14 and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. 15 Yet she will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.
— 1 Tim 2:14-15, ESV
Minesweeper was kind enough to provide a link to the original source I was reworking in my previous satirical post. Strayed’s message to women is extremely common, and a message modern women can’t hear often enough. The message is that women become more moral by casting off obligation and following their own desires. We see this message to women so often that it doesn’t stand out. Even when we see it, the full absurdity of it isn’t visible unless you switch the sexes.
This teaching is just one variant of the modern message that women need to worship themselves and their feelings. The highest virtue for women today is not to do their duty and honor their obligations, but to cast off duty and obligation and be true to themselves. Strayed explains that a woman’s own desires are a god she must obey and worship:
I didn’t want to stay with my ex-husband, not at my core, even though whole swaths of me did. And if there’s one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it’s that you can’t fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It’s a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees. And because of it, I can only ask the four women who wrote to me with the same question: will you do it later or will you do it now?
This concept didn’t begin with Strayed, or even second wave feminism. The vow for the UK equivalent of the Girl Scouts, the Girl Guides, originally included:
do my duty to God
In 1910 this was modified to remove a sense of obligation to God, and substitute it with emotional feelings for God*:
to love my God
This was then changed in 2013 to:
be true to myself and develop my beliefs
We also don’t get this merely from secular sources, or even just from liberal Christian leaders. Women’s feelings are regarded by modern conservative Christians as something holy, divinely inspired. Thus we are taught that wives are light years closer to God than their husbands, and that wives are channeling God’s will when they throw godly tantrums. This is especially true when it comes to women’s sexual/romantic feelings. Pastors Dave Wilson and Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr. both teach that a wife’s sexual attraction (or lack thereof) to her husband is a signal from God regarding her husband’s righteousness.
Another form of this message is the idea that a woman’s sexual/romantic desires are sanctifying. Drs Mohler and Moore teach that the romantic feelings of the wife (instead of the commitment of marriage) are needed to purify sex. Without the wife providing the purifying cover of her romantic desire, married sex becomes dirty, merely rubbing body parts together. Former CBMW president Owen Strachan had something similar in mind when he described God honoring romance. All of this of course goes back just under a thousand years to the idea of courtly love, which CS lewis describes as:
The sentiment, of course, is love, but love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love. The lover is always abject. Obedience to his lady’s lightest wish, however whimsical, and silent acquiescence in her rebukes, however unjust, are the only virtues he dares to claim.
Strayed also teaches that a woman’s sexual/romantic desires are sacred, holy, and sanctifying. However, it is easier to see the ugliness when Strayed teaches it:
…in order to heal [my wounds] I needed fifty men and three good women to have sex with me.
The Brilliant Lie.
There is a key lie that is used to sell the idea that women become more moral by being self-centered. This is the lie that women’s nature, their great fault, is to forever put others before themselves, and to feel guilty whenever they don’t put others first. This is exactly the message self-centered women want to hear most, and it is why the message of virtuous self-centeredness, of holy selfishness, is so wildly popular in all forms of media aimed at women. This is again both a secular and a modern Christian message. When Strayed tells women they will be more moral if they divorce, she explains:
Doing what one wants to do because one wants to do it is hard for a lot of people, but I think it’s particularly hard for women. We are, after all, the gender onto which a giant Here To Serve button has been eternally pinned. We’re expected to nurture and give by the very virtue of our femaleness, to consider other people’s feelings and needs before our own.
Notice how amazingly similar the message from Strayed above is to the message Sheila Gregoire is selling to Christian women in Guilt makes the woman go around:
We women feel guilty about everything. In fact, they say that the most common emotion women feel is guilt…
We feel guilty for relaxing, for reading a novel and leaving the housework behind, for spending money on a manicure instead of on paying down debt, and for feeding everyone cereal for dinner.
…
We feel guilty for not saving more, not loving more, not giving more.
…
Men find it easier to shrug guilt off, go out on the porch, and relax. They don’t tend to bother themselves with silly things like housework standards, menu standards, or etiquette. And they don’t even have to go through labour! They’ve got it easy. But perhaps they just aren’t as susceptible to this particular foible as women are. Instead of listening to God for what we should do, we tend to let society, the media, and the church culture set our standards. It’s no wonder we feel like we’re always falling short.
Maybe, we should try, just for one day, to be a man and not to feel guilt about stupid things. Let’s stop listening to those voices in our head and just seek out God’s voice. It’s worth the effort. If only someone would fold the laundry for me while I tried.
This is a common theme for Gregoire, and you can see another example in her complaint about women being asked to make sandwiches for funerals.
What we are seeing here is a very old pattern, where women are strongly tempted to put themselves (or their feelings) in the place of God, and men are strongly tempted to go along. Put another way, women are tempted to worship themselves, and men are tempted to worship women.
*Loving God properly means to obey God, but since obeying God had to be removed and replaced with loving God it is clear this is not what the new vow meant.
See Also:
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The Evangelical Church really has its work cut out for it when this rubbish is preached from it’s pulpits and self help books. I truly fear that it has gone past the point of no return, much like the so called “Mainline Protestants” have already done.
This reminds me of anecdote. I was talking with a woman, one who attended a very “progressive” church until the day of her death. In this conversation we were discussing the time when Jesus confronted a group of men who wanted to stone an adulteress. We of course know how that incident ended. The woman I was talking with was unfamiliar with the very ending of that story, no doubt because it was omitted from the “lesson” taught at her church. It was when Jesus told the adulteress to go and sin no more.
Well, let’s just say that this woman found that omitted portion of the story to be “offensive”. She even said something like “Who is he to tell her that?” I calmly replied: “He is the only Son of the Living God, and is God himself.”
Let’s just say that didn’t go over well with her. I guess it interfered with her own self worship.
I attended her funeral many years later. It was truly a depressing affair. The minister never talked about the promise of the resurrection, though he did quote Buddha more than once.
I guess the dead do indeed bury their dead.
It’s been the same cycle since the dawn of mankind:
Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’? … You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” — Gen. 3:1-5 (NKJV)
First comes doubt. Then comes the false promise of being your own god. And of course, next comes separation from God and mo’ problems.
“I’m a strong independent woman who don’t need no
Godman!”As gods, knowing right from wrong.
Plus ça change
Doing what one wants to do because one wants to do it is hard for a lot of people, but I think it’s particularly hard for women.
Seriously, she really said that?
WOW. Just … wow.
The vow for the UK equivalent of the Girl Scouts, the Girl Guides, originally included:
do my duty to God
In 1910 this was modified to remove a sense of obligation to God, and substitute it with emotional feelings for God*:
to love my God
This was then changed in 2013 to:
be true to myself and develop my beliefs
I think “God” in the original vow was a synonym for “England,” as these have pretty much always been one and the same for most British institutions. Then again, neither the God of Abraham nor the God Britannica enjoys any respect anymore, so the effect is ultimately the ssme.
So the point here is that men are horrible people. Men have all the pressure on them to financialy support women and children and when they don’t succeed they feel more guilt than any woman could imagine. Women really shouldnt feel any guilt at all because nothing in this world is considered their fault.
Feelings must obey…. Home rules…
What she’s missing is that women have tasks, while men have missions. If men don’t obsess about doing 51% of the laundry, it’s probably because men have to do 100% of the important (and occasionally dangerous) stuff that society expects of us… stuff that doesn’t even register to most women because they take male protection and provision for granted without a second thought.
“They’ve got it easy” (Since that 40-75 hour workweek for the man is written off as a complete given—as much a given as breathing)
Again laundry and dishes is miscast as several hours a day of drudgery. I’m so sick of that.
Emptying the dishwasher–5 minutes
Loading the dishwasher–5 minutes (even if people don’t put used dishes in it)
Laundry gathering—35 seconds to 3 minutes.
Laundry loading—22 seconds
Putting in soap, setting dial and pressing the button–14 seconds
Transferring laundry–28 seconds
Folding laundry–6-12 minutes.
1 full load of dishes–10 minutes all in
1 full load of laundry—8-21 minutes all in.
I’ve had a knock down, drag out online fight with women over this. They talk about dishes and laundry like it’s mysterious, unknown feminine hygiene. We’ve done laundry and dishes, ladies!
Vacuuming a large house–4 hours once every 10 days?
Kitchen floor—1 hour a week?
Ironing–Zero to 3 hours a week?
Doth protest too much?
These women that ascribe to the cult of self are often the most insufferable to be around. Always rationalizing away past transgressions, constantly ruminating on all the jaunts they wish they would have done or plan on doing in the future – only to be let down when the trip to Costa RIca doesn’t satiate their souls.
I want to pity them, but I can’t because their lives are a testament to self, bereft of any monuments of lasting value. And if you really look behind the publishing endorsements and smoke and mirrors, their actual day to day lives are sad; frequent divorces, sexual fluidity, substance abuse, disordered eating, etc…
They’ve made themselves into a golden calf, and a life of restlessness is the worst life of all.
Put another way, women are tempted to worship themselves, and men are tempted to worship women.
Rather, biological evolution has understandably made the scarcer reproductive resource more valuable in the minds of both genders. Both men and women are hardwired to place female well-being above that of men and even children, and until very recently, it was fair to say that the lives of 50 men were worth less than the lives of 1 woman (casualty patterns in wars certainly bore that sentiment out).
But now things are changing for the first time, as the scarcer reproductive resource by its very nature has the more narrow and specialized skillset, and since women are only required to use 10-15% of their reproductive capacity (on average), there are very few other areas in which they are used. Hence the obscene resource misallocations that have metastasized like a cancer in countries that have had the greatest duration of female suffrage (a force that also creates manginas where there previously were much fewer), and that will massively correct in the not-too-distant future.
It doesn’t help matters when you hear beta schlubs refer to their wives by terms such as, “She who must be obeyed.” They’re kind of joking when they say this, but kind of not.
“It doesn’t help matters when you hear beta schlubs refer to their wives by terms such as, “She who must be obeyed.” ”
That’s a reference to a series of novels, later dramatized by British TV, known as “Rumpole of the Bailey”
Horace Rumpole is a fictional British lawyer who is married to an unpleasant women he refers to, in jest, as “She who must be obeyed.”
A god we must obey.
She is able to channel extraordinary powers, as this site has often and clearly shown. Life changing and even life ending powers.
Many men fear her wrath or displeasure and go to great lengths to keep her placated.
Sacrifices are made for her, tribute is delivered to her. She brooks no criticism and all her actions are justified.
She obeys only her own will.
It’s either a queen or a god(dess).
That insane post by Strayed was really interesting.
In all of those letters, the problem obviously rests with the woman and her choices; every single one of those women made the wrong choice when they married. They got married for the wrong reasons, or before they were psychologically ready for it. It is 100% on them that their lives are miserable. Is blowing up the marriage the right solution? The real question is, why’d they get married in the first place?
Women process things differently than men do. Our stress reactions are immediate; you have to deal with an emotional even as it is happening to you. Suppressing it isn’t good, but after letting yourself have the moment (whether it’s fifteen minutes of tears or an hour away from the housework), you have to get yourself out of that reaction-state and back to a more logic-based frame of mind. It seems like a lot of women lack this basic skill set these days. The problem is that women lack resiliency, and from there all the other problems, such as an inability to make correct decisions or a constant driving need to please everyone around you at the cost of your own sanity, come.
What I don’t know is how it happened. Clearly we don’t teach our girls how to manage their own psychology. I don’t think this has ever been a major focus, but perhaps traditional social restrain and expectations imparted that knowledge indirectly. If you have four kids and the laundry all has to be washed by hand today and by the way, there’s canning and mending and farm work to do as well, you can’t spend half a day crying in the bathroom because you’ll all starve to death come December.
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I’m glad you thought to asterisk that bit about loving God. Excellent stuff, Dalrock.
The highest virtue for women today is not to do their duty and honor their obligations, but to cast off duty and obligation and be true to themselves.
