Arranged marriages or Marriages out of love? A not so easy to answer question...

- Have your married out of love?
- Of course! What a silly question!

Is it silly?

While in our society and in any other "progressive" society the marriage out of love is the norm, there are still some societies (like India, S. Arabia etc.) where many marriages are arranged. The question is whether these arranged marriages are unacceptable and whether they are more successful or less successful than marriages based on love. Emotional cries of the type "We are not in the Middle Ages" do not fit into this debate. Anyone who has even the least contact with countries where arranged marriages exist, is able to certify that such marriages can be successful.  Let alone the fact that few of us can say with certainty that his grandparents or his great-grandparents were not married via an arranged marriage.

A related conversation at Quora can be seen here. There exists a reference to a survey that states that while many love marriages gradually fail, love in arranged marriages is being built and growing over time. I have no opinion on whether the research is valid, I just mention this as a food for thought. And certainly when one takes into account the growing divorce trends in love marriages, the question seems even more timely and difficult than we would like to admit.

The religious question now comes to Christianity: What will a religious person choose? If one wishes to be objective, he must recognize that Christianity would prefer marriage from true love. Christianity favors love, unconditional love and is against any attempt to rationalize the affection between two people. On the other hand, the most correct rational view is the one that wants the choice of couples after the logical analysis of all the parameters in order to find the optimal "match" - that is, the arranged marriage.

Difficult problems with difficult solutions - if there are any.
Because as in all human problems, there is no easy answer here...

Search deep inside yourself...

Who is rational about this? (arranged marriages)
Who is irrational? (marriages out of love)

Philosophy Wire: Sai Baba, science and the mystery (?) of worship...

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2011-04-28]: Thousands of people came to pay their respect to India's spiritual guru Sai Baba during his funeral. How can such phenomena of worship be explained? The dry atheistic Dawkins-type answer is that these people are just...sheep and stupid. But how objective is such an explanation? For someone who does not believe, it is very easy to categorize billions of people in order to get rid of the burden to explain things that are just...unexplained for him. In how many funerals of scientists have there been so many people? Why? All the difficult questions are sometimes right in front of us and cry out loud...But if you do not want to liste, you will not listen. How many "stupid" friends do you have?


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