1) Let's start with religion. Religion is all in the mind, it's not a REAL characteristic like being a magic-user or a Muggle! Very few religions claim to have magic powers. In fact, unless a religion has been very vague about the spirit-world or God, science has already disproven it. Tibetan Buddhist monks don't really have magic powers. Voodoo priests controlled the population by claiming to raise people from the dead and make them into zombies, but scientists found they were using puffer-fish extract to paralyze people into a slow metabolic state, then appear to "resurrect" them later, often with brain-damage. Imagine that! An entire national religion disproven by science!
The Judeo-Christian religions have been disproven in their "reward" myths. We now know how the brain operates, that it's a matter of neurons like the bits of storage in a computer. Therefore, an infinite life would need an infinite memory to remember it all. So how are our brains going to expand to remember everything about an infinite life? It can't. So Heaven becomes unliveable unless you want to be like that dude in the movie MEMENTO who has no long-term memory and must tattoo notes to himself on his body like this:
--YOU USED TO BE CALLED JOHN MERCHANT.
--YOU WERE GOOD AND WENT TO HEAVEN.
--YOU SEE GOD EVERY DAY.
--ACT HAPPY.
So change your minds, snap out of religions. If you are unsure, there are always people from your religion, smarter and more devout people than you, who are now Atheist. Go seek them and see what they have to say.
Eliminating religions (in peoples' minds, I mean; you don't need to Auschwitz people to get them to change) will eliminate the world's supreme cause of bigotry. If someone seriously thinks he's going to get an infinite life, he's going to divide your life by his and conclude you are a Zero, a transient, a mayfly, only awaiting the fires of Hell, and that's the assumption of human inequality that leads to bigotry. Religions come in so many varieties even within the same religion that even same-religion couples might not agree. The only way to agree is to both be Atheist, since you can't have an argument about how NOT to believe in a God. You just don't!
2) Differences in culture and ethnicity are also hard to overcome in marriage. Every culture in the world has warned against it. The Judeo-Christian religions have the Book of Nehemiah, an Old Testament prophet who lamented that the Israelites took foreign wives and that their children spoke "half in Hebrew, half in something else". Nehemiah convinced the Israelites to "put away" their foreign wives. Nehemiah was considered a prophet good enough to have his own book, his mission to correct the course of Israelite culture was considered THAT important! In our multicultural, Politically Correct world, the churches don't want to talk about the Book of Nehemiah any more. Nor do they want to talk about the 4,500-year-old Hindu verse:
"Out of the confusion of women proceeds the mixing of races,
Out of the mixing of races proceeds a loss of memory,
Out of a loss of memory proceeds a loss of understanding,
And out of that, all troubles!"
Add to that, to confound the Politically Correct, is that Evolution is not just some distant theory applicable to finches on islands millions of years ago, but on EVERY species and operating even now. Every species is in the process of fragmenting, differentiating. The number of uniquely human genes has recently been downgraded to 30,000. Those are genes unique to man and not shared with other species, such as a gene for hair-coloring shared with a monkey or a gene for digestive enzymes identical to a fruit-fly's. We now find that certain races differ by as much as 10-13% of the uniquely human genes.
Small genetic differences can have huge effects. The lobe-fin in fish was similar to a club-foot; looked like a handicap -- the fin couldn't swish around as fast -- but it allowed fish to raise themselves on the land! And that led to all the land-animals! In humans, who are not evolving physically because they bend the physical world to adapt it to humans and not the other way around, evolution will be mental, and new differences will appear in one race only. If you marry someone of another race, your differences will be undone in your children, undoing the work of up to 200,000 years of differentiation. For this reason alone I don't recommend it.
