rate is already below 2.0 in most countries except for a few really poor ones.
I know this view doesn’t rhyme well with Christianity, but I guess God has nothing against clear numbers…
The Catholic view (that all Christians once shared) is that most people choose marriage as a vacation, but a substantial minority choose celibacy ("not marrying").
Those sacramental marriages are chaste (you only have sex that is open to life, you only have sex with the person you are married to or you don't have sex, and you can't trade them in for someone else to have sex with). Which tends to lead to high fertility across the population. One couple will have no children, another will have 1 or 2, another will have 3 or 4, etc., and you end up solidly above the replacement rate, on average.
A lot of people didn't get married. Few divorced and almost nobody remarried. A lot of people didn't have kids. Some people had a lot of kids. It worked. 🤷♀️
Increasing the number of people having kids has actually coincided with the birthrate going DOWN.
Well, it probably worked as long as there was a stimulus to do so, either imposed in a top-down fashion by the government-church „alloy“ or because the socioeconomic conditions were favorable (bottom-up). Both factors are not really present anymore. While the former is probably (hopefully) gone forever, the latter is still quite tricky. Poor economic conditions force people to have more kids (remember your great grandma having 15 kids?). Excellent economic conditions cause people to have less kids because businesses and industries are blossoming - people want to live for themselves here and now. In fact, the perfect
Since urbanization, bad economic conditions actually cause people to have fewer kids, not more, as kids are seen as an economic burden.
Yes, as a side effect of the excess urbanization in response to the initial expansive industrialization. In an ideal world, such people would always have the option to move to the countryside and seek for new opportunities („back to the roots“). In our broken world, these people get trapped in a socioeconomic limbo because there’s no more land or because the government penalizes such moves to maintain a certain level of poverty in cities which it can refer to during elections.
Business also cluster in cities, so people are forced to live near them, in a sort of urban feudalism, like what used to appear around castles.
I would consider it a natural development rather then modern feudalism. Urbanization is not bad per se. What‘s bad is the broken balance b/w the progressive minority in cities generating the income for all and creating jobs and the conservative majority preserving the identity and culture.
However, with increasing automation and AI applications, even this natural society model will end sooner or later. The question is what will be the trigger. A strong AI? Thermonuclear synthesis? A global economic collapse? I guess all of that.
In fact, the perfect conditions would be a predominantly Christian (conservative in a religious sense) society living in the countryside, with a progressive minority living in cities. This balance seems very important, but it feels like it’s about to break down.
I prefer both exhortations:
Get married and have children. Stay married and have more children.