Monday, April 7, 2008

American Atheists and Agnostics divorce rate below average

"In addition to finding that four out of every five adults (78%) have been married at least once, the Barna study revealed that an even higher proportion of born again Christians (84%) tie the knot. That eclipses the proportion among people aligned with non-Christian faiths (74%) and among atheists and agnostics (65%).



Barna Group, March 31, 2008
Not such a big surprise, but I post it so you can all see that Atheists and Agnostics fare pretty well in their marriages. One could argue that since these infidels are less inclined to marry, they ought to have a higher success rate anyway. On the other hand one could argue that religious people seem to marry for less than good reasons.
I see Asians have a low divorce rate, no thanks to Muslims who (depending on their denomination) can have four wives and marry and divorce for a night. I mean, I wonder what the divorce rate in Iran is where one-night-stands, I mean marriages, are accepted.
"Malaysian man gets divorced twice in one day
It is not unusual for the many wives of a Muslim man to put up with each other for the good of the household, but two Malaysian women got along so well they decided to leave their husband at the same time."

Guardian, April 2 2008
That also reminds me:
"The extravagant side of Mohammed bin Laden's nature made itself evident when it came to women. Islam permits a man four wives at a time, and divorce is a simple matter, at least for a man, who only needs to declare, "I divorce you." Before his death, Mohammed bin Laden officially had fathered fifty-four children from twenty-two wives. The total number of wives he procured is impossible to determine, since he would often "marry" in the afternoon and divorce that night. An assistant followed behind to take care of any children he might have left in his wake. He also had a number of concubines, who stayed in the bin Laden compound if they bore him children. "My father used to say that he had fathered twenty-five sons for the jihad," his seventeenth son, Osama, later remembered."

Lawrence Wright - The Looming Tower (p71)
So there you see, Osama bin Laden shows what will happen when parents divorce!
That doesn't bode well for USA, which is the country with the highest divorce rate (despite being such a God-fearing country).

Lastly, a bit cheesy video with different, and lower divorce rates:

2 comments:

bbk said...

I wonder what the divorce rate is for marriages where both parties are atheist.

Unknown said...

True, I reckon that marriages where one partner becomes Atheist will suffer from it.

There's a lot of issues with trying to make any meaningful statistics on Atheists in USA since they're so few.