Is there a Method in the Madness of Marriage?

What is this great human institution called marriage? People seem to be marrying all the time, falling in love, getting married and then promptly falling out of love, getting divorced and then marrying all over again. Why do they do it? Is it just sex or hormones or companionship? Is there a method to this madness? Are there norms or standard for marriage and divorce? Let me delve into this.

Oxford dictionary would define marriage as ‘the legal relationship between a husband and wife.’ It is a legal bondage, publicly made between a man and a woman, in the presence of all the relatives and friends, who bear witness to this event. How did it originate? Where did the idea come from?

I would like to turn to the Bible for this. Genesis 1:27 says, in the beginning God created man and woman in His own image and blessed them to multiply and subdue the earth and have dominion over it. This authority, you would like to note, was given to both man and woman and not just to man.

God who created everything, heavens and earth and all that is in these, acclaimed it as ‘Good,’ after creation of each of these. However God felt that ‘it is not good that man should be alone.’ Genesis 2:18. So He created woman to be a companion comparable to man.

A man is never full in himself. He is full only when united with a woman, his companion and of course vice versa. This was the design of God who created them man and woman. God further ordained that, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and they shall become one flesh.” Genesis 2:24. This was the story of Adam and Eve, the first human pair.

This was also the pattern that God gave for human couples. Therefore a man, which applies to woman also, will leave his or her father and mother and be united to his/her wife/husband. They form one unit, a new family unit, apart from the original families they came from.

Jesus while affirming this, further laid down that “Therefore what God has joined together, let no man separate,” Matthew 19:6, for ‘the two shall become one flesh.’ Mt.19:5. It is this union between a man and woman that is called marriage and is in existence since the beginning, ever since man and woman were created. It is a God-given institution to humankind.

If that were so, whence came the divorce? Why do people want to separate from each other and from this life-long bond? Why this animosity, hatred, violence, abuse and final separation? What went wrong in between?

We need to go to Genesis again, this time to the account of the Fall of humankind, recorded in Genesis 3:1-24. When the first human pair disobeyed God and went seeking after knowledge of good and evil, as prompted by Satan, without the approval of God, they fell under the influence of Satan, and lost the blessings of the Creator God.

This event poisoned everything in the creation, the relationship between God and humans, between humans and the world, consisting of animals and nature, between man and man and between man and woman. Hatred replaced love, separation replaced union and life became one of strife and contention, as we see it today.

In the 1^st century Jewish world that Jesus lived in, divorce was common. They were divorcing their wives on flimsy grounds, for Mosaic Law stated that a man may divorce his wife ‘if she finds no favor in his eyes, because he has found some indecency in her.’ But what is this ‘indecency?’

One school of thought among the then Jews interpreted indecency as adultery, but another school interpreted it to mean almost anything. A man could divorce his wife if she spoiled his dinner, if she spun, or went with unbound hair, or spoke to men in the streets, or if she spoke disrespectfully of his parents in his presence and so on.

The Pharisees, the religious leaders of that time came to Jesus and to test him asked him, whether it was lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason. It was then Jesus proclaimed what God has joined let no man separate. He further laid down that “whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery and whoever marries her who is divorced commits adultery.

So the standard for marriage is life-long union between a man and woman and them separately starting a family apart from their respective parents. And the only legitimate reason for divorce is adultery alone, either on the part of the husband or the wife. Remarriage after divorce for any other reason other than adultery, in Jesus’ view was tantamount to adultery, whether it was the divorced man or the woman.

Remarriage was permitted among Jews, if one of the partner, the husband or the wife dies. Then the marriage bond is dissolved and the person is free to marry again. A man or woman, being the wronged party and divorces his/her spouse for adultery is also free to remarry. Otherwise marriage bond is irrevocable.

Having seen the standard laid down by God for marriage and Jesus for marriage and divorce, what remains now is to apply these to the present day goings on with regard to marriage and divorce. 

That could be done only in my next blog. You may have to wait till then!

No trendy good bye this time! 

Divorce: at what price? Introducing the Subject.

Though I have written one or two blogs on the subject of divorce, blogs dated 19.9.2015 and 23.9.2015, these were mainly from the angle of parental interference leading to divorce among Indian couples.

The subject of divorce has been on my mind for quite some time now, mainly because many of the counseling cases I am dealing with are concerned with divorce, couples struggling to live with one another and finding it increasingly difficult to do so and gravitating towards divorce.

In Koramangala Methodist church, which I attend, we are planning to have a seminar on “Marriage Enrichment,” on Sunday, the 29^th May. Mr. Jacob Ninan, an experienced counselor in the matter will be conducting the seminar after the Sunday service. You are all welcome to attend. This added the interest in the subject.

I also happen to read the book by John MacArthur, “The Divorce Dilemma,” explaining the stand of the Bible on divorce, including the views and teachings of Jesus and Paul on the matter.

