One of the ways we deny the obvious truth of the billboard is by declaring any man whose wife succumbs to the temptation to betray her marriage vows a “deadbeat”. Deadbeat has become a euphemism for a man who has been kicked out of his family, and we tell ourselves that such men deserve the cruelty our family courts visit upon them. That a man is in so wretched a state after the family courts get through with him is all the proof we need that he is a loser who deserved what was coming to him.
If there were more deadbeats, there would be fewer divorces. Follow the money, it would be better if women feared divorce as much as men.
It seems to me like this ad is saying if you don’t buy X you are a deadbeat your wife will divorce.
“… we tell ourselves that such men deserve the cruelty our family courts visit upon them.”
In church they excuse, sanctify, and remarry the women who do it to them.
That women who would eject husbands/fathers for closet space can even GET married is one of a few indictments against modern men I will accept. After this long that kind of ignorance simply has to be willful.
Been there, so not a fan of dropping whale manure on someone already in the Great Marianas Trench. But Good Lord, we are so overdue for a wedding-season ‘Silent Spring’ it isn’t funny.
@Iowa Slim:
Of all havens of willful ignorance in the West, the Church is Patient Zero.
Literally unforgivable.
@JD
“Of all havens of willful ignorance in the West, the Church is Patient Zero.
Literally unforgivable.”
From the entry-level view of holy matrimony, the church advertises that it will act as a sort of FDIC to protect a young man’s life investment. When it’s his turn in the hole, there’s nothing for him but shoulder shrugs. Could be ignorance. The times I’ve seen it in action, it smelled more like fraud.
My kids are young adults and old teenagers now. They hate church with a passion. Not because I wanted them to. Because they perceive it as a henhouse and a chump farm for men. Also as an institution that averted its eyes or actively sanctified the vandalism of their childhoods by the fem-powerment reflex.
Pingback: Don’t be the guy whose wife wanted more closet space. | Reaction Times
Quick, someone remind me why young men still get married?
A great number of females are going to have a great deal to answer for when they stand before holy creator God. In the meanwhile, my advise is don’t put yourself into a position where they can use the government against you. Most of you are married, you already have ;).
Pingback: Marriage: soon the Surgeon General will warn about it - Fabius Maximus website
It’s clear from scripture that holy matrimony is a lifelong arrangement (possibly excluding some special circumstances). The question we face more and more also here in Finland is whether the legal definition of marriage upholds the theological truth of the matter, or whether it is downright deleterious to it.
It’s not unheard of for Lutherans to be outlaws when it comes to legal marriage, as the Prussian state only gave the legal powers to the sponsored state church, therefore precluding the rites from Lutherans who wouldn’t bend the knee. I find it rather sad that the descendants of the faithful who left for the free Americas now have to face such monstrous marriage laws. (This is something I keep harping on, yes.)
As a pastor in a newly established church body (year 2000), I find we have lots of freedom to shape the culture or “DNA” of the church, especially as we have members from many different strains of Finnish spirituality. In Finland, we find that young men are now more likely to take their faith seriously than young women. The challenge for us regarding feminism is about keeping the church open to newcomers and tolerating those who find biblical gender roles difficult (but are willing to be led) while also yielding nothing to the spirit of the age, ie. feminist rot. I am so grateful that the Finnish countryside is still bery skeptical about equalism (even if they rarely dare to say it). I’m not sure if asking the Internet for advice a good idea, but… any suggestions?
@vodrilus
The challenge you’re describing is the one that the American church failed. At one time it had the moral authority to function as a barrier to the divorce revolution and everything that ensued from it. Through compromise it evolved from barrier to booster engine. Its moral authority is gone as a result–rightfully so. It is now at the level of impotent hand-wringing or actively shooting its own best people in the back to keep up in the popularity contest.
I believe your first responsibility has to be to those who take their faith seriously and who hold to a biblical view of marriage and family governance. It’s the only way you end up having anything worthwhile to offer those who are genuinely willing to be led. Good luck to you, friend.
The Los Angeles dating scene for a 61-year-old woman: https://www.latimes.com/style/laaffairs/la-hm-la-affairs-robin-rapaport-20190420-story.html
I burst out of the chute of a bad 15-year relationship and raced forward into dating as if in a sprint. It was a race against time; I wasn’t 30 anymore. I aspired to make up for lost time spent being so unhappy. So I set out to find him. I believed that I would.
Fantasies of how we would meet and the courtship accompanied me on my drive to work and were replayed daily over and over, like a favorite movie. I starred in and directed my own epic love story and would mentally edit scenes as I traversed Coldwater Canyon and Los Angeles traffic. At times, I was moved to tears by my imaginative work, so beautifully was it scripted and calculated to have a happy ending, in all ways. …
Today, for me, at 61, the ocean of possible candidates has receded to pond proportions and is stocked with hopeful straggler fish. Not so when I was fresh bait. When I was younger, the lines at Trader Joe’s or Ralphs were dating sites. Now they are simply where I wait to pay while ensuring I have enough containers of Halo Top ice cream in my cart for the week’s Netflix binge.
