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Originally posted by Doug
I think that's a fair statement, but I think it's true of anything that has its origins hundreds of years ago but is still around. Not that it necessarily goes from distinctly religious to distinctly secular, but that it simply is going to change over the years. There are very few rituals or institutions that exist today the same way as they did hundreds or thousands of years ago. There might not be any, except possibly in the most orthodox of churches.
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Right, but in the case of the status of marriage, and the achieving of that status, the move has been away from religious and towards other things, which is definitively secularization. So, there really is no reason an Atheist cannot be married, because it has a purpose for them other than to be joined "in the eyes of god". They might even have a ceremony involving relgious references, though probably not overt ones. Atheists in the states still use money that has "in god we trust" printed on it. For most people, that statement is not the important aspect of money, it's the reprisentative legal value of it, obviously. The same is becoming, or has become, true of marriage.
Besides, how many people today would say they got married primarily because they wanted their union with another person to be "correct" within the church? I'm sure for some it's ONE of the reasons, but I wouldn't think it would be the first and most important.