Principles for us to found our marriage on

More general :

1) The ultimate model of marriage is Jesus Christ and His bride, the Church.

2) The Bible is the ultimate guidebook to marriage and all human affairs. It gives general guidelines applicable in all circumstances, and within those guidelines, God's Spirit helps us use our God-given brain to determine the best course of action for the specific situations we face. Thus, for example, the Bible is not a sex manual, but it provides many principles for interpersonal relationships that guide our thinking and help us make decisions in that and every other aspect of marriage and life.

3) Marriage is designed to be good and fulfilling, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically, and sexually. The intended perfection is no longer fully attainable in this disrupted world, but is largely attainable. Striving for maximal attainance of God's design for marriage is worthwhile as it advertises God's love and beauty and it minimises disruption within the marriage relationship.

4) The many pleasures of married life - as with pleasures generally - are best enjoyed in a purposeful and focussed pursuit of God's pleasure. Human pleasure, when made the end-goal of human endeavour, tends to evaporate. Thus, a human's experience of pleasure is highest when encountered during a higher pursuit. Personal pleasure as one's principal goal is a recipe for frustration and dissatisfaction.

5) Growth and learning are of greater value than comfort.

6) God designed marriage to be the ideal environment in which to create eternal souls. We joyfully embrace His design, gladly accepting from His hand the children He will give. This does not mean that we will never use contraceptive measures, but it does mean that we will not use modern culture as a benchmark for making decisions about family size.

7) We embrace God's design for authority and responsibility within marriage. We recognise that God's design of a "help meet" does not create "his jobs vs her jobs" but rather "his jobs and his helper". His helper is particularly well suited to certain jobs, and in general ("as nature teaches") this represents a good and natural division of labour. But we reject the notion that it is always inherently sinful for a woman to undertake certain tasks within the family or for the maintenance of the home, and likewise with the man.

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More specific :

1) We are not afraid of human disapproval.

2) We actively and continuously solicit the input of older and wiser couples, older and wiser individuals, and wise men and women whose teaching and training is captured in books, videos, or other media.

3) We experiment and try new things and new ways of doing things, and are not afraid of having other humans label us or our efforts as failures.

We expect that not everything we try will "be successful", but we would rather try ten things and find one of great value and the other nine as total failures, than to try nothing at all.

This applies to every aspect of human endeavour, except only where Scriptural guidelines or other evidence make it clear that experimentation is unwise or inappropriate.

4) That said, we undertake risks with advice, and seek to learn from others' experience rather than repeating their mistakes.

We recognise - particularly where life or health are concerned - that many risks are not worth taking.

5) We are lovers of hospitality. Our home is a ministry centre. It is an appropriately-protected haven of rest. But it is also a place into which we frequently invite others to experience the love and fellowship of Christ.

6) We seek a brilliant marriage. We do not naively think we are the first to do so, nor that we will be the first to succeed. Many brilliant marriages have preceded ours - although relatively speaking they are a small fraction of marriages. We seek to identify and learn from other couples with a brilliant marriage.

7) We honour both sets of parents who have gone before us as imperfect humans to whom God has given much grace, and through whom we have learned much of great value.

We forgive them for their many failings and do not use the bad examples they have set before us as an excuse to disdain God's design for marriage, parenting or family life.

We thank them for their responsiveness to God's dealings, and are glad for the many ways and many times they have modelled Christlike love and Christian discipleship.

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Now the only question left is : who is the other in "us"? Applications, anyone? :o)

On a more serious note than the preceding line, I am interested in your ideas on other principles worth including. I intend this to be the basis of a "founding document" which I and my Mrs (whenever she shows up) can refer to for the rest of our lives.

(P.S. My time is in extremely high demand at present - and has been for a few months now. Consequently - and I wish it were otherwise - some of my blog posts have to be thrown together extremely hurriedly. This is true of at least the last four or so posts. I trust that you still derive great value from them, despite me not having had opportunity to polish them to perfection. Thankyou! :o) )

What Is Reality?

A friend of mine recently asked "What is reality?" I whipped-up the following comments, then thought you might find them interesting too...

According to Buddhism, reality is that nothing is real, except for the ultimate oneness in which there is no consciousness and no distinction.

According to Islam, reality is that which Allah decrees. All that is or ever will be is exactly what Allah has always wanted. Even the infidels are infidels because Allah wanted infidels and so he created them. And thus Allah also wanted their perpetual torture in hell, and created both hell and infidels expressly for that purpose. Thus, reality is an illusion, in which we naively think we are actors in the play, when we are in fact the audience and our bodies run a pre-determined course over which we have no control.

According to Atheism, reality is anything we can consistently measure in a laboratory. But this creates huge problems for them in the realm of philosophy, for logic itself cannot be tested in the lab. And who is to say these same scientists aren't unwittingly in a virtual Matrix-esque world and thus all they are convinced is reality is but a fiction?

According to Marxism, reality is The Dialectic. Oppression, struggle and violence are reality. Life is cruel and cruel is ultimately good.

According to some hyper-zealous Pentecostals (whom I can criticise because I am a Pentecostal), reality is the "spiritual realm", and this physical world is a mere illusion.

According to Jesus, reality is that which exists. This includes that which we measure in the lab, and includes powers that exist outside the dimensions with which we are most familiar, and includes logic and love, joy and suffering, and everything else. Thus, when we are feeling pain, we cannot console ourself in the "knowledge" that life, including pain, is just a bothersome illusion that will disappear soon enough. We must rather acknowledge the reality of the pain and ask the next question : why this reality and what to do about it.

(As a side note, materialistic assumptions about "reality" are really quite hilarious. There is absolutely no way for a materialist to prove that there are not other random universes "out there" which operate on completely different laws and paradigms and have no connection and no capacity to connect to our own universe. Thus, the materialist's dogmatism that "matter and energy are all that is" is meaningless stupidity. Even if - as they clearly hope - there is no God, there can still be vastly more in existence than materialists acknowledge. And so materialism is a matter of chanting a nursery rhyme to yourself over and over until you're sure you believe it, instead of actually being a philosophically or scientifically defensible view. The moment a materialist can prove that this universe is the only universe that can possibly ever exist or have existed, and that there is absolutely no way that paradigms and powers unknown to our universe and impossible in our universe could exist in other universes, then materialism will be valid. But of course, such proof of the non-existence of other universes and other laws and powers in those universes, or even of a super-universe of which our own is just a tiny part, such proof is impossible to create, and thus dogmatic materialists (including most Atheists) are squeezing their eyes tightly shut and reciting a mantra instead of believing anything intelligent.)