Email: The examined life [SD]

Of course it would be "great" in many people's minds if God just handed us the perfect job, marriage and so on, on a silver platter -- but then we wouldn't be worthy of those gifts, since we'd be spiritually and literally sitting on our asses, being spoon-fed everything without using any effort or intelligence of our own. Like our muscles, our minds and spirits get stronger with exercise; witness any Olympic athlete for a shining example. I prefer to look more at the positive benefits and results of this divine arrangement than the messes and failures.

(Fundamentalists and evangelicals tend to show an inherent pessimism towards humanity as the flip side of their God coin, but this is mistakenly dualistic all-or-nothing thinking instead of viewing God and all creation as collaborators in the divine plan. You see, they believe that any plan of God's must proceed perfectly, without branches, switchbacks and mistakes; whereas salvation and secular history shows that God can deal with humanity's worst mess-ups and still deliver us from the evil of Hitler and so on. Good ultimately triumphs over evil -- even if some fundy parents are convinced that Eminem is a sign of the Apocalypse.)

By equivalent partners in a relationship, I meant complementary partners: A man and a woman accepting each other's weaknesses and strengths, trusting that two are stronger than one when together, and that it all balances out (with a few loose ends, but nothing glaringly dysfunctional). The problem with marriages today then becomes couples who chose marriage relatively blindly, without taking reasonable stock of each other's true compatibility. (This explains why secular divorce rates are equivalent with evangelical divorce rates; if anything, "true believers" can show more "blind faith" than anyone else, albeit in matters that should stand in plain sight.) An equivalent relationship also trumps the equal relationship idea in that a marriage between two control freaks can't sustain itself; a union between two persons of low self-esteem is unhealthy and unstable; while a relationship between a dominant person and one who is willingly subordinate can succeed (even if it's not as mutually healthy and preferable as an equal relationship).