That message has been in the making for centuries. Many old literary works depict marriage as a soul-crushing prison for women. Anna Kerenina, Age of Innocence, A Doll’s House — all of them depict marriage as slavery, sowing the seeds for no-fault divorce long before it became legal.
cynthia,
What I don’t know is how it happened. Clearly we don’t teach our girls how to manage their own psychology.
I don’t think women can learn this.
It is a much lower bar to clear for women to actually teach men how to accurately become more attractive to women (not even something as high-concept as Game, but just avoidance of the worst beta-pedestalizer behavior). Yet, there are no women teaching men accurate information, despite how desperately women want more men to become more attractive.
This proves that women have such a poor understanding of their own psychology that it is quite justifiable to tell women, in all seriousness, that they don’t understand how women think. Being a woman does not mean she understand how women think – quite the opposite in fact.
27 once-pretty girls who became ugly due to feminism.
Note that all 27 are white, destroying the myth of unity between impressive whites and morlock whites (an illusion White Nationalist-leftists – members of the undergroup – want to peddle).
Guilt, my arse. I am coming to think that women only feel “guilt” when the mirror is held to their face, making them face their actions. Otherwise, they don’t have the smallest shred of guilt or shame.
I cannot speak for most men, but I go by the idea “Character is who you are in the dark”. When I fall short, it bothers me, even if no one else knows. I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman where I’d even suspect that’s the case.
Guilt, my arse. I am coming to think that women only feel “guilt” when the mirror is held to their face, making them face their actions. Otherwise, they don’t have the smallest shred of guilt or shame.
Of course. A misandrist like Sheila ‘Woodchuck’ Gregoire slips into projection as easily as she exhales.
If women truly felt guilt, then the divorce rate of women with children (i.e. separating children from fathers) would be just 2%.
But you never even see older women who reflected on their divorce and the effect it had on the children, and advising younger women not to make the same mistake. Never.
But you never even see older women who reflected on their divorce and the effect it had on the children,
A common talking point among women is that her happiness is vital for her children’s happiness. One leads to the other.
As she might put it: “How can my children be happy if their mother is unhappy? My children need a role model/mother who is strong, independent, happy, fulfilled, and pursuing her own dreams and ideals. A happy role model/mother is vital for my children’s personal growth and development. Even if I could tolerate staying with my husband, my children would see that their mother was unhappy. What kind of message would that send? That they should grow up and surrender to being trapped in unhappy relationships? For their sake — not mine — I had to make the sacrifice of unselfishly pursuing my own happiness.”
Such is women’s “reasoning.”
Yeah well if it feels right then you might only go to Hell. Don’t blame the snake for women not thinking these things over. Eve blamed the snake for eating the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but maybe she just felt right about it. Lets face it, the easiest way to get a woman to do anything is to tell her not to do it.
If you love me, keep my commandments.
John 14:15
Frank K-
Rumpole was, in turn, referencing “King Solomon’s Mines” by H. Rider Haggard, which had an evil woman antagonist referred to by that name.
Feeriker is right for God is an Englishman.
I was never a member of a Girl Guide Troop and the view was that only rather plain or masculine girls joined the guides. I being too girly and pretty for that joined the Boy Scouts.
Notice how in a century if one reduces the exhortations to their most basic level we commence with ‘do’ proceed to ‘love’ and have now settled on ‘be’. I will leave it to Boxer to parse Heidegger on Being but is it not utterly passive as opposed to the active Doing. The explanation is surely that England has now little use for the Memsahib but when they did a certain toughness of which Girl Guiding was doubtless a useful precursor came in most handy – handling recalcitrant native servants, suffering without complaint under the intolerable humidity, that sort of thing. I’m a Memsahib get me out of here is not what they said and in all seriousness amongst some of the now very old of the female sex one can on occasion see that stiff-upper-lip determination.
I have an idea
Use “strayeds” column to show a prospective mate as a litmus test. Show it to a prospective mate and ask what she thinks of it. If she says its disgusting for the reasons dalrock said, then shes a keeper. And if she get all gushy and emotional, we can safely assume shes still immature.
What do you folks think?
fifty men and three good women
Thoughts on that classic line:
No doubt there will be plenty more down the road if she can manage it.
Note that the women are “good”, then men, eh, not so much.
Any man stupid enough to marry that female is going to be compared to the other 50 men and three “good” women for the rest of his life with his new princess, especially when things get tough. At least until she decides to “Go”. (Seriously, has there ever been a female that was a bigger walking liability?)
If the concept DNA retention is true, then any children she manages to push out, (assuming she hasnt found a 51st man on the side) is going to have a few “free” characteristics not found in either the current sperm doner or his lovely blushing bride.
What a whore.
No really, shes a whore. I have more respect for escorts who presumably have a far higher client base, at least they keep quiet about how they make their money, this one flaunts it.
Use “strayeds” column to show a prospective mate as a litmus test. Show it to a prospective mate and ask what she thinks of it. If she says its disgusting for the reasons Dalrock said, then shes a keeper. And if she get all gushy and emotional, we can safely assume she’s still immature.
And what do you do after you’ve determined she’s immature? Drop her? I don’t think that is wise.
Women are experts at copying others. They always want to conform, because, at heart, women are cowards and deeply insecure, so they hate to stand out, except when standing out makes them an object of envy, rather than of derision, among their peers. Their often repeated assertions of being “strong and independent” is a dead giveaway.
In my own opinion, the single most important characteristic that makes a woman a keeper is her willingness and readiness to adapt to her man, not some random “litmus test” that was pulled from a website. She has a natural ability to adapt, so it’s her willingness and readiness that count.
When a man meets a woman he is interested in, after getting her full attention, he should clearly let her know what he wants from her, and what he won’t take. If she is willing and ready to adapt to him, sometimes after a few “negotiations”, then she is a keeper. But if she persistently spouts the “strong and independent” nonsense, then she is not ready for a relationship.
This teaching is just one variant of the modern message that women need to worship themselves and their feelings. The highest virtue for women today is not to do their duty and honor their obligations, but to cast off duty and obligation and be true to themselves.
If that idea is true then the greatest mistake Judas Iscariot ever made was in not being a woman.
Women process things differently than men do. Our stress reactions are immediate; you have to deal with an emotional even as it is happening to you.
The belief that the second part of sentence two is an inconvertible fact would lead one to believe sentence one is also an inconvertible fact. But it’s not and it isn’t. “Suppressing” emotions is what one does when other things have greater priority. It’s also called be an adult, rather than an emotionally incontinent overgrown toddler.
Again laundry and dishes is miscast as several hours a day of drudgery. I’m so sick of that.
Apparently we’ve been doing it wrong for years, and you’re supposed to clean every object in your house, every day, with a toothbrush, or perhaps your tongue. That’s the only explanation for the time and effort that it supposedly takes to maintain a home.
“We women feel guilty about everything. In fact, they say that the most common emotion women feel is guilt…
…
Men find it easier to shrug guilt off …”
NOTHING could be further from the truth. Or, perhaps it is true in the shallow, materialistic sense in which she talks about “guilt,” that it’s all a matter of housework or personal finances or pursuit of hobbies of something like that. My observation is that, when it comes to “guilt” in a spiritual sense, our culture seems to make women impervious to guilt. It tells them that they can do no wrong, and that only men have faults. So, apparently, only men are fallen creatures. I’m reminded of an exercise a pastor conducted at a retreat for young people (I believe Dalrock wrote about it once, if I had time right now I’d try to find it in my folders), in which he divided the group by sex and had each group create a list of weaknesses and sins they thought their sex was especially prone to succumb to. The men came up with several things, excesses that they felt men too easily give in to. The women had trouble coming up with anything at all, but finally managed to come up with one female fault: “we too often tend to lack self-esteem.” I think that pathetic response points to a major fault that is endemic in contemporary womanhood: an inability to look one’s faults in the face and own up to them, i.e., an imperviousness to “guilt” in any spiritual sense.
Christianity is a religion of salvation, a way to overcome the effects of the Fall. If one has (or thinks one has) no faults, then one (thinks) one has no need of the Atonement. Why be a Christian at all? I think the women in the pastor’s exercise are much more challenged in practicing Christianity than the men are, because they have been immunized against any feelings of guilt. Gregoire is 100% wrong in what she writes.
I just looked up the reference to the exercise I mentioned:
http://www.drurywriting.com/keith/Do.Women.sin.htm
I had a few details wrong (it wasn’t a pastor, and wasn’t a retreat), but I remembered the responses correctly.
“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.” Proverbs 9:10 (ESV)
It’s not hard to understand why they’re so destructive and devious: they’re fools. Evil, evil fools.
@Frank K:
The Evangelical Churches will simply be cut off. Like all of the rest of the Circle of Fools they align with. Most have chosen their fate, and it starting to seem like a number of them are starting to realize it.
I think that Satan started working on Eve the moment she became conscious. “Why do you suppose God made Adam first? Why do you suppose Adam is so much bigger and stronger than you?” i.e. “you should resent Adam (all males)”.
The result is history.
@Dalrock
I’ve twice now listened to a Modern Scholar’s audiobook “Masterpieces of Medieval Literature”, and the author (Timothy Shutt) speaks extensively on the rise of courtly love; referencing C.S. Lewis’ book several times.
But he also goes back one step further, which I found very compelling. He says the fuse was lit by St. Francis of Assisi, who promoted a new affective style of Christian worship. According to Shutt, St. Francis created the first creche (Nativity) and emphasized emoting over the motifs of Baby Jesus, and Mary as the mother of an infant. This emphasis opened the door to a feelings-based style of worship, and transmuted the idea from love-as-obedience to love-as-warm-feelings. He says this permeated the whole of European Christianity, including and especially Christian concepts of marriage and romance.
If I walk into my house and see that my wife has left a bowl of fresh fruit, it is human nature for me to look through the stack until I find the one with the least amount of blemishes. In doing so, I am leaving the worst fruits for everyone else in my house.
The commandment in question here is “love they neighbor as yourself.”
As Dalrock points out, this algorithm (obey Godbecomes feelings for Godobey feelings) is the outward expression of a universal problem among Christians (in this case women are cursed with being easily deceived by it) that has manifested throughout history time and again. (See Canes explanation right above me).
Have you noticed that quite a few preachers now exposit “love they neighbor as yourself” to mean “you cannot properly love others until you learn to love yourself?
In truth, the commandment presupposes an enormous amount of “self-love” as the natural state of the human condition. It should be read “love they neighbor in the way that you already love yourself.
But ask yourself, is the problem with the world that people do not love themselves enough? Imagine if everyone in the home with the bowl of fresh fruit did the exact opposite, and purposely left the better specimens for their family.
Likewise, the women of today are being told “follow your heart.” The heart is of course where this tendency to eat the good fruit before anyone else gets it resides (or any other selfish act).
Its all the same thing. Follow your heart. Love yourself. Do what you are inclined to do anyway, and you will have “no regrets” (another stupid mantra of the modern age) because how could you regret listening to the heart that God himself gave you?
Beautifully put Scott!
Cane, I’ll have to go back to the book and see what I can find. I did stop reading as his topic changed from explaining the history to more pure analysis of specific works (the latter being the real purpose of the book).
The Girl Guide promise in full goes:
I promise that I will do my best, to be true to myself and develop my beliefs, to serve the Queen and my community, to help other people and to keep the Guide Law.
I have absolutely no idea how the Girls Guides have been dragged into the rather rambling polemic presented by this article. Actually I have no idea what the article argues other than that feminism is a bad thing possibly because the bible says so.
There is a key lie that is used to sell the idea that women become more moral by being self-centered.
The truth is the opposite. Being self-centered is the sin known as PRIDE – “dangerously corrupt selfishness, the putting of one’s own desires, urges, wants, and whims before the welfare of people.” As CS Lewis notes, “Pride leads to every other vice” – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, all the things in which the Modern Liberated Woman wallows.
Amazing that so-called pastors do not understand this.
Again laundry and dishes is miscast as several hours a day of drudgery. I’m so sick of that.
