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Everyone knows that friends have to have things in common if the friendship is going to work. The same is true of other relationships—love without a foundation on some sorts of commonality between people is not enough to sustain a relationship of any sort, be it friend, family, or marriage. Love must have some common basis in both people.
This is the reason that often (though many times they do) marriages between people of different religious faiths simply don’t work—the two people love one another, but they have different goals, perceptions, and in some cases, morality. It’s the same for the family unit, that is to say, for spouses and their children. Let us take (for sake of simplicity) a family of four—husband and wife, son and daughter. Let’s also assume that they are Christian (for the sake of my familiarity with that faith).
The family in question has, in general, the same values—those prescribed by their common faith. They also have many of the same goals (living a godly life, heaven, perhaps teaching others, etc.). Likewise, they perceive moral and ethical conditions in the same way by benchmarking them against the Bible. In general, then, they see and live the same way. They have these many things in common: faith, perceptions, morality, goals and ideals.
Another family, however, has no religion (agnostics). This family has no common religion “filtering” their perception of life and reality. Reality to them is what they each perceive it to be, and those perceptions (and therefore the actions they take on those perceptions) will be different. It may sound good to say “celebrate your differences,” but in fact it is difficult for a family always to question why one member did one thing. In the case of a child’s action violating a parent’s perception of morality, the child may face serious disciplinary consequences. In the case of a parent’s violations of one of the children’s perception of morality, the child will face serious questions as to the role model-value of their parent and will perhaps question parental authority on other, immutable issues.
The same basic things happen in a family of mixed religions. If nobody understands the other’s reasoning for the way they act, how can they be expected to be close? If one thinks the other is doing something morally wrong, how can their love for one another stand? There is no common ground for parental/filial love. Again comes the question of authority/example. The situation becomes quite tangled and it is difficult to find any common ground upon which to stand jointly.
It can be seen, then, that a common religion establishes a broad base of commonalities and prevents a number of potential problems. Love must have something on which to stand and be based. The foundations that religion sets up create a perfect foundation for love.
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