It is surprising to know that the 1^st century Roman society faced as much deep problems with regard to marriage and divorce as we in the modern society. World hasn’t changed after all! Or is it that human beings haven’t changed much in spite of the technological revolutions that we have witnessed in the modern era?

Apart from parental interference, the very fact society has become shrunk and there is opportunity for coming in contact and mingling with people of different regions, different religions and different cultures has been a major stumbling block in happy marriages.

In India, a north Indian working in IT capital Bangalore, meets with a south Indian, they fall in love and marry, without realizing that culture in these two places are different in many respects. When the initial love and euphoria are replaced with the reality of living together, things fall apart. They are not able to adjust. Food, habits, family bonding – all differ.

Unless of course, the young couple have been born and brought up in the upper middle class or affluent family surroundings and values, then things like what you eat and what you wear or how you treat your in-laws, do not really matter much.

These things are almost non-issues for them, for they keep experimenting in all these and delight in the variety available in the various cultures. Parents are generally supportive for they themselves are educated and achieved a fair amount of financial independence. These couples are more bothered about where to go for holidays and how much to splash on parties and so on.

As indicated in my earlier blogs it is the middle class which is trying to break into the ceilings of upper middle class and affluent class that suffers more. Mainly because they are not used to experimenting, but are brought up in one single mode and find it difficult to get away from these influences. It is almost an affront to their cultural values. When you do not bend it breaks. And that is what is happening.

Today the world is a melting pot with an amalgamation of different cultures. With the world having been reduced to a global village, the dominant culture is that of MacDonald and KFCs from the West. Many things are floating in the cultural melee and Indians, especially the upcoming middle class and the upper and affluent classes, ape these without disdain.

Living-in-relationships, dating, sex before marriage, divorce on flimsy grounds, remarriage, single-parenthood, single children, gay and lesbianism, same-sex marriages, pornography and so many such Western cultural values are being adopted by Indians and it is becoming increasingly the norm here also.

So what do we do about it? Is there a norm, a standard which we can follow and stabilize our marriages? Has anyone defined marriage? Ultimately what does it mean to be married? What is marriage? On what foundation should it be built?

What are the rules and regulations with regard to marriage, which are above all cultural differences and cultural influences?

What is the most unifying factor in marriage of two different individuals from two different cultures?

To these we will turn in the next blog.

Catch up with ya later! Does it sound trendy enough?!

What is with me and my water color?

Having pulled a sciatic nerve on the left side, I was grounded by my Doctor for three weeks. Not knowing what to do as I sat brooding over at home nursing my aching knees and nerves, I hit upon the idea of trying my hand at water color painting, for which I have recently developed a taste!

Last year, towards August or September, while tidying up some cluttered books and documents, I discovered a whole pad of water color papers fresh and unused under the pile! It set the ball rolling!

I used to paint oils on canvass, but my inspiration to paint used to come once in five years or so! Since 1983, I have been painting in bundles and knots like miracles in the Bible, once in five years, sometimes even longer! The last I painted was in 2009 or 2010. The next inspiration was to have occurred in 2015, there it is right on target!

I did two water colors and when some active members in my local Metropolitan club wanted to hold a talent show of the inmates (not that my colony is anything like a prison!), I presented these in the exhibition. The exhibition was called the “Talking Walls!”

The one on the left is a still life, painting of a vase with flowers from my home. The one on the right is a hibiscus flower that blossomed in my terrace garden! 

Though my friends and colleagues appreciated my efforts greatly, the art critic who had come to view the exhibits and conduct a demo for us was not greatly pleased. He said that water color has to be transparent and not so opaque! I realized that I have painted water color on paper like oil on canvas!

Crest-fallen, I returned from the battle-field. Determination grew inside of me to master the art of water color and improve my performance. I trouped into the library of my club and picked up two books on ‘how to paint water colors’ and ‘water colors for the beginners’ and started to read and even take notes!

Presto! Time has now come to put on paper what I have read. Famously I took the most brightest and beautiful of the pictures I had captured on my camera during my visits and tried my luck. It was a flaming tree with its leaves all blaze in bright orange hue in its fall splendor in the month of September, near my son’s house in Michigan, USA. Very ambitious, one might say. Hesitantly I uploaded that on my face book account.

Face Book being what it is, my friends and relatives, wanting to appreciate my efforts, sent many ‘likes!’ But there was one friend among them who is good at water color. She remained discreetly quiet! I knew then I had repeated the folly of painting water color like oil.

Not to be put down or give up, I tried my hand at another painting. Practice makes one perfect, they say. Don’t they? This time it was an area of beautiful scenery, again captured by my camera, on the way to Yellow Stone National Park, Wyoming, which I visited in 2011 along with my son.