I grew up in a house that did not have a washer/dryer or dishwasher. Laundry and dishes had to be done every day BY HAND. That actually was several hours of drudgery!
But you never even see older women who reflected on their divorce and the effect it had on the children,
A common talking point among women is that her happiness is vital for her children’s happiness.
The default rationalization is “children are resilient” and they’ll adapt. Moreover, “my kids say they are happy so they must be happy!” — as if the kids, having seen her abandon her husband, would dare to express unhappiness when that could lead her to abandon them, too.
When my parents got divorced (when I was 5), I had constant dreams about my mom abandoning me, but I never told her about them. For all she knew, I was “happy”. (Not that she was happy…she was a bitter rage-filled alpha widow from then to this very day.)
The things that society demands of men are framed as duties: fighting for the nation/tribe, protecting women and children regardless of the cost to him as an individual, sacrificing his time/effort/resources for women and children, etc.. A man who fails to perform those duties is thought of as a coward, or a bum. We have plenty of words for men who live for their own happiness rather than for women and children, like man-baby, Peter-Pan, and player. Such words and phrases universally denote a lack of character… something for which those men ought to feel shame and other men should avoid and actively oppose.
Now we have this…
While the crushing demands society places on men are framed as duties, the mostly-trivial expectations society places on women are now being framed as optional. Even someone as clueless as the “Mother of Modern Feminism” – Betty Friedan – understood the difference in expectations. Although Google has done a fairly effective job of sending it down the memory hole, she noted that the “Problem With No Name” is not because society expects so much from women, but rather because it expects so little. She correctly saw that women like her were not feeling over-burdened (like men are… but are expected to carry on anyway), but because women’s lives lacked challenge. By the middle of the 20th Century men had done such a good job of creating safety and comfort for women and children that women didn’t have any meaningful challenges left to overcome.
Although she was wrong about a lot of things, she was right about that… and feminism has, ironically, made it worse: while men have duties, women only had expectations. Second-wave feminism turned those expectations into mere suggestions, and third-wave feminists (incredibly) contend that what little remains of them are indicators of oppression. Just like any other “S#i+ test,” feminism is an attempt by women to find a man who’s strong enough to tell her, “No,” and society keeps failing the test. Giving feminists what they demanded has only made women more miserable… and irrational: no rational person could look at the way western women live and arrive at the conclusion that they are “Oppressed at the hands of the patriarchy.” It is absurd on its face.
Yet that is what these women are demanding to be released from. Having shucked off even the trivial expectations society had for their grandmothers, they now demand absolute freedom: not only to do whatever they please… not only freedom from the consequences of their own choices… but freedom from even feeling guilty about the wreckage they cause.
@Dalrock & Scott
I hope my comment wasn’t misconstrued as an argument. It was meant as an addition.
I highly recommend Shutt’s “Masterpieces of Medieval Literature”. The first several lectures are on Germanic/Norse works. While seemingly unrelated to the topic of romantic love: That’s the point! After the fall of the Roman Empire, Germanic culture dominated Europe and (within the surviving literature) romance played no role.
Then St. Francis of Assisi appears and his idea the religion should be primarily an affective work takes the courts of Europe by storm. Well what’s good for religion must be good for marriage, too! Within a century French troubadours sang songs about courtly love; especially in the courts of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and her daughter Marie du Champagne. They were the trendsetters of their day.
Mrs. Caldo got it for me from the library, but it is also available for free on audible.com if you have Amazon Prime.
@Cane Caldo
You were clear, and the insight is very much appreciated. I was unclear in my reply. I didn’t see it as an argument, but am curious if I missed something or if Lewis wrote the extra bit somewhere else.
@Lyn87: “The things that society demands of men are framed as duties: fighting for the nation/tribe, protecting women and children regardless of the cost to him as an individual, sacrificing his time/effort/resources for women and children, etc.. A man who fails to perform those duties is thought of as a coward, or a bum.”
It would be an interesting experiment to ask a class of college students what the duties of men are in society, then ask what the duties of women are. You might have to ask different classes or at different times to avoid too much cognitive dissonance.
An alternative experiment: solicit the duties of men and what to call men who avoid them, then reverse the sexes: “A woman who won’t fight for her country is a ______.”
“St. Francis created the first creche (Nativity) and emphasized emoting over the motifs of Baby Jesus, and Mary as the mother of an infant. This emphasis opened the door to a feelings-based style of worship, and transmuted the idea from love-as-obedience to love-as-warm-feelings. He says this permeated the whole of European Christianity, including and especially Christian concepts of marriage and romance.”
This is especially true today in the Charismatic movement and its offshoots (Latter Rain, Azusa Street, Lakeland Outpouring) and a lot of ministers and pastors today, mostly under the authority of small denominations. Baptism of the Holy Spirit is fine as far as it goes, and in fact occurs at salvation. But this has morphed into exuberant and inappropriately outward worship, sometimes with screaming, yelling, uncontrollable laughter, uncontrollable loud sobbing, being “slain in the Spirit” where individuals fall or collapse, etc. it’s all about how good the individual feels, and how others feel about the individual worshiping in this way.
I always understood, perhaps incorrectly, that worship was human service to God.
I thought men and women will demonstrate their service and obedience to God.
Or they will not.
Period.
End of story.
One need not make a grand production of things to tell very easily whether someone is being obedient to God and Christian dogma.
Beyond that, to me the interesting question is, in modern times, do:
Do men make themselves of service to women?
Do women make themselves of service to men?
For men, I think the answer is “yes”. It seems that men are demanded, required to be of service, availability, and to show deference to women and shamed, derided and condemned if they do not.
For women, the answer to the question seems to me to be “no.” Women are no longer imposed upon, or asked for the same commitment as men, for a woman to serve a man is today effectively equivalent to his enslavement and dominance over her – something women overtly resent, but in reality privately respect.
It also is correct that men worship women for reasons of practicality – either to earn her favor and potentially access to sex, or to avoid her rejection, admonishments, condemnation and retaliation (legal or emotional).
Women are worshiping themselves, but it’s not correlated to male worship.
A generation of women are alone, and discovering perhaps for the first time how masculine, alpha behaviors (putting themselves first) are not feminine are not garnering the male attention, resources, commitments that were promised by feminism and gynocentric policies at work and society.
Speaking of God, gods and goddesses, Doug Wilson has an interesting pair of posts. In the first, he takes a Biblical story and couches it in modern victim language:
https://dougwils.com/s7-engaging-the-culture/potiphars-wife-survivor.html
And in the second post, he deals with blowback from his offending the “goddess” in the earlier post:
https://dougwils.com/s7-engaging-the-culture/no-goddess-can-ever-save-us.html
@thedeti
Absolutely. It’s still a problem in RCC circles, too; visions, crying statues, etc.
@thedeti:
Pentecostalism & the Charismatic Movement are both about chasing after the emotions. They started from a place of a special blessing, but like all addicts, they felt the need to chase the next hit. The Lord has used them to rapidly spread to areas that had been mostly cut off from Christianity, as the special events got a number of people to start “moving”, but like all of the rest of Christians in history, they never actually wanted to get the message.
Or, maybe in context, they want to prophesy like Isaiah, but don’t ask them to walk around naked for 3 years. Oh, no, actually following through on what you’ve been asked to do? That’s too much. Gotta go find that next exciting “spiritual” experience.
Is it any wonder that a reversion back to our actual, natural state is always there?
@Cane Caldo:
The issue isn’t the visions, dreams or prophecies: those are going to exist when the Lord grants them. The “issue” is that people, regardless of whatever group they are in, want to be “special”, and the fastest way to do that within a religious group is to be more Holy than the next person. And overplaying whatever special blessing the Lord grants you is a pretty classic way to do it.
The normally clear sign when someone really has gained something special from the Lord is the utter change it causes in the person’s life, rather than accentuating things about their current life. It should be a “life-altering” event, and not in the good way we normally use the term.
Men find it easier to shrug guilt off, go out on the porch, and relax. They don’t tend to bother themselves with silly things like housework standards, menu standards, or etiquette. And they don’t even have to go through labour! They’ve got it easy . . . . Maybe, we should try, just for one day, to be a man and not to feel guilt about stupid things. Let’s stop listening to those voices in our head and just seek out God’s voice. It’s worth the effort. If only someone would fold the laundry for me while I tried.
Ever notice how it always seems to be a common theme with feminists to not just complain about what their burden is, but to complain about what their burden is in comparison to the men? Their next move will be to usually be to shift to focus on how this must be fixed immediately, because when women have to carry a different load than the men do, that’s an affront to equality. If Sheila Gregoire is any indication, the “Christian feminists” aren’t immune from this either — except that they’re more likely to frame it with some sort of convenient scripture mixture, saying something like “God is love, and there is neither male nor female for we are all one in Christ — so if God loves me, He wouldn’t want to see me hurting, and He particularly wouldn’t want to see me hurting in an area where the men don’t have to work through any sort of pain or trial.”
Contrast that with how Christ chooses to respond to Simon Peter after he asks his Lord why his struggles must be worse than those of another disciple:
This is especially true today in the Charismatic movement and its offshoots (Latter Rain, Azusa Street, Lakeland Outpouring) and a lot of ministers and pastors today, mostly under the authority of small denominations.
Yeah. It’s common enough even in mainstream Catholicism, as I remember it, due to the devotional life that developed in the periods after what Cane is talking about. In the Eastern Church, it isn’t really present. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t Eastern Christians living in the West who have absorbed this from the ambient religious culture here — there certainly are people like that. But the actual life of the church — liturgy, devotions, etc. — does not really have that emotive aspect in it, sort of more like the pre-medieval Western Church.
Scott,
Most people lust themselves. They do not love themselves. They would take much better care of themselves in physical ways (I would include myself in that statement), for example, if they really loved themselves.
That is why the statement is so abused. I would agree with the principle, but I would probably be assuming many different things than those you appear to be targeting.
deti,
Plenty of evidence exists that this is a separate follow-on experience, at least part of it. The disciples got the Holy Spirit when Jesus breathed on them in an early encounter, but they were not baptized in the Holy Spirit until much later.
Just asserting that does not make it true, though many fall on both sides of the issues. Most on the “once at salvation” tend to be cessationists (I can’t think of a counter example) and therefore deny that much of what we read about in the Book of Acts is applicable today. Many others believe those things remain active. Modern FI crud in the church is a separate issue. Humans have a way of corrupting any truth.
Looking Glass,
This is not a fully accurate statement. Man is built to connect to God and the churches that rule all this stuff out cause the problem as much as any “holy roller.” People want a real connection with the supernatural. Look at the amount of media with a supernatural spin. The desire is there.
I am rather the exception, being a very logical (perhaps not in the eyes of all here, but I do think many things through) in a movement that is often much more emotional, but the principles it promotes are quite Biblical. (It would take some time to argue those points and not on the blog’s focus, so I will try to restrain myself on that.)
This seeking the new is no different than a discussion I recently read on a board gaming site. The “Cult of the New” impacts almost any area of human endeavor. Christians clearly have to watch for this, since God’s Truth is timeless, but it does still have a new component.
We need new applications of God to our lives all the time, especially as situations change.
This does not justify any specific action, but ruling them out completely is also incorrect. Many valid things will make some her uncomfortable. FI stuff can be present in more traditional things, though it will likely be much more buried and not as clear to see. The curse on the woman was that she would desire to control her husband, and that is present no matter what the outward worship form.
Novaseeker,
Accusations of impropriety have been around since the start of the Church:
Your point about
And that is one of the reasons it lacks a compelling aspect for many, even solid Christians, today.
Though I would argue that the ceremony of “high church” things has an emotive aspect all its own. Part of the reason some are seeking it now is because of the emotions it evokes, rather than just the traditional basis.
Gentlemen, I hope you are all well,
https://americandadweb.wordpress.com/2017/02/27/a-plea/
@BillyS:
I wasn’t ruling them out. Notice I didn’t dismiss the big movements of the Spirit? Which points to most of the problem, as that defense comes up almost instinctively. It’s important to realize the churches of which that response is directed to ceased to exist a LONG time ago.
