Could you marry an atheist? I’m asking this seriously because someone I know is seriously considering doing so and he asked me what I would do. He asked me seriously. I answered quickly because it was easy to me. I’ll say it right now that there’s no way I could marry an atheist. He asked if I could think of an exception. By that he meant if she were really really really gorgeous but I told him I couldn’t.
Looking for exceptions in my own mind I wondered to myself that if maybe I viewed the marriage as something akin to gaining the beachhead with the end goal being conquering her atheism with the ceremonial lowering of the atheist flag and raising high the banner of the cross on our fifth or tenth anniversary. But you know what -not even then. Because I couldn’t live in a marriage like that. I would be exhausting because I’d never stop questioning her or challenging her. And I can be really really badgery and annoying. Then she’d eventually kill me and that wouldn’t be good for anybody.
Now I know enough of my own mania and all around looniness that my inner thoughts don’t often match others. Like I also know that I couldn’t marry a Democrat. Seriously. I couldn’t. Just the battle between watching Fox News or MSNBC would be ugly.
Just to show that I’m not soooo rigid I’ll just tell you that I could marry someone that didn’t cheer for Notre Dame football (as long as they weren’t a University of Miami fan but I think that’s just common sense.)
I’m openhearted enough to have forgiven my wife for not being a NY Giants fan because she was raised in Philadelphia and she just doesn’t know any better, poor thing.
But anyway I’m getting back to the point at hand. I seriously could not imagine myself marrying an atheist and I can’t even imagine how it would work.
I knew a woman who was a devout and wonderful Catholic who was married to an atheist who she says was a very good man and they were married for decades and decades and raised good children. So I know it can happen. I just don’t know how.
I couldn’t marry an atheist because she wouldn’t see our children as miracles, she wouldn’t see our finding each other as God’s plan, she wouldn’t look at the stars or the sunset the same way, there’d be no Christmas, there’d be no…gratitude for living because there would be nobody to be grateful to. And I need gratitude in my life. I do.
So my answer is no I couldn’t marry an atheist. What about you?
