Roll this comment around in your head for a moment: “Only marry someone that is your financial equal… Do a credit check, asset check, income check… you are going into business with these people.”
The quote is a reader comment appearing below an article in the Huffington Post, Divorce Section, written by William Quigley. The author is identified in the byline, not at all surprisingly, as a “venture capitalist.”
The article sets out Quigley’s argument in favor of requiring couples to read and sign a marriage financial disclosure form as a condition of obtaining a marriage license. Marriage is, after all, a contract. Right?
Quigley argues that it isn’t prudent to enter into a contract with such far reaching financial implications as marriage without a full disclosure of financial risk and exposure. Wedding vows are fine, but hey…
Almost all of the 44 (so far) reader comments which follow the article enthusiastically support the idea that marriage is, fundamentally, a business arrangement—a business arrangement of which smart, successful people should be very wary. One reader was moved to charmingly remark, “As more and more young men are finding, it’s a lot cheaper to pay to drink the milk than to buy the cow.”
America is sick, and the prognosis isn’t good. Mr. Quigley’s article is a diagnostic tool as conclusive as any MRI, CT scan or x-ray or blood panel. The patient has a tumor. A giant, unmistakable and potentially terminal mass of greed clearly visible in every sentence of his article and the reader comments which followed it.
Greed is a deadly sin, and greed has become the national currency of our political, social, religious and, now, our family life.
The politics of “me and mine” have long ago vanquished the politics of “together we stand.” Class warfare, the kind where the wealthy smash even the dreams of the poor and middle class, inflicts more casualties than armed conflicts ever have, month after month and year after year.
Satan has seized the pulpit and mesmerized millions with a damning Prosperity Gospel through which millions embrace greed, believing it to be God. Desperately wanting it to be God.
And now, marriage, the precious jewel of human life and the repository of the Christian religion, has been perverted, adulterated and transformed into another ugly and rotten thing.
We are powerless to seize the emperor and force a gown upon him, but we can continue to remind him that he has no clothes. We can do no more for those who cling to the fake than to continually show them the real. And, we can inoculate ourselves against the pernicious and infective agents of greed only by focusing always upon the truth, averting our eyes from the popular obscenities.
“Marriages, it must be said, when entered into merely from natural or external motives, without regard to agreement of minds (or spirits), are in reality not marriages at all, but only have the appearance of marriage. As a result of the lack of spiritual affinity between the parties such fake marriage must of necessity be dissolved, if not in this life, in all events in the future where spirits alone love and are beloved.
On the other hand, when marriages are entered upon from an elemental and mutual love—or, better said, from a longing of spirits to be united—and then as bodies in affirmation of a truly conjugial love, then and only then are they such as ‘God hath joined together,’ two spirits made one as they are in heaven and, as result of God’s hand, indissoluble.” —The Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg
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I only recently discovered Swedenborg through a friend at work. Thanks for offering another resource for people interested in his writings. I would love to visit a New Church, but there aren’t many of them and I can’t find any in my area (South Florida).