The Lord’s “mercies” are new every morning, because the only thing we deserve is eternal damnation and he’s coming back to burn the world in Holy Fire. This points to the problem of the “emotive” nature of the current Church. It’s far too easy to forget we’re ransomed prisoners that deserved our execution.
This ends up being the crux of the problem with the Pentecostal/Charismatic side of things. “Experiencing” God becomes far too important rather than Following God. And that experience is used to hand-wave away the rest of the issues in the Church.
LG:
Pentecostalism. That was the word I was looking for.
It’s all well and good to criticize inappropriate worship. I’m sorry I seem to have touched off debates on when baptism of the Holy Spirit occurs, and worship styles. That wasn’t really my intent as none of us are theologians and it’s not my place to question another’s salvation, status with God, etc.
In my observation, I think it’s useful to look at how men and women treat obligations differently. I will stipulate that I’m talking about the kinds of obligations that are are required for most people to meet, most of the time, for a society to function at a high level. The higher the standards are and the more people adhere to them with the least amount of external prodding, the better the society works for the group. We call that system of obligations “patriarchy” because it is the only system that reliably produces advanced civilization. I will refer to those obligations as “doing the right thing.”
Men:
Left to their own devices, a few men will do the right thing just because it’s the right thing to do. The vast majority of men with do the right thing if there are incentives for them to do so. Nearly all men will do the right thing if there are incentives for them to do so and punishments if they don’t. Honor is the best motivator for men.
Women:
Left to their own devices, a few women will do the right thing just because it’s the right thing to do. But then the paths diverge. A significant minority will do the right thing if there are incentives for them to do so. Unless the punishments are very severe, a weak majority of women will do the right thing if there are incentives for them to do so and punishments if they don’t. Avoidance of immediate unpleasant consequences is the best motivator for women.
Societies differentiate themselves by how they manage those systems of incentives and punishments, but they are always there… they have to be. They can be based on religion, culture, and/or law, but they’re always there in some combination, and the stronger the incentives and punishments the greater the compliance, all things being equal. The most successful ones understand the different things that men and women respond to as incentives and rewards, and enshrine those within the various “levers” at their disposal.
(A related topic is the “levers” I mentioned. A religiously- and culturally-homogeneous society will have little need for a robust legal system, but as religious and cultural diversity increases, the legal structure must increase with it. The difference is that the only power the legal system has is negative: punishment – whereas religion and culture include positive power: incentives.)
One of the things that’s apparent is that a significant percentage of women simply won’t do the right thing unless the penalties for not doing them are both powerful and immediate. Both history and modern feminism show that “doing the right thing for the greater good” is simply insufficient to motivate a large percentage of women to avoid selfish actions that will destroy their own lives and the lives of those around them. Men, on the other hand, can usually be motivated to sacrifice for the greater good if they will be honored for doing so.
One way to make the system “work” without imposing draconian legal solutions is to link the actions of women to the honor of men. In other words, some societies have (and do) hold men responsible for the actions of “their” women, with female misbehavior bringing dishonor to her family. We certainly do that now, as a quick reading of any feminist textbook, trad-con article, churchian exhortation to husbands, or Duluth Model apologetic will attest. Other systems do it even more directly – if a father must pay a dowry that’s predicated on his daughter’s virginity and good behavior, he has a great deal of incentive to make sure his unmarried daughters keep their knees together and learn how to be a good wives.
The obvious corollary is that men must have the authority that goes with that responsibility. To have one without the other is madness. If a father is responsible for the actions of his daughter, and a husband is responsible for the actions of his wife, then fathers and husbands must have the ability to constrain the actions of the women for whom they must give account. (If a husband is legally responsible for his wife’s debts, then wives should not be able to secure credit in their own names, for example.)
But that is no longer “acceptable.” So be it. But…
If we are to abandon the idea that men should have any control over “their” women, then we must also abandon the notion that men bear even the slightest responsibility for the actions of women. Even that can work in theory (although history is not kind to it working very well in practice), but at a minimum it must be accompanied by strong – perhaps overwhelming – social stigma attached to bad female behavior. But the same cast of bomb-throwers is equally adamant about doing away with even the mildest forms of stigma (when directed at women, of course… they’re fine with throwing everything-and-the-kitchen-sink at men who don’t “man up”).
So what is a trad-com/feminist/churchian to do? Civilization is crashing around them in the form of a cratering in the marriage rate, religious observance, the number of legitimate births, and highly counter-productive sexual license, along with skyrocketing bastardy, public debt, and the growth of expensive and counter-productive legal and social systems that amount to nothing more than sticking fingers in a collapsing dike. Their solution seems to be to figure out a way to get men to keep the system from collapsing on their own, because to ask women to constrain themselves is “traditionalist” or “misogynistic”… or something. But since so much of the zeitgeist revolves around “men bad / women good,” AND the fact that the incentives require something from women, the “male incentive” part of the equation has to go. And the old formula of carrots and sticks had to be abandoned… so now they say, “No carrots for men! Give me TWO STICKS!”
But there’s a problem with THAT, too. As stated, men respond FAR better to an honorable goal to which they can aspire than to an unjust command they must adhere to to avoid an unjust punishment. If there is no reward to gain, and the best they can hope for is to avoid punishment, the rational thing to do is to just keep their heads low… No-one can confiscate resources you don’t have and you can’t be held responsible for the actions of “your” woman if you don’t have one in your life.
Emanuel Swedenborg describes what happens to souls and societies when their women rule over them:
”Visitation was made upon certain societies of the Dutch, where are those of whom the wives ruled over their husbands. They were in the boundaries at that part, and there was a vile stench of vomit there; yea, they collected vessels full of vomit, and held the nostrils over them, and reveled in the stench. All those who were in the boundaries were cast down into hell; and some who were nearly like them, were gathered out of societies, and also cast down.”
A Society Where Women Rule Over Men Stink in Hell.
Excellent. We can take most of the conventional wisdom of the church and world and think and do EXACTLY OPPOSITE of it and then find God.
Conventional wisdom: men worship women.
Exact opposite: women worship men.
That freaks even the most Bible literate folks, but: “the woman is the glory of the man” “he is the image and the glory of God.” Abraham was ‘lord’ to Sarah just like Christ is “Lord” to His church. Women worship God by worshiping men then ‘Men lift up holy hands’ so “that the word of God be not blasphemed.”
Further, note that Satan did not attack God directly. He did not even attack God physically. Satan attacked God by using women to attack men, God’s representative on earth. Satan broke down God’s authority structure to separate us from God. The hearts of the fathers and their children were separated by women destroying the house …her husband’s house. Only women destroy homes. It is no coincidence that Elijah will return to restore the hearts of fathers and children; Elijah originally fought the Jezebel spirit and that spirit is alive and well today.
Thanks Dalrock for pressing on against arguments “that exalteth themselves against the knowledge of God.”
Cane Caldo @ 7:56 am:
“According to Shutt, St. Francis created the first creche (Nativity) and emphasized emoting over the motifs of Baby Jesus, and Mary as the mother of an infant. This emphasis opened the door to a feelings-based style of worship, and transmuted the idea from love-as-obedience to love-as-warm-feelings.”
At the time, the change was probably needed. Love-as-obedience was often turned into legalism just as love-as-warm-feelings has been turned into Jesus Feelgood. Obedience is the beginning of loyalty but ultimately, God wants sons not servants. It’s a hard needle to thread.
…
BillyS @ 11:55 am:
“This is not a fully accurate statement. Man is built to connect to God and the churches that rule all this stuff out cause the problem as much as any “holy roller.” People want a real connection with the supernatural. Look at the amount of media with a supernatural spin. The desire is there.
“I am rather the exception, being a very logical (perhaps not in the eyes of all here, but I do think many things through) in a movement that is often much more emotional, but the principles it promotes are quite Biblical.”
I also have some Pentecostal background. Holy Spirit baptism is a real thing and separate from salvation, but it’s such a personal experience that there’s little point in having regulations or guidelines about it… and yes, so many Charismatics only want the spiritual highs that it’s no wonder the Charismatic movement is famously incoherent and disobedient. Like Christian charity, Christian mysticism requires both a warm heart and cold head.
@Lyn87 – Wow. Very well said.
@thedeti
At certain points these topics are inevitable.
Great post Lyn87.
In a word, it’s satanic. And The Devil is still whispering to the woman, as he did right from the beginning.
“Absolutely. It’s still a problem in RCC circles, too; visions, crying statues, etc.”
Fortunately virtually none of those are deemed authentic by the Church. Still, that doesn’t keep people from becoming obsessed with them. Take the Medjugorje visions, They have not been sanctioned as authentic (and probably never will be), yet people still go there on pilgrimages.
“And the old formula of carrots and sticks had to be abandoned… so now they say, “No carrots for men! Give me TWO STICKS!”
“But there’s a problem with THAT, too. As stated, men respond FAR better to an honorable goal to which they can aspire than to an unjust command they must adhere to to avoid an unjust punishment. If there is no reward to gain, and the best they can hope for is to avoid punishment, the rational thing to do is to just keep their heads low”
But this makes me wonder if the establishment already understands this. It appears they do, since marriage and fatherhood are sold to men as “the right things to do” and “good” and “honorable”. Much of what we see from FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, Focus on the Family, Protestant “family” ministries, and from Prager, Geraghty/Edwards, etc. are appeals to men’s senses of honor.
Sure there are some appeals to incentive (more money, more sex, better life, better health). But the “you’ll be respected” theme is there too. According to Prager, Geraghty, Wolfinger, et al, it is honorable and noble to be a married man and a father of children, (perhaps it used to be, but it isnt’ now – dads and husbands are the perennial joke everywhere). Men will “get the respect they want and deserve” when they marry and have kids. It’s shown this way on the videos – Ward Cleaver is held up as a “stud”, a man who gets respect, a man of status and stature.
All this makes me think this is one reason why men have been so slow to respond to the changing incentives – because other older men are telling them “it’s respected! it’s honorable!” And the younger guys were saying “ok” and going for it.
Pingback: Your feelings mean nothing. – Adam Piggott
cynthia
Women process things differently than men do. Our stress reactions are immediate; you have to deal with an emotional even as it is happening to you.
The same is true of men. We just suppress it.
Suppressing it isn’t good,
We know that. See “Typical lifespan for men vs. women”. The leading cause of death for men is still circulatory issues, which can be driven pretty hard by blood pressure and other stress reactions.
What happened to women in part is the You Go Girrl culture that teaches women to self-suppress nothing, to express everything; the flip side of that is men must suppress everything even more.
To put it another way, girls and women are on their own little pedestals. They are often their own gods.
Fascinating that this process was underway as early as 1910.
theDeti- “But this makes me wonder if the establishment already understands this. It appears they do, since marriage and fatherhood are sold to men as “the right things to do” and “good” and “honorable”.”
They may try to peddle marriage and fatherhood that way, and I’m sure that some Churchian betas will buy it, but the trend is that fewer and fewer men are buying it. My son has witnessed three male relatives have their marriages nuked by an “unhappy wife”. He knows that their motivation was to hop back on the carousel. Pastor Bob can tell him that getting married is “good” and “honorable”, but my son sees that it has become a minefield, where the odds of landing a woman who will stick with him and honor her vows are not great.
Lin87-“No-one can confiscate resources you don’t have and you can’t be held responsible for the actions of “your” woman if you don’t have one in your life.”
This is where the tradcons and feminists stick their heads into the sand. There seems to be a deluge of “where have all the good men gone?” articles, why pretty much conclude that men are behaving this way for mysterious reasons, as opposed to recognizing that men are simply reacting to the raw deal being offered, which is to reject it altogether. But as Upton Sinclair once said (to very loosely paraphrase him) if you have a heavy stake in not understanding something, then you won’t. Recognizing the raw deal men are getting implies flipping over the apple cart, and there is little stomach to do that at this point. For Pastor Bob, it means an exodus of women out of his church, meaning he will most likely be dismissed, or if there is no one to dismiss him it means the collection plate will be much lighter than usual. Either way his income takes a huge hit, with the attendant consequences.
