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To: Antoninus
No, not quite. Those stats leave out one very important factor--how many atheists even bother to get married at all? I'll bet if this chart included atheists who are in 'committed relationships', the stats would be dramatically different.

Nope..

Quote "It just stands to reason that the bond of religion is protective of marriage, and I believe it is." But Mr. Barna's numbers appear to say something otherwise about some of the country's most fervent Christians. His letter addressed those Christians' most common defenses, point by point, and the cross-tabulations of his study responded to many of the scholarly objections. He rejected the idea that large numbers of divorced Christians left their marriages before they converted. He also found no reason in his 3,854-person national survey to believe that large numbers of Christian marriages broke up because the Christian partner was "unequally yoked" with a non-Christian.

He doesn't buy that Christians divorced more often because they married their romantic partners rather than merely living with them. He doesn't have co-habitation data, but, Mr. Barna said, "of more than 70 other moral behaviors we study, when we compare Christians to non-Christians we rarely find substantial differences and we have no reason to believe co-habitation would veer from that pattern."

And, as with most of these types of surveys, it doesn't attempt to separate out those who are committed to their Faith from the RINO (religion in name only) types.

I'm hearing bagpipes

but no, in all Barna surveys (Barna is an Evangelical Christian polling group BTW)the pollster first determines the religiousness of the person they are polling by asking specific questions

116 posted on 09/15/2005 1:04:39 PM PDT by qam1 (There's been a huge party. All plates and the bottles are empty, all that's left is the bill to pay)
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To: qam1
I'm hearing bagpipes

Let him poll my group--traditional Catholics--and see what the divorce rate is. If it's over 10%, I'll be utterly shocked. Among my immediate family and friends, I didn't know anyone who was divorced until I was in my teens. And then it was invariably the people who took the Faith the least seriously--if at all.
185 posted on 09/15/2005 7:25:01 PM PDT by Antoninus (The greatest gifts parents can give their children are siblings.)
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