The Daily Record:

…latest figures show more and more couples have opted for humanist weddings since they were granted legal status in 2005…

…The figures come as no surprise to humanist celebrant Juliet Wilson.

The 33-year-old, from Edinburgh, became interested in the secular philosophy when planning her 2005 humanist wedding to husband Tim.

Juliet said: “What attracted me towards humanism is that you work out your morality for yourself rather than being told what to believe in.

“Humanism is a positive life stance. We can live worthwhile lives without religion or superstition…

…”Humanists would never be racist or sexist or homophobic or ageist or anything like that…

Apparently, though, being dismissive of other people’s faith basis (or would that be their “superstition”?) doesn’t seem to fall under the “humanist” credo as Ms Wilson grasps it. That said, the issue of being able to live “worthwhile lives without religion” is by now a thorough cliché. However, importantly unconsidered is how the idea of non-religious and even non-civil marriage seems, at best, if one might say, hollow.

Why? Because, in the former ceremony, one takes an oath before God, and in the latter, before the State. Yet in a “ceremony” built around neither? In the presence of what or whom precisely are you as a couple pledging your shared lifelong fidelity and love?

Evidently, a “hollow,” a loch, or a “grove of trees”:

…Another draw couples see in humanist weddings over those conducted by a registrar is that the venue doesn’t have to be licensed.

THE ceremony can take place anywhere deemed “safe and decent”.

Juliet added: “Couples can get married anywhere - by lochsides, in woodlands, wherever you want…

Curiously, how far we think we have come, and yet how little has really changed in a century.

And although Ms Wilson undoubtedly would not express it this way, this latest attempt to redefine matrimony is not only for those perhaps a bit embarrassed to try to book the church they have probably rarely, if ever, attended in their lives. It well-suits also those who find it too inconvenient even to get down to a registry office. Surely both are therefore a healthy sign of the willingness to face all of the trials that living in this world throws at any married couple, til death do you part.

Bear in mind, that’s not to say that being unaccepting of “religion or superstition” is not one’s right. Of course it is. But here’s a “secular philosophical” question: why is it that those professing to be above religion and well-beyond foolish superstition usually find themselves striving to mimic, or otherwise aiming to refashion, the substance of faith?

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An aside. If you are a Roman Catholic who feels “meaning” is lacking, while undoubtedly “lochsides” and “woodlands” are magnificent, this blog would urge you also to visit the Vatican. Even Sikh friends of ours were so taken by it spiritually, they said it almost made them want to become Catholics.