They understand there is a massive problem, but they lack the Wisdom to have the context for what the problem is. It’s no different than someone getting injured, you see them hurt, but you have nothing to offer by kind words and calling an ambulance. The problem the Pastors have is they don’t even know what 911 is.
Sipcode – It didn’t just take Elijah, it also took a man of double portion to take out Jezebel. Her death count was so high (450) real priests, that even Olympic-running Usain Bolt “Elijah” crawled into the highest mountain before God had to bring him back down. It seems that his mission is quite fitting to take out present-day Jezebel in a multiplier effect the world hasn’t seen.
Still we can find refuge even in his time, (7,000) men still found solace in God. Sites like this provide a foundation for the remnant to continue to stand.
Romans 11: Do you not know what the Scripture says about Elijah, how he appealed to God against Israel: 3“Lord, they have killed Your prophets and torn down Your altars. I am the only one left, and they are seeking my life as well” 4And what was the divine reply to him? “I have reserved for Myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.”
Lyn87
And the old formula of carrots and sticks had to be abandoned… so now they say, “No carrots for men! Give me TWO STICKS!”
That takes me back a few years to the late Spearhead. It was one of Zed’s recurring points there, and he drilled that point home multiple times.
We can’t overstress this, because men in good-enough marriages just don’t see it until either it happens to them, or someone they know; or sheer repetition of the truth seeps into their brain.
test
[D: Not sure why the spam filter was blocking you. I unspammed the comments I found. Hopefully that fixes it.]
Once again, Dalrock is ahead of the curve. Less than a day after he posts a blog that details how women are now seeking virtue by venerating their emotions and putting themselves first above others, a female writer shows up in Christianity Today to declare that we have an urgent need to see even more women in the church doing exactly that.
Unfortunately, the women she’s referring to in her piece are the growing number of . . . . female pastors. Her headline says it all: “Female pastors are on the rise. And so are our impossible expectations for them.”
Article can be found here: http://www.christianitytoday.com/women/2017/february/study-female-pastors-are-on-rise.html
In the off-chance that the church’s future has any children in it, maybe we can tell them that there was once time when it was considered a pastor’s duty to not be proud, to serve the flock, and to humbly obey both God and His word — but we were able to dispense with the silly idea that a pastor should have such outdated obligations simply by changing their sex.
thedeti,
I see what you’re saying. I would suggest that what you are describing is a trailing indicator: the guys peddling this are my age. I actually remember watching “Leave it to Beaver” re-runs when I was a kid… I didn’t have to Google the name “Ward Cleaver” like most of the guys the pathetic Prager University video is supposed to be persuading. But the message isn’t aimed at guys like me – it’s aimed at 20-something men who don’t know who Ward Cleaver was and have no frame of reference for a world in which guys like him (and women like June Cleaver!) are utterly unremarkable.
They’re doing classic “carrot and stick” marketing but without understanding their target audience. The young guys who make up the target audience know something about the current state of things that the peddlers don’t. The young guys know that they’re subject to being shamed no matter what they do or refrain from doing, but one of those ways minimizes their exposure to life-altering risks. They also know that the promise of honor for doing the right thing is subject to unilateral revocation at any time… also regardless of what they do or refrain from doing.
That’s a tough sell, which is why they come across as used-car salesmen in tweed suits and mismatched shoes rather than men whose opinions of them should matter. A couple of days ago I gave my opinion about rites of passage and the need men have to be acknowledged as men by the older men of the tribe. The peddlers act as though they are the tribal elders who may dispense or withhold the status of “acknowledged man.”
I can almost hear their eyes rolling.
It also occurred to me that if Pastor Bob’s collection plate gets lighter that there’s a good chance that Mrs. Pastor Bob will divorce him, that is if his “red pill” preaching hasn’t already convince her to find a new Churchian replacement for him.
What a sad state of affairs.
Lyn87
That’s a tough sell, which is why they come across as used-car salesmen in tweed suits and mismatched shoes trying to sell them a used https://infogalactic.com/info/Ford_Pinto rather than men whose opinions of them should matter.
Improved that for you. No charge.
Lyn87
A couple of days ago I gave my opinion about rites of passage and the need men have to be acknowledged as men by the older men of the tribe. The peddlers act as though they are the tribal elders who may dispense or withhold the status of “acknowledged man.
Exactly, and when asked for their credentials & qualifications, Prager can point to his two divorces, Geraghty can point to the single mother he married, Cam Edwards can point to the divorcee he married…these are not “tribal elders” in any sense of the term. That is part of the problem: media figures who assume authority over other men than they just don’t have.
@AR:
It’s basically failures claiming to be successful, then telling everyone to follow their lead.
No wonder they get along with Leftists. They think sort-of-not-completely-being-wrong is a great virtue. The ability to point to someone else and say they do nothing right does not, in turn, make you right. A point of view right from people that understand there is objective truth, but lack the ability to actually find it.
No wonder they come across as a bunch of “cucks”, politically!
LG,
I was responding to the common general concerns. I didn’t mean to paint your post incorrectly.
I will shift a bit and notice that I do find much in the circles I follow now to be far too emotional. What passes for “praise and worship” is across many spectrums, even those who deny a second Holy Spirit experience.
I definitely dislike “Jesus is My Boyfriend” songs, for example. I also would not consider myself in the Pentecostal camp, as that tends to things I do not find appropriate in general, even though I do believe strongly that expressions of the Holy Spirit are completely valid today. I would probably be in agreement with many here in that area.
I do see the “emotionalism” as a problem in a wide range of areas and more of a sign of modern society than one of an inherent flaw in any specific movement.
Society, unfortunately, has a heavy influence on how Christianity is expressed. Christianity in China is very different than Christianity in the US and always will be. We all have the same Lord, but we are different. This is one reason I believe a “Name It, Claim It” idea, even though those who tout it today completely disgust me for the most part. It should be used to put God’s promises into place in your life, not to line your pockets or obtain and fill and elaborate house.
The implication of this is that the ideas of feminism have completely infiltrated the minds of many people who would think they are not feminists. Even many supposedly “conservative” Christian women hold a great many feminist ideas. That is a fault of the spirit of our age at a root level.
A bit of rambling I wrote earlier and got distracted before posting.
Deti,
I don’t mind the discussion at all. I will assert what I see as truth, but I do not expect to convince anyone completely. I am convinced this is all part of a bigger picture though, even though I have seen some purely blame it on much more narrow causes. That is the main point I am trying to get across. The problem is societal.
“Female pastors are on the rise. And so are our impossible expectations for them.”
Poor Jesus-chicks. It’s such a tough world out there.
From the “Christianity Today” article that Darwinian Arminian linked (regarding female “pastors”),
“Our success in Christian growth is tied up in their success.”
Technically the writer is correct, but it’s too bad that she doesn’t realize that it’s an inverse relationship.
“Suppressing it isn’t good,”
“We know that.”
Do we? You and I both know the opposite is true, to a degree.
Subordinating one’s emotional state to the achievement of an objective is evidence of strength.
Testing for emotional strength is why we (used to) have rites of initiation, hazing, what have you. (When was the last time you heard “momma’s boy” used as an insult? At all? It is telling.)
I think the real problem is the nasty double-bind of accountability and powerlessness we see today in the domestic sphere and, increasingly, in work and politics and everywhere else. It is born of viciously cruel, catastrophic mis-leadership.
And we’re going on at least four or five decades of it now. Quadrupleplusungood.
@Darwinian Arminian
What a classic bromide you have found at that link. It’s all there. Nobody knows the trouble I’ve (women) seen. Nobody has been down the long hard road like I (women) have been. No one has had to overcome the impossible odds I (women) have had to overcome.
“Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good,” stated Charlotte Elizabeth Whitton, the first female mayor of a major Canadian city.
All trotted out in Christianity Today (what even is that?). Time to learn another thing everyone else probably knows but I don’t.
*Clicks on Our Ministry* – 3 inches down finds: “Since 1956, Christianity Today has challenged the church with real-world content that is timely, compelling, insightful, balanced—and biblical.”
and biblical? I just finished reading your women pastors up against impossible odds article.
Once a church has arrived at woman pastor, it’s over man. It’s over. You’re dead in your trespasses. Bury the corpse.
I think I was meant for another era. Maybe I’ll ask Dalrock to change my username to Born Too Late.
Boy, this women as god theme hits way too close to home.
For much of my marriage, I was a “drunk captain,” thinking that being a good Christian husband meant I should shut up and sacrifice for my wife and family by taking orders – any orders – and following them. I went from man to boy in about 6 months of marriage, and stayed that way for 10 years.
Three years ago I discovered Dalrock and the rest of the Christian manosphere and decided to get my act together. I built and sold a business that put us in good financial shape. I lost 70 pounds. I started leading our family in morning bible studies and prayer with the kids. And I took on leadership roles in our church and neighborhood.
I also started to lead our family by setting direction and gently captaining our ship.
Fast forward to today… my wife has a habit of cursing in front of our kids when she gets very angry. I have asked her over and over again not to curse in our house or in front of our kids. She did it again today, and I asked her not to do it any more. She told me she would do whatever she wanted. Then, for the first time, I *told* her she was not allowed to curse in our house or at our kids. It was the first time I have ever been that explicit with telling her something, even after three years of slowly ramping up in terms of directing our family.
She blew her top. She told me I wasn’t the boss of her. She told me she would do what she wanted, when she wanted. She told me I could shove it, and she would never listen to me.
Tonight, after things calmed down, I initiated a discussion. She calmly told me to blow chunks, and that she wasn’t under my authority or my dictates. This from the woman who when we got married told me how she wanted a spiritual leader for family, someone to be the head of the house, and suggested that we keep “obey” in the marriage vows (the pastor wouldn’t let us… long story). I had always assumed that if I did tell her no for something, particularly in the area of faith or morals, she would submit to my authority.
I calmly tried to remind her of our vows, our plan for our family, and in a very light way, what the bible said about authority and the right relationship in marriage. She told me that she wasn’t having this discussion, that she didn’t care what I had to say. That I was an arrogant a*hole and if I only heard myself, I would understand that I wasn’t the saint I thought I was and that I had no right to tell her what to do because I, myself, have made mistakes in the past (I used to like to drink too much, but gave that up when I made my change 3 years ago).
I’m not sure what to do. Maybe I was a drunk captain too long? Maybe I handled this incorrectly? I have no idea. I’m trying to follow God on this one, even though I felt weird telling her that she did need to listen to me on this one. Not sure what to do, but I feel utterly defeated.
It also occurred to me that if Pastor Bob’s collection plate gets lighter that there’s a good chance that Mrs. Pastor Bob will divorce him, that is if his “red pill” preaching hasn’t already convince her to find a new Churchian replacement for him.
More likely she’ll just muscle in and take over his pastoral duties while he slinks away, tail tucked between his legs and balls retracted back into his abdomen. He’ll become her silent kitchen bitch while she preaches on Sunday mornings and starts leading weekly Bible studies. She’ll make it known that that’s the way its gonna be from now on, or else she WILL start up the divorce engine (and being still “officially” a pastor’s wife, she’ll be able to easily paint herself as a victim of his neglect and/or abuse, ruining his career in the process).
Just watch. Some variation of this scenario is going to be a prevailing trend in the next few years. Anyone who has spent any time in American Protestant churches over the last decade, especially the evangelical ones, is well familiar with the “pastor’s wife as ‘co-pastor ‘” phenomenon. One also wonders how many of these women there are lying in wait out there in Churchianistan.
I think I was meant for another era. Maybe I’ll ask Dalrock to change my username to Born Too Late.
If you do, be sure to append it with “1.” A whole lot of the rest of us feel the same way and might want to co-opt that handle as well.
