Christian Marriage Revisited

A month ago I looked at the many reasons why Christianity is damaging to women, and especially how it is damaging to marriage. I was thinking about the subject again today, when it occurred to me that there may be one aspect of Christianity that I overlooked.

In the Synoptic gospels, Jesus is recorded as responding to a theological query about marriage and the afterlife by saying that after married couples "rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven." Thus, the marriage bond does not continue into the afterlife (and, presumably, neither does gender).

If Christians believed that their marriages continued past death, perhaps there would be more value placed on them. But for the Christian, marriage (like everything else in this life) is cast off at death, like a dusty cocoon. All of eternity will be spent glorifying God- what reason is there to care about the fate of your life partner when you're in the presence of the Almighty?

Thus, I think that the honest Christian has to admit that trading one spouse for another (and another, etc.) throughout life really doesn't matter in the long run, since all bets are off once death arrives. This is just one subordinate symptom of the Christian disregard for the trappings of this world, but one which may also explain the high failure rate of Christian marriage.