As a test case, I showed it to my friend. She appreciated it genuinely. When I was squirming in the park bench where we sat, she grandly said, ‘you never know, after your time, this may be discovered as a master piece and people might pay tributes, like it happened with all the other famous painters in the world.’ Very wickedly she also said, ‘of course, you may not be living at that time to receive the honor or the money!’  

Well, this painting is definitely an improvement over the other three water colors, I would venture to say. Or is it? Well, I am uploading it in this blog for your scrutiny and your very valued comments! Don’t just send me your ‘likes,’ but say something, say anything, that it is beautiful or that it is not!

I am hoping that my water color expert friend will take note! 

Was Abraham wrong in obeying God at Mount Moriah?

Trying to prove that Biblical narratives do not lead to good moral living, especially in the 21^st century, Dawkins picks up narratives like destruction of the cities Sodom and Gomorrah, Noah’s flood, and destruction of people who worshiped the golden calf during Moses’ time and so on and gives a twisted interpretation of these events, painting a picture of a cruel and vindictive God.

What Dawkins does here is cherry-picking, a tendency which he condemns in the evangelists but ends up doing the same. That is first of all intellectual dishonesty. Secondly God had His reasons to act that way. All these destruction were carried out because of some grave moral turpitude of the people concerned.

Without going into details of these incidences, I would like to point out that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because of the sin of sodomy. Genesis 19:5. Noah’s flood carried away people to their death as they were morally corrupt. God “saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Genesis 6:5  

Golden calf episode was inexcusable, as God had just delivered the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt and have brought them up to Sinai after performing many great miracles and was busy giving Moses on the top of Mount Sinai Ten Commandments and the other laws. During this absence of Moses for 40 days, people wanted to create new gods for them and had the golden calf molded. Wrath of God though Moses destroyed large number of them justifiably. Genesis 32:1

Coming to the intended sacrifice of Isaac, son of Abraham, on Mount Moriah, where God’s demand of such a sacrifice and Abraham’s obedience of it are ridiculed by Dawkins, I would like to deal with this matter in some detail. This whole episode is narrated at Genesis 22:1-19.

One fine morning, God tests Abraham and asks him to take his son, his only son, whom he bore in his 100^th year, to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering to Him. Isaac was the promised son of Abraham, for whom he had waited for 25 long years and when he finally was blessed with him in his very old age, the same God who blessed him with this son, is asking this precious child to be sacrificed.

In spite of this Abraham takes this journey towards this mountain range taking along his son Isaac, I am sure with great turmoil in his heart. How could God ask such a thing from him? Would He really let his son, the promised son, be killed like that? May be, it is possible that after the sacrifice, God would still bring him back to life? Is not God capable of that?

Still Abraham went ahead and prepared an alter for making the sacrifice and at the nick of the time when he was about to raise his knife to sacrifice his son, God stops him and provides him a ram to be sacrificed in the place of his son. Abraham calls this place where the ram was provided as a substitute, as the place where, “The Lord will provide,” ‘Jehovah Jirah.’ Genesis 22:14.

Dawkins disapproves this whole episode and feels that the child would have gone through such a trauma and how will he ever recover from it! To him it appears as if God was joking with Abraham tempting Abraham to test his faith. As a modern moralist he calls this narrative as child abuse, bullying in two asymmetrical power relationships and as ‘one of the great foundational myths of all three monotheistic religions.’[1]

I think intellectual honesty is an unknown concept for our dear Dawkins. Elsewhere he condemns Christians judging people of yesteryear from the vantage point of modern knowledge and technology, but here he himself is judging an event that happened around 4000 years back, as a modern moralist and condemns it. He even comments that ‘Any modern legal system would have prosecuted Abraham for child abuse.’[2]

‘It is commonplace that good historians don’t judge statements from the past times by the standards of their own,’[3] is a statement by Dawkins for defending racist comments made by Thomas Huxley during his time and such others. Then why does he violate this code and judge Abraham in the light of modern child psychology? Intellectual dishonesty? Hypocrisy?

God of Abraham abhorred child sacrifice and condemned the gods worshiped by the people of Canaan for demanding such sacrifices. Canaanites were making their sons and daughters pass through flame in the arms of their god Moloch. 2 Kings 23:10. Israel, in spite of warnings, started to copy it. Such sacrifices have happened in Punic city of Carthage as learned from Greek and Latin sources.  

They sacrificed their own children to build a city, to lay the foundation and to erect the gates of the city. 1 Kings 16:34. There is no way that God of Abraham would have literally wanted such a sacrifice.

Yes, God wanted to test the faith of Abraham. Abraham was to be the Father of the great nation that God would raise, from which will come the salvation blessing to the entire world. In Genesis 12:3 and elsewhere God had promised Abraham “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” The test is obviously for Abraham, to know that he could obey God even to this extent.  

