Some do and some don't. However, I can still make my points without needing to attach to your points. It's a free board, hun.
In regards to Western culture most people don't know that in love feeling WILL fade. When it fades they get restless and break up rather than knowing it's normal for all couples to lose that "in love" feeling. Whereas, in Eastern culture that happens far less often because they have married for the sake of "like" and they don't have romanticized notions about "love".
Your point, however, is
wrong. Not that there isn't an element of accuracy to it -- I know that, although my wife and I remain deeply loving and committed after almost 34 years of marriage and just scant of 50 years of friendship/courtship/wedlock in total, we have had a few tough times in the relationship, and knowing God's strength and guidance helped us through them.
However, in point of fact, it is a matter of individual character whether commitment is honored or not -- not a question of religious belief, though that may enter into it. Some believers cheat, or mistake the dying down of infatution and lust for 'falling out of love'. Some non-believers have the moral character and capacity for solid long-term love that keeps them together through thick and thin.
I am going to bend a personal rule of my own and point at Ted Haggard, not as an object of ridicule or example of hypocrisy, but as someone deserving of compassion. As we all know by now, he belonged to, in fact led, a church whose doctrinal approach included the 'homosexuality is a choice' canard. And, looking at his behavior from a non-moral psychological viewpoint, it's fairly evident that he was bisexual in orientation -- feeling desire both for males and females. Since he could not conquer nor change that, and even talking it out or seeking help to deal with it was closed to him in the position he held, he fought the homosexual component of his libido as long as he could, succumbed to it, and entered into a sordid gay relationship with a male prostitute, cheating on his wife -- and when the truth came out, was disgraced and entered into some sort of therapy, which he has now left and is writing a book and has scheduled celebrity interviews about it.
To me, the scandal here is not totally his. I suspect that if he had been able to calmly and confidentially talk out his feelings with someone, without being judged by a doctrinal system derived from misinterpretation of a few verses of Scripture which bears no relation to human reality (the doctrines not the Scripture), he might have been able to cope, control himself, and continue in his committed relationship to his wife without what happened. I hold the Dobsonian theology as much at fault as Haggard himself for what happened. We do have a choice in what we do, a moral choice. But human beings are often in need of help and support, and the doctrines had walled him off from that, refusing to recognize what was happening inside him. And so he continued to teach the doctrines he had himself been taught, while secretly cheating on his wife with a man and covering it up.
When it came out, Dobson & Co. were quick to hold him to repentance and to extend a sort of forgiveness that entailed his humiliation and disgrace. They never acknowledged the nature or even the existence of his orientation -- which puts him right back where he started emotionally, but with public disgrace and a wrecked career and a load of guilt added in. Some "abundant spirit-filled life" that is!
The gay activists acted little better, though -- holding him up as an example of hypocrisy and ridicule, rather than seeing him as a brother who had gone through some of the same problems they themselves had faced, but in his case in the limelight of publicity and public humiliation.
Nobody came off looking good in that scandal.
"Judge not, lest you be judged" is there for very good reason. Jesus, truly God and truly man, knows of what we are made -- our strengths and our weaknesses. The Golden Rule comes only 11 verses after that admonition, and is directly related to it. The measure by which you judge is the measure by which you too will be judged. Therefore render judgment unto others in the same manner as which you would want your own shortcomings to be judged -- with compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and brotherly love.
