Pastor mentioned this morning that the statement by God in Genesis that "It is not good for man to live alone" ultimately does not mean only marriage, but human society in general. Marriage is only the first step of that. Now that I've seen it, it looks obvious. But I never noticed it before.
Sunday, November 08, 2020
Missing The Obvious
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2 comments:
Wrong. It is very fine to live alone, and really you have little chance to reach any great understanding, any other way.
Just another control mechanism, which is what most religions are really about.
I (when single) ended up co-teaching a church class on "singleness".
In doing the research for this, I came to the same conclusion as your pastor - human relationships more generally are essential. We also came to a conclusion that I've been reminded of by a few posts on this blog over the last weeks: We've set up our churches to segregate people especially by age. Youth must meet with youth, young working with young working, elderly with elderly. This is especially isolating for the contingent of elderly as their peer group dwindles with age.
The takeaway for the singles who-didn't-want-to-be-single was to build close friendships with people of every age and sex, investing time to do so. And there was plenty of anecdote that this will almost inevitably lead to introductions that lead to romance.
Continuing the verse past the excerpt you quoted of Genesis 2:18: the word the KJV translates as "helpmeet" is in concordances, and mostly refers elsewhere in the Bible to God being someone's "help" when they are in need of rescue. So reading it more like "assistant" misses a lot of meaning.
Things may have changed with cultural changes, but at that time the research in North America and western Europe indicated pretty clearly that for men, being married added on average 6 to 8 years to their expected lifespan. For women, there was hardly any difference at all in average lifespan between married and unmarried.
So it is science: according to government data, for men, 'not being alone' leads to increase in Q.A.L.Y.
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