It was necessary for God to build up Abraham’s faith in Him and this was the ultimate test, in which Abraham came out with flying colors. Who can find fault with that? After all, all the three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, hold Abraham as their Founding Father. Should he not be strong in faith in such a God, who selected him and set him as the Father of Nations?

Lastly the range of Mount Moriah, where Abraham was to offer the sacrifice was also the place where the present Temple Mount of Jerusalem stands. Abraham was asked to go to the mountain range of Moriah and offer his son as the sacrifice around 2000 BC. Genesis 22:2.

Solomon, the son of David, King of Israel, built the Temple at Mount Moriah around 1000 BC, 2 Chronicle 3:1, almost in the same place.  That was also the place where the Son of God himself was crucified as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world, around 33 AD.

Yes, the Lord will provide in the mountain, a lamb for His sacrifice. 2000 years later in the place of ram God provided a lamb, His own son, who was cruelly murdered by unbelieving people like Dawkins. But he rose again!

God raised him from death. That is the hope and promise of God that all of us who believe in what Jesus Christ has done on the cross and seek forgiveness for our sins, will be saved, saved for eternity to be with God and His Son Jesus Christ.

The significance of these will not disappear just because some distraught minds question the act, which I would say is foundational to our faith in Christ.

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[1] Richard Dawkins, “The God Delusion,” Black Swan, London, p.275.

[2] Ibid, p. 300

[3] Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 302

Who designed the Designer?

Considering the arguments of the atheists against God, their major objection to God seems to be that a God who could create a complex universe and design life on one of the planets, earth, has to be a very complex Being. So they ask, who created the Creator? Who designed the Designer?

The question put up by these atheists is God ‘must be a supremely complex and improbable entity, who needs an even bigger explanation.’[1] Naturally, the puny human mind, even if it is the mind of a sharp atheist like Richard Dawkins, is not able to fathom the depths of a Being called God.

On the face of it the question is so ludicrous. If God has to be created, then He is no God at all. He is God because He is self-existent, above all created beings and the created matter in the universe. Dawkins is not able to comprehend a powerful Being, who is not created, but is in existence always, in eternity, needing no one to create Him.

Just because people like him have difficulty in comprehending an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God, who is the Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End, can they postulate that God does not exist? Isn’t it like the proverbial ostrich, which would bury its head in the sand and think that the enemy around him does not exist, because he is not able to see him!

What is the alternate explanation provided by atheists like Dawkins? Since they are not able to think, imagine, visualize, comprehend or experience God the Creator, in their limited capacity to think, a task which is constrained by a brain which is perishable on death, they propose natural selection as the alternative.

Natural selection discovered and propounded by Charles Darwin looks like a life-savior for the atheist, who does not want to believe in an all powerful God. So they switch a lie for the Truth; a mechanistic force like natural selection in the place of the living God the Almighty.

Again, how does an atheist swearing on natural selection explain the origin of life itself? Only if there was life on earth as a starting point, natural selection could have operated on it and produce a gradation of life from simple to the complex life-forms. That is what they propose, as if it all happened in a dream!

Dawkins says, ‘origin of life was a unique event which had to happen only once.’[2] The explanation of this unique event, he brazenly attributes to luck, ‘initial stroke of luck.’[3] Is that an explanation worth a great mind like Dawkins? Just like a child he believes in luck! The starting of the first life on earth, that magnificent event, can it be attributed to mere luck? Is it a child’s play? Is this a scientific explanation? People, even great biologists, need to think.

Not wanting to believe in a Creator God, these people spun magic weave after weave, worse than what they condemn among creationists. Not able to explain the origin and existence of a life-friendly planet, the earth, where the six fundamental constants which hold the universe together are so finely tuned, so that life could appear and is supported, these atheist scientists propose a Multiverse (many universes!). They propose, ‘there are many universes, co-existing like bubbles of foam, in a ‘multiverse’.[4]

The idea is somewhere somehow by a stroke of luck the first life appeared and there after Natural Selection took over to shape and bring out different life forms including man/woman, as if from a magical Pandora box! But is there any proof?

NO, not a single shred of proof! Scientists who reject God because there is no proof and that it is highly improbable, are willing to bet their lives on luck and multiverse, without any iota of proof! Amazing!

Such people would rather believe in a mechanical grind named natural selection than God who created it all. Let me ask, who made natural selection a force? How did it get the so called power to select and what is its intelligence to make such a selection? What is its motivation? Who gave it such motivation, if any? The scientific-minded atheists have no answer.

There are only suppositions, guess work, presumptions, assumptions, hypotheses and lastly faith in some luck, fluke by which life originated. 

I think they could have done better!

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[1] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Transworld Publishers, London, 2006, P.176

[2] Ibid, P.167

[3] Ibid, P.168

[4] Ibid, P.173