I was that woman who could meet a man on a flight, at a wedding, hiking Fryman, on vacations or even while crossing Westwood Boulevard. Have I really run out of happenstance? …
@RPL
Classic example of female solipsism. At 61 she’s lucky to get any attention from a man at all, even “good morning”. Yet she still remembers “how it was” back when George H. Bush was President…
I was that woman who could
meetbe approached by a man on a flight, at a wedding, hiking Fryman, on vacations or even while crossing Westwood Boulevard. Have I really run out of happenstance? …Fixed that for her. She uses the word “bait” to refer to herself but…doesn’t really mean it. Way, way post Wall.
The answer to her question is “Yup. Deal with it”.
The eventual end of every feminist, who doesn’t degenerate into a hideous immoral lesbian: https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zW61M4HbzSs/Thrita5C6oI/AAAAAAAAACY/YxrwtH0p22E/s1600/catlady.jpeg
@Iowa Slim
Thank you, I appreciate your words. Alas, I feel you got too optimistic a view of our prospects. We are a tiny offshoot from the state church, which has devolved to utter depravity in the last 100 years, with gay “marriage” only held back by some legal technicalities. We have our own share of backstabbing among us, starting with those who insist on staying within the “Mother Church” with excuses that would have prevented the Reformation altogether if applied to Doctor Luther & co. With a few thousand members, we make up only about 0.1% of the population. I sincerely hope it’s just enough to be heard by those who need to hear us. Fortunately the average age is fairly low due to many young families (actually, we’ve had to draw some hard lines against a total rejection of contraception). This does not guarantee any triumphs. I am comforted by the fact that God does not require success, but faithfulness. Success is in the hand of the Lord. Be well, friend.
@vodrilus
Welcome, vodrilus.
If there is any one piece of advice that can be shared: do not allow women into positions of authority or teaching. The US churches that have done that over the last 100 or more years are generally in decline in many ways. Various Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, Baptist, Church of Christ, Episcopalian, etc. groups that have allowed women to hold office with uniformly bad results.
Relevant to you the two largest Lutheran denominations in the US. One allows women as pastors, one does not.
https://infogalactic.com/info/Evangelical_Lutheran_Church_in_America
and
https://infogalactic.com/info/Lutheran_Church–Missouri_Synod
From my own observation, the “thin edge of the wedge[1]” often is admitting women to the board that aids church members, typically called “deacons” but some churches have other names. Who wouldn’t want women to be helpers? Except that this winds up with women being confirmed or assigned to the office formally, that puts them into church leadership, and the first step onto the down-going escalator has been taken. Further down that escalator can be found easy divorce, toleration of homosexuality and so forth.
Thus:
Limit women’s roles in your church. Do not let them preach or govern in any way.
In the US it appears to be standard for women to teach school on Sunday to children up to the age of 12 or so, then either married couples or men take over the teaching. It is common to find women teaching women. There are men here, such as Hmm, who are part of their church governance who may be able to offer more substantial suggestions to you. Hmm is part of this denomination:
https://infogalactic.com/info/Presbyterian_Church_in_America
I hope some of this helps you.
[1] I am sure there is something comparable in Finnish. It comes from splitting wood for the stove, the first crack in a big log is made with a wedge that is hammered in. Once the split is started, it is easy to break the log into long parts. So the first step to splitting a log is hammering in the wedge, and it is the thin edge of the wedge that produces the first split. “Lady deacons” as far as I can tell are more often than not that thin edge.
Just the fact that a billboard like that can be put up – and nobody protests, nobody speaks out about it, nobody finds it abnormal or sickening, says everything you need to know about “modern society”.
And what it says is this – it has rotted beyond redemption. Collapse at this point would be better than this sort of degeneracy continuing.
Actually, the speed with which “transexuals” have become “mainstream” and the general acceptance, either by conviction or fear of retribution, of homosexual marriage says that we are an utterly corrupt people. The next stop will be the normalization of pedophilia.
@ Vodrilus
It’s not unheard of for Lutherans to be outlaws when it comes to legal marriage, as the Prussian state only gave the legal powers to the sponsored state church, therefore precluding the rites from Lutherans who wouldn’t bend the knee.
First of all, let me echo the welcome, and Happy Easter to you!
Next, a question on the quote above: Aren’t Lutherans the denominational majority in Finland, and thus the “official state church” (not that there should ever be any such thing)? I was unaware that there was another denomination considered “official.”
