I've taken a few hours to think this over before replying, since this will be my
last posting to HP3000-L and I didn't want to mar it with an overly emotional
response.
In the first place, I didn't claim that a lack of "fundamentalism" was
responsible for the decline of the family, nor do I recall limiting it to
Christian families, as Wirt seems to think I was saying. However, although I
don't use the "fundamentalist" label for myself, my beliefs are pretty
conservative and I do consider the Bible to be both the Word of God and an
absolute authority in my life, so we'll let the label stand.
What I was actually trying to say was that the traditional shared moral values
that many people today consider "prudish" (no divorce, no sex outside marriage,
obedience of children to parents, etc.) contribute greatly to the stability of
society. I won't try to argue with Wirt's statistics (especially as I put
little faith in polls dealing with personal faith; there are just too many ways
in which both questions and answers can be misleading). Instead, I'll just
mention my own personal experiences.
I was born in a time and place (eastern Virginia in 1955) where two-parent
families were the norm, divorce was very rare (and considered shameful), drug
use was confined to "the bad kids" with whom the rest of us weren't allowed to
associate, and sex was something schoolboys talked about a lot but with which we
had little (or in most cases, no) personal experience. As the son of a Navy man
living in Navy towns I grew up among people of many races, nationalities and
religious persuasions. Almost all the families in my neighborhood attended
church in one place or another; those who did not were regarded as a bit odd.
We kids played outside until well after dark without fear of anything worse than
mosquitoes bothering us. By the time I was in high school in the early '70s
much of this had changed, with drugs and racial strife beginning to become a
problem, but it was nowhere near as bad as it is today. Something has changed
during my lifetime: As I've seen people turning away from traditional moral and
spiritual values, I've seen crime, drugs, teen pregnancy, and many of the other
ills of modern society growing worse and worse. It's been necessary for me to
keep a much closer eye on my own children than my parents kept on me, because
the world is a much more dangerous place for them than it was for me. It's hard
to imagine that the differences in their childhoods and mine has nothing to do
with the changes in the morality of the people around us. I'd say pretty good
evidence for this is the fact that my boys have been raised in a Christian home,
with a father and mother who are committed to the family and to imparting
Christian values, and they have managed to avoid the problems many of their
friends have suffered. Both are teenagers now; they have never been involved
with drugs or alcohol, never offered us any serious disciplinary problems, never
been in trouble with the police. In contrast, some of their classmates have
been arrested (one -- a middle school student -- for murder!), been in drug
rehab, attempted suicide, etc. Our oldest boy, who plans to attend Bible
college this fall, has spent long hours on the phone and in person with a former
high school classmate who tried to kill herself a few months ago, counseling her
and helping her to work through some of her problems. (He got her to come to
church with him about a week ago.) We're very proud of both our boys, and of
the fact that we've been told by many of our friends and acquaintances how
sweet, helpful, and considerate our children are.
Since this discussion has dealt a lot with divorce rates, let me mention this,
again from personal experience. Since I became a Christian in 1973, I've known
personally a number of Christian couples who had experience with divorce. In
all but three cases, one or both partners had been through a divorce before they
were Christians, but had remarried after becoming Christians and remained
faithful to their new partners. In the other three cases, I have not seen two
of the couples in many years and have no idea what their spiritual conditions
were at the time of their divorces, or whether they still claimed to be
Christians. So I only know of one confirmed case, from my own personal
experience, in which both husband and wife professed to be committed Christians
at the time of the divorce. In contrast, I have known many, many non-Christian
couples through the years who split up, some going through multiple marriages.
I'm sure many will dismiss this as merely anecdotal evidence, but those
"statistics" mean a lot more to me than statistics about people I've never met
and about whose spiritual lives I know nothing.
