Illogical

Do you know the official sign of summer being over?

When we buy the first gallon of apple cider.

Do you know the official sign that fall has begun?

When the gallon of apple cider disappears within 24 hours.

By the end of fall we can keep it a few days.

That was a thought completely disconnected with the rest of this post, but I thought it important to include.

I read this article today:

http://www.boundlessline.org/2007/09/why-dating-outs.html

For those of you who don't feel like reading the link, here's the summary: if it's unwise to marry a man (or woman) who doesn't share your belief in God, it's just as unwise to date someone hoping to convert them.

I looked at that and thought "um...isn't that obvious?"

Reading the commentary, however, I was...well, it's melodramatic to say I was stunned, so I'll just say I was pretty surprised. The Boundless blog is nominally written to a Christian audience on topics related to having a Godly worldview. A lot of the commentators call themselves Christian. And yet a whole bunch of 'em think the only way they'll get married - which they think is important for all the wrong reasons, it seems - is to look outside their church/faith because there's "no one" for them to marry within it. The ubiquitous argument about "the church has a 60-40 ratio of men to women - so what are all us women going to do if we don't marry unsaved men?" came up and all I could think was, "who'd want to marry a man with a totally different belief system?"

I'm not what I would call a romantic religious person, where I'm willing to make a lot of poetic sounding raptures about how I want to marry a man "on fire for Jesus" (which I think must be a popular phrase right now) so our marriage can reflect the perfect unity of Jesus and his bride the church. These are things I believe, but I would probably not use them in this context and I probably wouldn't express them that way either. I like to sound more matter-of-fact than that. Nor would I get into a long debate about whether Paul's admonishment not to be unequally yoked only applied two thousand years ago and not now. Speaking of illogical...

To me, this issue is pretty simple: I wouldn't marry a man who thought life would be better with no kids.

I wouldn't marry a man who wants to live out of a tent to help save the environment.

I wouldn't marry a man who thought it was good to vote for Hillary Clinton.

And I wouldn't marry a man who didn't share my basic belief in how the universe functions: God made it, he's in charge, pleasing him is our ultimate goal in life.

Who'd want to live seventy or eighty years with someone who thinks some of my basic philosophy is pointless? Sounds mighty uncomfortable to me.

Sure, it's unbiblical. But to me that's hardly even the point. The blog writer's original point makes perfect sense to me: dating - or marrying - someone who is not a fellow Christian is an illogical thing to do.