Also, I’d like to amplify Iowa Slim’s advice and echo Anonymous Reader’s. Remember that the church is a body of believers, people who have accepted Jesus as their unconditional Lord and Savior and are bound by God’s laws, rules, and commandments as set forth in Scripture. As IS points out, it is the “seeker-friendly” mindset, the willingness to “go along to get along” that has utterly destroyed the American church as a spiritual counterforce against the culture and has rendered it all but irrelevant. A church that capitulates to the World and its ways has nothing of value to offer anyone who is seeking relief from the World’s poisonous destructiveness.
AR’s advice relates directly to this. Ignoring God’s prescribed order for the roles the sexes are to fill for the kingdom accelerates the infection of worldly infiltration, compromise, and destruction. Resist the call for egalitarianism/equalism at all costs.
You might be in a more difficult position there in Finland than is someone in the same position here, given the rather more accelerated rate of collapse of the church in Europe, combined with the fact that many European nations have effectively criminalized speech containing the message of Scripture (e.g., the Bible’s strong prohibitions against homosexuality are in some countries considered “hate speech” and punishable as a crime if voiced). Granted. we here in the U.S. are closer to that dark day than many people want to believe, but (for now) it’s a threat we don’t face that you might be facing. That being the case, I pray that the Lord grant you comfort, strength, and wisdom to “fight the good fight.” Persecution has always been the lot of those who seek to do right by the Lord.
God bless you, and take care.
Actually, from wikipedia:
Why is St. Olaf College (Catholic) hiring a fugly radical leftist feminazi “fat and body positive” sex therapist to tell young Catholics that personal trainers are Nazis, putting fat kids on diets is like molesting them sexually, and not being obese is really white supremacy?
Anyone?
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/04/college-speaker-says-putting-a-child-on-a-diet-is-akin-to-sexual-molestation-compares-personal-trainers-to-nazis/
St. Olaf College is Lutheran, ELCA to be precise.
Great, thanks for clarifying that Frank. In my best tough street Irish voice, “Now answer the question.”
Because ELCA is pozzed and dildoed and has been for decades.
Yeah, ELCA was the first denomination in California to accept openly active homosexuals into its clergy. They’re Social Justice Warriors, not Christians. Not even Churchians.
St. Olaf College is Lutheran, ELCA to be precise.
Yes. As others have pointed out here, that = hopelessly pozzed.
@Anonymous Reader
The original impetus for the formation of our church body (The Evangelical Luther Mission Diocese of Finland, or previously just Luther Foundation Finland) was indeed the question regarding “women’s ordination”. In our mother church (The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland), this resolution was sadly passed already in 1986. One of the older pastors has published a “scrapbook” of letters, petitions, speeches and news articles from about 1970 to 1999 with some commentary from his personal diary. It’s heartbreaking to see these deeply committed men losing battle after battle in the church of their fathers, many suffering depression and other ailments, while others were betrayed by former comrades. It was a bleak read, with tragic heroes and all.
The upside of this is that we are strongly inoculated against women posing as pastors. This still doesn’t mean that we’re safe from the feminist spirit, as it permeats the whole of our western culture. This has lead to discussions regarding the role of women in the church, and life in general. A special problem is having women in the church board. These have not been easy discussions. We still have hope, however, and we can work with that.
Peace to you.
@feeriker
Christ is risen!
There might be some confusion here. I mentioned a rather obscure precedent from the Prussian state in the 19th century. I’m not exactly an expert on the subject, so this Wikipedia page should probably explain it better than I could. It doesn’t mention the marriage issue, but it was quite an issue for the decent Germans who had to lead scandalous lives in the eyes of the State. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_Union_of_Churches#Royal_attempts_to_merge_Lutherans_and_Calvinists
Finland had a single state church inherited from the Swedish kingdom until the 19th century, when the Russian Empire cut certain legal ties between the Lutheran church and the State, thus making space for the Orthodox church. This continued until the Religious Freedom Act in 1910 or so, when some Lutherans formed “free churches”, some of which survive to this day. We are very fresh on the scene.
To this day, the two main churches and the state are legally bound in a rather strange way: E.g. the churches have a right to tax their members piggybacking State taxation processes, and receive some additional money from the State to maintain public graveyards. Also, the church law and the church order must always be ratified by the house of representatives. Interesting bedfellows, I’d say.
“Hatespeech” laws are fortunately not coming in the near future, thanks to a resurgence of nationalist populism in the political field. Many people are sick and tired of the leftist propaganda about cultures being all the same and equal. Unfortunately, this populism is sometimes connected to outright racism. It’s a “fire – frying pan” type of situation.
Peace to you.
Pingback: Women embrace higher values, destroying their families - Fabius Maximus website