I no longer work with HP3000 systems, and though I'd hoped to do so again
someday, HP's pulling of the plug on the 3000 makes it highly unlikely that I'll
get the chance. So I'll just concentrate on the Solaris and Linux systems I'm
currently administrating and turn my attention to other things. In any case,
I'd rather not spend my time on HP3000-L reading condescending messages that
ridicule Christian beliefs as childish and ignorant. So, this is my last
message and I'll be unsubscribing from the list today. I'd like to thank all of
you for the help you've given and the questions you've answered over the years,
and wish you all the best.
Wayne Brown
Wirt Atmar <[log in to unmask]> on 07/08/2002 09:00:46 PM
Please respond to [log in to unmask]
To: [log in to unmask]
cc: (bcc: Wayne Brown/Corporate/Altec)
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] OT: Pledge of Allegiance ? Was church and state
Greg writes:
> I understand about Nevada, although your original email did not describe
> this, nor disclaim it.
My apologies. I thought the exception would be obvious.
> But please explain New Mexico to us, if not Wyoming,
> Indiana, Idaho, or Florida, which is still 40% above the national average.
...
> But I suspect that people still get married and divorced for any of several
> reasons, for which there is probably no simple root cause.
Money *is* the simple root cause of most things, and it gives every evidence
of being true for divorce rates as well.
If you compare the state-by-state divorce rates with that of economic
measures, in the case below, with the "economic vitalities" of the various
states, you will see a very strong correlation between the two:
divorce rates:
http://www.divorcereform.org/94staterates.html
economic vitality:
http://drc.cfed.org/index.php3?section=grades&page=grades
But, as I attempted to indicate earlier, there are other correlates as well.
If you were to plot divorce rates vs. the percentage of people in the state
that believe that "Genesis is the literal word of God", divorce rates vs. the
percentage of people in the state that voted for George W. Bush (the "red"
states have higher divorce rates than the "blue" states), divorce rates vs.
the average number of books in the household, etc., you will undoubtedly find
highly correlated graphs in all of these circumstances, in great part because
these are not independent variables but are rather high quality predictors of
one another.
The lowest divorce rates occur in:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Rank State Number Business Vitality Score
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
1 Massachusetts 14,530 2.4 AAA
2 Connecticut 9,095 2.8 AAA
3 New Jersey 23,899 3.0 BAB
4 Rhode Island 3,231 3.2 BCC
5 New York 59,195 3.3 CAB
Pennsylvania 40,040 BBA
The bottom five (excluding Nevada) are:
46 Indiana *** 6.4 BDC
47 Wyoming 3,071 6.5 CDC
48 Tennessee 34,167 6.6 CCD
49 Oklahoma 21,855 6.7 DCD
50 Arkansas 17,458 7.1 DDF
The correlation won't be perfect of course. There are states with worse
business scores that have lower divorce rates (New Mexico's score is FDC) as
well as states that have very good business scores (Colorado's score is AAA)
that have a worse-than-average divorce rate, but you shouldn't expect perfect
correlations; correlations rarely are. But if you were to plot these two
scores (business vitality vs. divorce rate) as a scattergram and run a linear
regression line through them, I can tell by simply looking at the data, that
the correlation is going to be quite good.
And if you were to plot divorce rates vs. the percentage of the population
that voted for GW Bush, I'm sure that you will almost certainly get the same
level of correlation. Divorce rates simply go up as a family is increasingly
stressed for money and can see little way out of its predictament. These same
people often have a tendency to seek simpler, more child-like explanations as
well, in both their politics and in their religion.
But before anyone forgets the original point-of-launch of this subthread,
Wayne wrote in regards to being a Christian family being equated with
"prudishness":
> You and me both! A lot of our tradtional "prudishness" has been
eliminated,
> to the great detriment of our families and our society.
In that regard, the demonstrable facts are quite the opposite of Wayne's
assumption, that as fundamentalism ("bibical-literalism") increases, the
Christian family is put increasingly at risk of disintegrating, undoubtedly
because of lowered earnings potential, but also because of the mandate of
female subservience to the head of household, etc.
Wirt Atmar
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