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bklockquote>Ryan McConnell says:
February 27, 2017 at 9:21 pm
Over time most of them will flake.
“Even when we see it, the full absurdity of it isn’t visible unless you switch the sexes.”
Kudos to you for using the correct word.
Red Pill Latecomer –
Anna Kerenina, Age of Innocence, A Doll’s House — all of them depict marriage as slavery, sowing the seeds for no-fault divorce long before it became legal.
I haven’t read Age of Innocence or A Doll’s House; for all I know you may be correct about them. But that’s a mistaken perception of Anna Karenina. In that book, the titular character, Anna, blows up her marriage to a good-but-boring man because she’s unhaaaaaapy, and has an affair with a handsome, roguish military officer named Vronsky. This affair turns into a live-in pseudo-marriage — but it doesn’t end well for Anna, because she turns clingy and wants more out of Vronsky than he can give. After yet another fight, she ends up despairing — she threw away her marriage for a love that has ended up fading to nothing — and commits suicide in her despair.
But the book ALSO portrays another marriage, between Levin and Kitty (Katarina). Levin, while a bit beta-ish and inclined to put Kitty on a pedestal at the start of the book, is a good, decent man, and once he grows a bit of a spine and finally proposes, he and Kitty have a good marriage. The book contrasts the two couples at every turn. For example, in one chapter you’ll read about Vronsky and Anna having a fight, misunderstanding each other, and starting a growing emotional rift between them (which eventually ends with Anna’s suicide). Then a few pages later, Levin and Kitty have a fight, but they are each able to see each other’s perspective. This lets them calm down and reconcile, and their marriage ends up on a firmer foundation afterwards.
The reason why many people appear think that Anna Karenina depicts marriage as slavery is because it’s quite good at showing each character’s thought process, and Anna really does think that way. But all one has to do is look at the contrasts the book makes, between Anna and Vronsky’s pseudo-marriage that falls apart, and Levin and Kitty’s marriage that endures, to see that the lesson in the book is that marriage can be good if both partners are willing to work at it. A very good, and realistic, lesson.
@Scott –
Just a side note, but don’t use the Wingdings font — for anything — on the Internet. I’ll relegate the technical details to a footnote*, but the sentence where you wrote “obey God→becomes feelings for God→obey feelings” ended up looking like this on my screen since I don’t have that font installed: “obey God▯becomes feelings for God▯obey feelings”. I could tell what you meant, but Wingdings screwed it up by not complying with the relevant Internet standards for fonts. There’s supposed to be a method by which fonts you don’t have get substituted with fonts you do have, so you see the correct character even if it sometimes looks a little funny, but Wingdings doesn’t comply with the relevant standards so the font-substitution doesn’t work.
* It uses the Unicode private-use area instead of the proper Unicode encodings. So instead of the correct U+2192 for the right-arrow character, Wingdings uses U+F0E0, thereby guaranteeing that nobody will be able to know what character it was supposed to be unless they’re intimately familiar with Wingdings and its quirks. There are fonts that are worse offenders than Wingdings, but it’s pretty bad.
@Ryan McConnell –
Ouch. I’ve never had to deal with a woman in full-fledged rebellion, so I don’t really know how to advise you, except to say “Hold your course, since if you back down now, you’ll NEVER be able to re-assert your authority ever again.” Part of why your wife blew up is because deep down, she knows you’re right and that she should stop cursing in front of the kids. But because she has been listening to the world, she doesn’t want to acknowledge that you have any authority over her, so she uses your past mistakes as a rationalization for her rebellion.
I don’t know whether it would be wise to say something like, “Yes, I was acting pretty crummy back then, which is why I stopped. It was difficult, but it was the right thing to do. But right now, you’re the one acting pretty crummy. So are you also going to do the right thing, even though it’s hard? Or are you going to tell me that cursing in front of the kids is totally acceptable behavior and there’s nothing wrong with it?” Depending on your wife’s psychology, acknowledging that your behavior in the past was unacceptable might be unwise, since it might just fuel her rationalization. I don’t know her, so I can’t tell. But depending on how you frame it, it might also be a wise course of action: since she’s currently in rebellion against the idea that you might have any authority, redirect her thoughts to “Is your behavior acceptable?”
I noticed, you see, that she said, “I’ll do what I want when I want to”. She did NOT say, “What I do is perfectly all right.” (Or maybe she did and you didn’t mention it — if she did say that, then my conclusions are going to be wrong). I think that that indicates that she really does know that her cursing in front of the kids is wrong, but she doesn’t want to admit that because that would mean admitting that you were right, and her rebellion is shouting louder than her conscience. As I said earlier, I’ve never had to deal with a woman in full-fledged rebellion, so I’m just guessing — but MAYBE, by focusing on the objective standard of “Is this behavior acceptable?”, you might be able to get her conscience to shout louder than her rebellion.
@BillyS
Worship requires a weightiness, Gravitas or Kabod. Here is an example:
And don’t forget the Basso Profundo:
The type of music is just as important as the lyrics for as of now the type of music is identical to Romantic Love songs among many worship songs.
Lyrics must also be a secondary form of Catechesis.
OFF TOPIC:
https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/08/24/say-you-dont-need-no-diamond-ring/
Youngest women may be earning more than the youngest men at this point, which may cause the marriage rate to decline even faster, as both men and women prefer marriages in which the man earns more than the woman.
Also off topic: I just heard two radio commercials.
In the first, a little girl asks, “Daddy, where do babies come from?”
The father becomes flustered, too embarrassed to answer, and finally calls his wife to rescue him, “Ah, honey!
“Mommy went to the store,” says the little girl.
“Oh,” says the crestfallen father. He then proceeds to analogize — badly — the birth process with Geico Car Insurance.
“So, that’s where babies come from?” asks the little girl.
“Ah, yeah. Well, I’m glad we had this talk.
This Geico commercial was followed by a commercial for some college. A woman was discussing her desire to obtain an MBA from a good university.
And so fathers are doofuses who can’t handle embarrassing questions from little girls. While women are out comparison shopping for graduate degrees in business.
@Ryan:
I won’t offer any direct advise, as that’s something for those with more experience in this area AND not on open discussion, but I’ll offer you my support. Keep faith. She’s throwing everything at you because she’s losing, and she knows it. She also knows she’s wrong and her pride won’t allow her to admit it.
Robin Munn-
That’s good advice. But what happened was I used two dashes and and arrow, all bunched up together when typing it in word. This makes an arrow with a tail, automatically. I didn’t even notice it until after I cut and pasted and then posted the comment. Weird.
Picking up on Robin Munn’s excellent comment about Anna Karenina (a book I have never and never wanted to re-read) is it not curious how Nineteenth Century male writers went to considerable trouble to empathise and usually with the their extremely slutty female heroines whereas female writers from that century were determined no matter the implausibility to marry their heroines off to morose men like D’Arcy or the psychotic and probably brutal like Mr Rochester. Then there were the librettists finding ever more ingenious ways to prevent their heroines suffering a fate worse than death; who could forget the eponymous Iris of Luigi Illica* avoiding such a fate by throwing herself down a laundry shute into a sewer where she drowns or Rachel in (((La Juive))) of Eugene Scribe* being thrown into a vat of boiling oil on the orders of her father who just happens to be a Roman Catholic Cardinal.
*Mascagni and Halevy the respective composers.
LG-
The Lord’s “mercies” are new every morning, because the only thing we deserve is eternal damnation and he’s coming back to burn the world in Holy Fire. This points to the problem of the “emotive” nature of the current Church. It’s far too easy to forget we’re ransomed prisoners that deserved our execution.
Yes. All of existence requires Gods assent, every instant of the day.
Imagine if we had to do that with just one of the things we “create.” Imagine you build a car. But, in doing so, you had to conjure up the rubber for the tires, the shape of the tires, the air pressure in the tires, the material for the rims, the lug nuts, the lug bolts, the brakes, all the materials and physics that go into every single part of the car existing. And you had to actively think about all of that, every second of the day in order for it to keep existing. As soon as you stop, the car disappears into a poof of non-existence.
Now, imaging God doing that for everything and every process in the universe, all the time. Every cell in your body. Every leaf on every tree. Everything decomposing under the ground. The water, the air, the farthest star and all its burning gases. When He decides we should no longer exist, we don’t.
That is how much God loves what He has created.
@ Ryan McConnell:
What about “your cursing is repulsive and unfeminine” , with somehow disgusted smile combined with a piercing killer-stare? And don’t discuss it any further. And once she does it next time, tell her, calm, firm, “stop it please”.
Her response can be either bitching “I will do whatever I want bla bla..”, in that case you just leave the situation without response, let her scream, ignore her. And if the cursing happens next time, do the same: her cursing – “stop it please”. If she challenges you about asking her to stop, you tell her that she knows your point, you can repeat it “the cursing is repulsive and unfeminine”.
If you persevere this way, at some point she might/should stop.
Or she’d divorce you for abuse.
Dear Fellas:
Can mod change my pseudonym too? I’m thinking Raped by SirHamster, Now I’m a White Nationalist might be funny. What do y’all think?
That sort of appeal to logic and leadership will work on men, most of the time, but will probably not be as effective as you’d like on women. She’ll just curse you as a meany, and get a thrill out of the fact that you’ve paid attention to her.
What I’ve found works well is to suddenly stop reacting, giving her a semi-blank look, and stating flatly: “you’re making yourself really unattractive to me right now.” Immediately after this, I snap back to being my happy self, and go on doing whatever it was I’d be doing if she weren’t around.
Try it and see how it goes.
Boxer
@Ryan McConnell
I. Always keep in mind that she is in control of herself. That means several things.
-A. You’re not in control of her. You have no power to make her change her behavior. That means you have no responsibility to make her change her behavior. All you can do is tell her the truth, and then try not to undermine your own position through your own behavior.
-B. It means she’s making her own choices. That means her behavior isn’t caused by something you did a few years ago; such as sometimes drinking too much. Your past drinking didn’t cause her rebellion anymore than your current straightness causes her to be submissive now.
-C. If she wanted to, she could change her mind right now. That she doesn’t submit to God and you means that she does not want to. She’s not waiting around to be submissive when you say some magic words, or figure out some secret. Her rebellion is not a failing on your part. It’s born of her desire.
II. I’d pay closer attention to those who are around her. The smart money says someone is encouraging her to be defiant and egging her on to tell you off; friends, coworker, blogs, Facebook relationships…
III. You are not “utterly defeated” unless you quit. Here I mean unless you give-in and stop telling the truth such as “We don’t cuss in front of the kids.” We do serve a just God, and He will repay, and we who are part of Him will share in that repayment.
IV. The first of a bit of practical advice: When captaining your wife (or kids), use the collective “we” whenever you can. “We don’t cuss.”
-A. This communicates that you too are under authority. This isn’t just something you came up with because you’re the husband, but because it’s part of your responsibility as the husband.
-B. This gives your children the chance to make the right choice. They see more than you know. Let them make an informed decision to follow Angry Mom, or Calm Dad.
V. The second bit of practical advice: Pick your battles, and pick how to fight your battles. Sometimes gentle teasing is the right answer. Sometimes it’s recitation of the 4th Commandment, and a word to the kids that God is not pleased.
VI. The third bit of practical advice: Don’t have a “calm discussion” about everything. Address things in the moment, and then move on. Don’t bother trying to convince her. She already knows what she did wrong. That’s why she did it. Don’t worry about trying to show her how good you are now. Women are absolutely tuned-in to behavior. If you have changed for the better: I guarantee you she has noticed. (It’s possible your improvement may be what is irritating her.) The point being that It’s a waste of time to “help her see”. She sees. She just doesn’t like what she sees, for whatever stupid reasons. I say this because I remember I used to have a burning desire to make my wife “understand me”, and to want her to agree with me. That’s impossible, and an unfair burden for me to put on either of us. Now, I realize that she doesn’t have to agree. She just has to do what I ask. We’re both happier.
