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The Bible is against divorce. If you're a Christian who's married and your spouse cheats on you with another person, is that a good reason to get a divorce?

 

The Bible is against divorce. If you're a Christian who's married and your spouse cheats on you with another person, is that a good reason to get a divorce?




This is a subjective decision in my book. It comes down to the betrayal and whether or not you can get past it. Ultimately, it will be your decision and no one should shame you for it.

To me the idea of sticking around comes down to whether there has been a change in the person. If they show genuinely that they feel bad about what they did to you and that has manifest itself into real long term change of behavior then it might be worth giving him a chance but, there has to be a desire to change and he has to acknowledge that it takes a long time to build trust back up after a major betrayal and that is what he did was betray you in the worst way imaginable.

If getting past it is not something that you feel you can do then I’d consider the following:

Those who let society dictate that they must live in a perpetual hell to appease or to conserve some misplaced notion that in order to be a good person you have to stay in a miserable, life threatening, toxic, emotionally abusive or whatever the circumstance is that makes the situation unbearable - are allowing themselves to be imprisoned in a life where they are miserable and exposed to unending mistreatment for other people.

If God is good and loves you then wouldn’t he want you to be safe or wouldn’t he want you to be happy somewhere thriving as opposed to living by some code that some man wrote in a book so filled with fantastic stories that it seems more of a work of science fiction than it does a historical record of when God last came to earth? Would God want you to live and breathe those scriptures even if it meant you were being beaten to within an inch of your life every night just to preserve the patriarchy and the master servant paradigm which is at times overtly approved within the ancient scripture?

The religious people have often stated that you can’t take what the bible says at it’s literal meaning because they are stories meant to teach you as opposed to historical accounts, which is a modern take on the books by the way as at one point they were to be revered and understood as the word of God and therefore were infallible accounts of the events. Well, if these books are now story telling vessels to convey a moral wouldn’t God want the moral of the story to be one of equality, or one of love rather than one of abuse and punishment?

Shame will be used by your community, by your family, by all those who depend on the stability of their understanding of God and of reality that have hinged their identity on this notion that you must obey the books or face the wrath of God have a vested interest in preserving that dynamic because it is the foundation of security for them. That is, if you follow the rules in the book then you must put the words of the book above your own needs or wants and those very same people will selectively choose when or when not to apply those rules as they continue to evoke shame in you to get you to fall back into place and play your role in the patriarchal ego massage which these men often require in order to maintain their grandiosity and these communities require in order to retain this notion that their world is safe and that they are in control.

These communities will downright throw out the bible when it comes to their individual actions as being immune to their own consequences because they are acting on God’s behalf and they may even get so arrogant as to presume that they know God’s will as they spout off lines of scripture that help to solidify their argument to ‘make you see reason’ and to ‘give it another chance’ as it’s what God wants according to scripture blah blah you must show forgiveness etc.

They will use the bible as a weapon to keep you in a bad situation and will put on willful blinders as to the effects that abuse has on you and your overall mental well being. It’ll degrade you, you’ll sell yourself and your own needs in exchange for this self betrayal and this shame induced onto you from the actual perpetrator of the very thing that was done to you which was wrong. Worse, as a means of mind control one of the major components of it is for the person to betray themselves at the same time as they have this shame thrown into them which causes them to naturally divorce the parts of them that the behavior of the community or the husband is instilling in them.

So in essence, they start to give up fighting fort their own rights and what is fair to them because of having to compromise and accept the unacceptable and this is a first major step towards mind control/thought reform or whatever you want to call it - but the ultimate end state will be such an emotional dependence on the community and on your husband or on your abuser if that is the case - and this emotional dependence will manifest itself in your identity being fused with theirs where if you try to leave between the harassment you receive from the community, and the harassment you receive from your husband as well as the emotional pain of having your identity ripped away from you - will cause you such existential emotional pain that will feel like the biggest agony you’ve ever experienced thus causing you to return home to that situation just to make that pain and harassment go away thus further selling yourself out and entrenching you in this bad situation.

The bible can be something great when used by the right people for the right reasons but it is also responsible for some of the greatest atrocities that have ever happened to mankind when it is used for the wrong reasons . It’s a tool. It’s not a good tool, it’s not a bad tool but it is a tool that will reflect the true nature of the individual in a disguised and often seemingly universally accepted justification for their actions.

In other words, religion can be used to keep you in hell as much as it is used to show you the way to heaven. It depends on the context, the interests of those that are wielding it, and the motivation or the desired behavior that they seek to discourage or encourage. Ultimately, it often comes down to being a method of control in these circumstances and you have to go back to the one underlying statement that I would hold dearest to me if I were you.

Think about it in terms of someone you loved. If you were in charge of the universe would you want someone you loved to be put into a situation that was miserable all their life?

I would say to yourself that this is the golden rule to follow. If God were here and if God loves me the way the book says would God want me to suffer like this so that others can get away with their bad behavior? Ultimately, communities that shame and people that judge do so that they can continue to exert control over the people in their lives through the use of shame and exploiting that persons belief system to get them to become subservient.

Ultimately, in my humble opinion - you have to look out for what is right for you. You only get one shot at life and to sacrifice today for a potentially fictional tomorrow where your husband reverts back to a dream boat seems to be a bad choice if he displays no change in behavior and has no clear signs of remorse and or desire to change.

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