@Ryan McConnell
I wish I had some good advice for you, but I’m in no position to talk. If anything I’ve gone in the opposite direction: I used to be able to assert myself more in domestic situations, but I’ve kind of lost my psychological stamina I guess, and find that I’m no longer any match for my wife when it come to playing such games. It’s not just that it’s “easier” to give in (although there is that); it’s that she can fight in ways I can’t. If it suits her to play the victim, she can resort to that (that never works for men). And she has a greater reserve of psychological energy than I do, so she can keep it up longer. I’m pretty even-tempered, and rarely blow up. My wife is not what I’d call a hothead, but she can get riled about unpredictable (and often trivial) things, and I get caught off-guard and can’t get my bearings as to how to deal with it.
But I like to think that my calmer reaction is perhaps the best thing I can do. If I try to elevate my emotions to the same pitch as hers, it would just backfire. And besides, a calmer reaction defuses the situation over the long run, even if not immediately.
I wish you the best in dealing with your situation, and hope others can offer better advice.
People like Sheila Gregoire can be teachable moments. We all know women like this – usually they marry alpha slackers. Everyone knows women like this – main breadwinner in their household but wrapped around their alpha slacker’s finger and gets a little thrill out of telling the world how put-upon (i.e. NEEDED) she is. Eschews self-awareness; blames her falling for a natural script-flipper on “society” when most wives manage to avoid that.
This problem takes care of itself over time. Alpha slackers (as opposed to alpha providers or beta providers) are likely the group of men whose marriage rate has plunged the most in the past 50 years, as there is no societal expectation for them to marry anymore and it’s easy for them to enjoy the bachelor life. Only the small group of hardcore con men who marry in order to have a meal ticket still remain in the matrimonial market from the alpha-slacker bunch.
Ryan McConnell (February 27, 2017 at 9:21 pm):
I had very similar issues as you and ended up depressed and lost in my own life, with a wife who demanded I change for her, yet despised me for having made those changes.
Then one day, in the midst of a mental state that had depression and anxiety mixed together, I accidentally took ”the Red Pill”.
For me there was no simple formula. There never is. What helps is learning manosphere lessons and learning Game. I made the stunning realization that I might very well lose her, but I thought it worth the risk. Then answers come.
When my own wife told me that ”I wasn’t the boss”, and ”I had no say” in public. I told her, ”Do not impose on my good nature. If I’m not the boss, then you aren’t the boss of me either. So we can race to the bottom for who can care the least, shall we? With that attitude, what sort of marriage, what sort of family do you have?” I found that public shaming works.
She will yell and scream.Hold your ground. It’s a shit test.You will not move. Remind her, ”This is my house too. Those are my children too.They are mine because I paid for them. Or are you so great you can override property rights?”
Keep in mind: She only loves you opportunistically, not idealistically. God alone loves you completely. Read Psalms and Proverbs. Commune with God alone. Bit by bit, she will start noticing that her flaming attacks have no effect on you. You will wear her down eventually but even if you don’t, you will follow God. God changes you. A woman doesn’t. She never can. She will have no effect on you.
All the best.
@Ryan McConnell
Cane wrote:
“If you have changed for the better: I guarantee you she has noticed. (It’s possible your improvement may be what is irritating her.) The point being that It’s a waste of time to ‘help her see’. She sees. She just doesn’t like what she sees, for whatever stupid reasons.”
Yep. When a person doesn’t want to face his/her own sin, it’s typical for him/her to try and tear down someone who is working on his/her sanctification. Typically, we avoid such people. Obviously, we can’t do that with wives.
Cane’s right. When we find ourselves in that situation with our wives, we have to speak the truth calmly and lovingly, continue to work on our sanctification, and leave it up to God to work on their hearts. The “calmly and lovingly” part is difficult, but it’s also key, which is not to say that I’ve mastered that skill.
Excuse the interruption. A follow up from yesterday,
https://americandadweb.wordpress.com/2017/02/28/a-plea-coda/
“I actually remember watching “Leave it to Beaver” re-runs when I was a kid… I didn’t have to Google the name “Ward Cleaver” like most of the guys the pathetic Prager University video is supposed to be persuading.”
As an aside and for historical context: “Leave it to Beaver” ended original first run production in 1963. It was probably rerun until, oh 1980, maybe, and perhaps later in some regions of the US. I am 48 years old and I too watched a lot of TV from 1974 to about 1984, when I went into my junior year of high school and really started getting busy with other things. I have never watched an episode of this sitcom, except maybe bits and parts on those vintage TV channels like TV Land (and I don’t subscribe to that channel).
I did know about the show, usually because as I was growing up during second wave feminism, it was held up as an anachronistic, outdated icon to a bygone era; a paean to squareness, unhipness, being out of touch, irrelevant, sexist (June is a put-upon housewife!) and patriarchal (umitigated eeeeeevil). This, and shows like “My Three Sons” (silly anodyne stuff) and “McHale’s Navy” and “Petticoat Junction” (sexist) and “Father Knows Best” (sexist, eeevil patriarchy – Just look at the title!).
”This is my house too. Those are my children too.They are mine because I paid for them. Or are you so great you can override property rights?”
I might not be, but I can summon men with guns who can override your property and parental rights.
“I might not be, but I can summon men with guns who can override your property and parental rights.”
Yup, all it takes is for her to make one phone call to the boys in blue and you will find yourself sleeping on someone’s couch, possibly with a court order to stay away from your own house and children.
“I might not be, but I can summon men with guns who can override your property and parental rights.”
Aaaaaand that’s all folks. When a woman says that, it’s over. Time to see a lawyer, find out what a divorce will cost you, bite the bullet, and file.
“Yup, all it takes is for her to make one phone call to the boys in blue and you will find yourself sleeping on someone’s couch, possibly with a court order to stay away from your own house and children.”
Might as well file first and end the marriage with as much dignity as can be mustered. When a woman even so much as threatens that, it’s time to wrap up the marriage.
@Ryan McConnell
What I’m getting is you’re trying to assert leadership after a long period of not doing so. IMO what you’re describing is a great difficulty in conflict resolution. If you want something to try, there’s a conflict strategy called the DESS model. The purpose of it is to engage a conflict while not triggering a defensive response out of your partner and is perceived as less ‘bossy’. In it’s simplest form avoid using ‘you’ during an argument.
So “You shouldn’t swear in front of our kids” becomes “I don’t appreciate the kids being exposed to foul language”.
The model is
Describe – I don’t appreciate the kids being exposed to foul language
Effect – The displays of anger and rough language are not good for the kids’ psyche
Specific – I’d prefer the kids to not be exposed to such outbursts of anger
Specify Benefit – The kids will feel more secure at home
Essentially the slight shift if focus makes the behavior a problem instead of making HER a problem.
The effect becomes that she thinks about what she’s doing instead of whether or not she meets your approval.
@Ryan McConnell
That is a really difficult situation.
Cane’s comment at 7:12 is excellent. The only other thing I would add is that when she decides to do as you are asking she very likely won’t tell you she is doing so. As the adage goes, pay more attention to what she does than what she says (or doesn’t say). Often wives will initially rebel against something and then later on decide to do it. For example, she might tell you under no uncertain terms that she will curse in front of the children whenever she pleases. But after she cools off, she might decide she really should stop doing this. If she does so, chances are she won’t tell you she made this choice.
@Ryan McConnell says: February 27, 2017 at 9:21 pm
Ryan: Stick with your guns. YOU ARE LOVING YOUR WIFE AS CHRIST LIVED THE CHURCH. Long suffering is not forever suffering and Christ eventually got in the faces of the Pharisees [fake believers] and throw over the tables and cracked the whip. You description of your situation is identical to mine; only the names were changed. Christ was made of no reputation and beaten and killed. My wife “reads” the Bible everyday yet says “don’t tell me about the Bible.” She has chased me with butcher knifes and says “ladies can kill too you know.” “Go have sex with someone else.” This is the condition of the church: she was an elder’s wife and I had to resign years ago as this attitude of ‘no correcting’ kept growing. “Your not going to tell me what to do” came 37 years ago, one year into our marriage, after she vowed to obey [on a cassette tape …remember those things]. Then she had a widowed pastor’s wife — My Mother – support her in her Titus 2:5 Blasphemy of the Word of God.
This is our call: to be Christ to our wives as they arrogantly take the path to Hell. Easy to say but …hang tough, after all you are a man and “the tabernacle of God is with men” Rev 21:3.
Heavenly Father, give Ryan YOUR strength and insight in his house, that he and his house may serve the Lord …in the name of Jesus, so be it.
Ryan: My heart goes out to you, brother. Keep the faith, and keep the fight.
It’s probable that when you were in the “drunken captain” phase, your wife felt morally superior to you and used it to justify her behavior/choices. It’s very common for those close to us, rather than celebrate and support someone “getting their act together” like you have, to instead feel threatened and attempt to sabotage it. You improvement throws her rebellion into a harsh light, she knows the truth in her heart, and she hates it. It would be so much easier to tell herself, “he’s just as bad!” but now that excuse is being taken from her and she doesn’t like it one damned bit.
She is not the judge of your actions – you answer to God for the stewardship of your family. Dont. Give. Up.
Ryan,
Good advice in general, but also make sure you find and talk with a good divorce lawyer. (It may be a conflict in terms, but competence is important here.)
I would be much quicker to file in a case like this, but that is likely my bias to my own experience of being surprised twice. (Once when my wife announced out of the blue when we were at a marriage conference that she “decided she was going to stay” (as in not divorce). I didn’t even know divorce was an option at that point.
She never clued in how harmful that was, but then she followed through years later. I didn’t get kicked out of my house, but it was still a huge kick in the gut when she bailed and left.
I am not sure it can be resolved in most cases like that. My wife was far more passive-aggressive, but the root problem is the same.
Do you know if she has ever really repented for anything in the past? I realized that was missing from my wife’s life when I thought about it after the fact.
@Spike says: February 28, 2017 at 8:26 am
‘Remind her, ”This is my house too. Those are my children too. They are mine because I paid for them. Or are you so great you can override property rights?”’
Actually, it is only YOUR house and only YOUR children and only YOUR property. The church and the laws of man have told us otherwise. We need to speak the language of God: “As for ME and MY house …” Women break the connection from generation to generation, “the heart of the fathers to the children and the heart of the children to their fathers”; the mother’s connection to the children [his seed in her oven] is by being one with their father.
Can mod change my pseudonym too? I’m thinking Raped by SirHamster, Now I’m a White Nationalist might be funny. What do y’all think?
Leave the poor hamsters outside of your anus.
ARMAGEDDON! ARMAGEDDON!
Ryan, rather than issuing directives to an uncooperative “actor” like your wife, maybe try altering the “scene” a little. If you made a game out of your kids correcting mommy’s outburts– “Oooo! You said a bad word, it’s “where are my ‘fracking gosh-darn chickenplucking’ car keys,” mommy! Ha ha…”– you might nudge her into more acceptable behavior.
(On the other hand, you could provoke her into abusing your kids that way, if she’s deranged enough, so your milage may vary.)
Nobody likes to be told what to do, but nearly everyone tries to satisfy the disembodied authority of decorum. If you improve the environment, behavior (usually) changes for the better.
Mindgames can bring bring people together or crash whole societies.
@Dalrock & Ryan
So true. Though, such wives often expect that their husbands notice and appreciate such silent mind-changes.
The thing is just not to fall into a cyclic trap of negative reactions. Wives are often tempted to lay such traps as a way to show the husband “isn’t so holy after all”. Praise the good, and warn against the evil.
Lyn87, LOL same thought crossed my mine.
Ryan, use reverse psychology, if she refuses to do anything you ask, then ask her to swear constantly (wear ear muffs) . She will eventually rebel against you wanting to hear her swear and maybe will stop.
This is of course terribly non biblical but you could have some fun with this. Maybe she only likes it as she knows its rubs you the wrong way. If she isnt bothered with sinning against God as most women arnt, I doubt she (like most women) will care what their husbands want.
Dalrock et al:
We need a hit squad on PJ Media (for those with Disqus accounts):
https://disqus.com/home/discussion/pj-media/spain_appoints_39sex_tsar39_to_help_married_slackers_get_busy_between_the_sheets/
@Lyn87
”We call that system of obligations “patriarchy” because it is the only system that reliably produces advanced civilization. I will refer to those obligations as “doing the right thing.”
Patriarchy is description of how the sexes are ranked relatively to each other under God’s ordained Order where Christ is the head of man and man is the head of woman so it isn’t inaccurate nor is it mutually exclusive with ”doing the right thing”
Patriarchy is derived from Patriarch or Father. So its more specifically and especially rule by Fathers but its definition now includes rule by men over women and children.
infowarrior1:
Yeah… I know the Latin etymology of the word “patriarchy.” I was just trying to stipulate that patriarchy is the only system that works beyond the “everybody lives in grass huts” stage of civilization.
Ryan McConnell says: February 27, 2017 at 9:21 pm
One more thought Ryan; stronger:
Don’t abandon your post or her blood will be on your hands. Christ, AS YOU, said “take this cup from me.” Then He [AS YOU MUST] said “But not My will but Thine be done.”
sipcode,
Do you mean Ryan is responsible if his wife goes wacko? Hardly.
BillyS:
Thanks for this. I don’t think there’s a perfect correlation between Christ and any mortal man.
That goes double in this analogy. My read of the text lists a couple of positive duties: screwing her, and her alone, and providing for her alone, and not divorcing her. That’s about it. If she decides to do wrong, there’s really nothing you can do about it; and the text doesn’t tell you to physically stop her from doing any of these things. That’d be a bad idea in any age, but it’s an extremely bad idea in the age of VAWA.
Boxer
Thanks for the catch Billy S.
Clarify: I’m saying that if he abandons his post, then blood is on his hands. He is to love her as Christ loved the church, not abandoning her because she is persecuting him. Yes, I suggest her blood is then on his hands. Read about the ‘watchmen’ and blood on their hands. Husbands are those watchmen; prophets. [Jonah ran and was warned] Ryan is to confront her like Christ was the Rock of Offense and take the heat that comes with doing it. It feels like Hell, but that is our position as husbands if we desire Christ.
“Yeah… I know the Latin etymology of the word “patriarchy.” I was just trying to stipulate that patriarchy is the only system that works beyond the “everybody lives in grass huts” stage of civilization.”
Also, feminism isn’t *merely* a revolt by females against male leadership … it is foremost a revolt by humans against The Father.
News flash: hypergamy and a lack of economic opportunity combine disastrously.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-men-are-having-problems-getting-married/
“As manufacturing jobs dried up over the last few decades, blue-collar men have suffered from lower income, fewer job opportunities and the increased likelihood of risky behavior, which in turn has hurt their marriage prospects, Autor and his co-authors wrote in a paper published at the National Bureau of Economic research.
…
It’s not only that young working-class men are less marriageable when jobs dry up, but that some of these men are actually disappearing, the paper noted. When Chinese imports take a greater share of trade, the ratio of young men to women declines by 1.7 percentage points, they found. The study examined population shifts in commuting zones, or the 722 regions that cover the continental U.S. and represent a regional economic area.
Where are these young men going? Many are turning to risky behaviors such as heavy drinking and drug use. Trade shocks are leading to higher mortality rates for young men, which explains some — but not all — of the imbalance. Young men are also disappearing because they’re incarcerated, homeless or migrating to other areas to find better job opportunities.”
Trump’s victory is, of course, still a mystery.
“..But after she cools off, she might decide she really should stop doing this. If she does so, chances are she won’t tell you she made this choice”
-which is exactly what I experienced. My wife’s behavior improved after I went MRP, but she never attributed it to me. She simply started dropping the bad behavior quietly.
sipcode:. ”Actually, it is only YOUR house and only YOUR children and only YOUR property. The church and the laws of man have told us otherwise. We need to speak the language of God: “As for ME and MY house …” Women break the connection from generation to generation, “the heart of the fathers to the children and the heart of the children to their fathers”; the mother’s connection to the children [his seed in her oven] is by being one with their father”
You make a very good point. I mention it because it worked for me, so perhaps my wife didn’t know her legal position as well as you do, much to my advantage. I was prepared to bluff, and I was in such a bad position that I was prepared to have my bluff called. Thankfully, it ended right for me.
That might be a point in case for Ryan: If she doesn’t know the law, don’t you tell her!
If it were only true (that women experience guilt). I see zero evidence for such assertions.
Rather, I see plenty of evidence to the contrary. I see plenty of haughtiness, pride, arrogance, stubbornness, rebelliousness, and disrespect of men and Godly social values, roles, expectations and conventions in the behaviour of women. Women are unrepentant because they do not even recognise their guilt.
Out of the heart spring all the issues of life. Judging by the rot that drips from the mouths of these hysterical women, it’s safe to conclude they are utterly unregenerate; Life is not in them: Christ is not in them.
@ Ryan McConnell:
There is another small point that might be worth mentioning. As Cane has already mentioned she may be getting encouraged by others. If she has friends or family she is close to that are already divorced they could be filling her head with all sorts of bad ideas.
Make sure that you don’t use your real name online, especially on this forum, she may already be talking to a lawyer, or worse, her divorced friends. You will be an easy target for a savvy lawyer.
This is likely to make more sense if I put it in the correct post —
be true to myself and develop my beliefs
In the spirit of the newest Girl Guides motto (and ever in obedience to self-as-god), this came via
the website of The Other McCain:
http://www.statepress.com/article/2017/02/spopinion-virginity-is-a-social-construct-rethink-purity
“Virginity is a fictional concept constructed by society.”
“Virginity is conceptual, it is a social construction. When we have sex for the first time we do not actually lose anything. It does not change our identity, it is not life-altering and it does not affect our worth. It is simply a new experience.”
Make sure that you don’t use your real name online, especially on this forum, she may already be talking to a lawyer, or worse, her divorced friends. You will be an easy target for a savvy lawyer.
Hopefully that’s a nom de plume of the Speaker and Majority Leader….
Dear Lost Patrol:
Such attitudes might seem common sense in the age of DNA test, but for most of our history, virginity was the only way a family could be sure that their wealth was being passed on to their relatives.
Think about it: You’re responsible for a farm and livestock. Your son marries a girl who has physical evidence of her virginity intact. You put them into a room someplace for a few weeks, and when she gets pregnant, you have a reasonable chance at having a little boy or girl who is your relative. At least the first one will be yours, anyway. The rest of them, well, you hope…
Feminists will scoff at this, but back in a more hand-to-mouth era, this was a life and death matter, and the gravity of it is totally understandable.
Boxer
My two cents on Ryan’s situation is that it sounds like normal adjustment. When you teach an old dog new tricks, there’s initial resistance to adopting new behavior patterns, particularly when the old ones were comfortable. I shouldn’t advise on wives but have seen the attitude in coworkers.
“We can’t use the old software anymore. Here’s the new software.”
“No way! I’ll just use the old system and import the data as needed.”
“You have to change. The hardware is incompatible with the old and everybody else is using the new.”
“I WILL CHANGE WHEN HELL BECOMES DISNEYLAND!”
“We’ll have this conversation every day until everybody (you) is using the new system. Same time tomorrow?”
The winning move is patient consistency. And a sense of humor.
@Lost Patrol
Should Virginity be a social construct where nothing is lost, nothing is changed, is not life-altering and does not affect a woman’s worth and is merely a new experience then it must surely follow that Rape is nothing, does not change a woman nor be life-altering nor alters her worth and is merely another experience. Rape is a social construct.
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@Opus
Virginity is a social construct (it must be because the spellchecker didn’t even recognise the word), therefore Rape is a social construct…Yeah! I wonder how that would hold up in court? The concept of virginity doesn’t even make it to trial.
“Virginity is a social construct …, therefore Rape is a social construct…Yeah! I wonder how that would hold up in court?”
Provided the rapist can check the properleftist-approved group-identity boxes, it holds up exactly as you’d expect
“virginity as a social construct”
It’s not life altering except that it puts into motion irreversible processes in both body and mind, all the bonding and imprinting mechanisms, plus the dominant-submissive dimension of every sexual act, but pronounced much more intense, since it’s for the first time.
They are downplaying as irrelevant anything that could matter to men.
Would be interesting to see a reaction of a woman, if one would go explain her, that she should spread for/marry a complete loser, since status is a mere social construct..
Also, as Boxer mentions the agricultural subsistence past conditions and wealth transfer – there are also cultures with strong emphasis on virginity, who were nomadic hunters/gatherers (Cheyenne).
Laura,
I posted this link on another of Dalrock’s threads. Maybe it also applies here? It definitely applies to your comment.
This was me at Toastmasters. I actually won the competition with that speech.
This was me at Toastmasters. I actually won the competition with that speech.
Nice. What level of competition? Are you still competing? As I recall, there’s a couple different levels, club, district, regional, and whatnot, with winners competing at the next higher level.
@Ryan,
Although it wasn’t as bad, I went through a similar situation. And yes it was and occasionally still is very hard.
Although there’s no magic bullet, the thing that helped my situation turn around is learning to ignore her. At some point, I realized that giving a person attention (even shouting at them, which I did, sigh) is always perceived as a reward in some dark recess of our minds. So when you approached her again to resolve the situation, some part of her subconscious emotional mind perceived it as a reward. You reinforced the bad behavior.
Ignoring someone is perceived as a punishment. I remember turning the corner: she snapped at me, “What do you care?! What difference does it make to you?!!” I literally crossed my arms and turned my back to her. Her anger evaporated, and she went silent. It completely defeated her.
And I didn’t bring up the issue again.
But I have two warnings from experience: (1) After she starts to improve, use it sparingly. It really hurts a woman a lot. The need validation. And (2) this won’t work long term unless it is paired with praise when she is good. There has to be a contrast.
SH, that was just club level.
IBB, nicely done, but if I may be a slight bit critical, taking about 30 seconds in the beginning to build the case for marriage would go a long way.
@IBB: Congratulations on winning the contest. You did a great job, and of course, it’s our favorite topic!
I encourage the criticism. I also forgot to focus on mentioning that the people who used to get married younger (like 20) were also the more “marginal cases” that need a stable marriage… the most. Now those more marginal cases don’t marry… at all… or they just frivorce. But I ran out of time.
@IBB, well done, for shock value you could mention that remarriages for >45’s is projected to hit 0 around 2030 if trends continue.
Stopping back in to thank you all for your advice and wisdom. I didn’t mean to hijack the thread, it just really spoke to what I was going through (what I *am* going through). Your guidance is very much appreciated, everyone!
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@Dave,
“When a man meets a woman he is interested in, after getting her full attention, he should clearly let her know what he wants from her, and what he won’t take. If she is willing and ready to adapt to him, sometimes after a few “negotiations”, then she is a keeper.”
Excellent comment.
Most young men need to be taught what to insist a future wife be and do. They also need to be taught that they should lead and dominate their wife. This takes confidence and leadership that most men are discouraged from nowadays.
@IBB,
Congratulations on winning the contest! Non-PC content but you still got the win.
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I haven’t read all the comments, but I have two observations. Emotions are not evil, nor are they unmanly. Empathy is a godly emotion. The highest form of love is agape love, whose definition in Greek usage is “commitment to love, affection and high esteem”. It is the love God shows for His people, and the love we are to show God. God fixes HIs love on us, and He is love. God shows affection through: mercy, compassion, tenderness, kindness. Jesus wept for Jerusalem, Love is commitment, but it does show affection.
Second, while the Bible does say the woman was in transgression when she was deceived, it also says the following about Adam (who WILLFULLY sinned):
1 Corinthians 15: 21 For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.
22 For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.
and
Romans 5:14 Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come.
The Bible says that came into the world through Adam. Women are not naturally good, but they are not more sinful than men are. I also hope you are not implying that true salvation comes for a woman through childbearing and rearing.
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