Gimme a Second!

This is a filler post to let y’all know I haven’t gone away or lost the thread. I’ll write DoW III this weekend or early next week. Right now I’m hunting for a new job and also working on my beloved Excursion; which nears a score of years in age and needs some lovin’.

DoW II: Diversity Plus Proximity Equals Whore

Carrying on from the previous post in the series, we’ll look GW’s second objection from his comment at Dalrock’s:

Certainly not all young females who delay marriage do so because they want to fornicate with multiple men, and in the church this demographic is rarer. Normal women tend to want to get married. The number of loving Christian fathers who are okay with their daughters whoring around is zero. Let’s put aside foolish and worldly talk.

Just as with the first sentence (you can read about it by following the first link in this post), the second is, again, factually true, yet still misleading; just as anti-missile flares distract because factually they are hot.

Normal women want to get married, but normal women don’t necessarily get normal  instruction and discipline (by historical standards) to be good wives. It is also quite normal for normal women to want to end their marriages. This is because of sin nature; both what women suffer directly and also what they have to suffer by proximity to their husbands’ sinful natures.

Nature teaches us that women should be submissive to men, and that women are most beautiful when covered. Men grow in stature and their heads are uncovered when at their most manful. This is not true of women, who are covered even at their most feminine; yet they want that kind of manly glory even though it is harmful to them.

Today weddings are practiced in such a way that they begin with a man’s submission to a woman when he bribes her to marry him with expensive jewelry (preferably while kneeling). The wedding proceed as a celebration of her in as full feminine regalia as can be purchased; usually beyond affording. It ends without her declaration to obey him. All of which is to say that a modern wedding conveys no symbolism about the thing it mocks. I mean it has nothing to say about Christian marriage. So why do normal women want to get “married” if they are in rebellion against, or in ignorance of, Christian marriage? Two reasons: They want to be celebrated, and because if she doesn’t get a husband she can’t pursue her sinful desire to rule him. When that doesn’t work out to her satisfaction (It never will; that’s some of the trouble with sin.) she starts thinking that she must have been fooled into marrying the wrong man. She begins to think she needs someone stronger, gentler, kinder, tougher…better. Thus normal women are strongly tempted to entertain the idea that what they need is a new marriage to a new man.

This brings us back to the motivation behind GW’s objection that, “Normal women tend to want to get married.” The unavoidable implication is that generally what normal women need are superior men than what God has provided them from which to choose. It is a statement of encouragement to a woman that they deserve a better man; that in a just world they’d get a man who understands her needs. He is saying women should get a man like him.

Another Feminist Club Opens Up

Over the weekend Dalrock sent me a link posted to his comments by seventiesjason about about yet one more program to train Christian men to be Christian men:

Theology Professor Launches ‘Christian Man Academy’ to Combat Destruction of Biblical Masculinity

You can read it if you like. The short version is it’s another self-improvement scam perpetrated by the would-be teachers not only upon other men, but upon themselves. From the Christian Man Academy’s Welcome page:

Which brings me to the question: “Why should you listen to me? What are my qualifications for teaching on this subject?” First, I’m a man, have been for 52 years. Second, I’m a Christian man. I’ve been a Christian for thirty years. I’ve been a husband for 28 years, I’ve been a father for 22 years with five kids ranging from 22 to five years old (including three sons aged 22, 21, and 5). I’ve been a pastor for 23 years. I’ve been involved in training young men for the ministry for 16 years. I’ve taught leadership courses for 11 years. I’ve counseled hundreds of young men and I teach a Sunday School class made up of junior and senior High School kids.

Look: If you’re a Christian man then you’re a Christian man. Army Basic Training produces soldiers and baseball camp produces baseball players. You don’t need specialized training in how to be a man because you already are. Congratulations, you’ve arrived. You can skip the man camps and academies. In fact you should. Application of reason (you’re already a Christian man) and Dalrock’s Law of Feminism: (Feminism is the assertion that men are evil and naturally want to harm women, followed by pleas to men to solve all of women’s problems.) reveals these training courses will only form more useful idiots for the Feminists. And you would also enable the false projections of these men, and they have enough problems without our encouragement.

DoW I: Celebrating Hay in a Needle Stack

This essay (or, rather, one like it) was supposed to be posted last week, but I must admit that I lost the specific line of thought I wanted to attack. Then I read this comment at Dalrock’s by GW:

Certainly not all young females who delay marriage do so because they want to fornicate with multiple men, and in the church this demographic is rarer. Normal women tend to want to get married. The number of loving Christian fathers who are okay with their daughters whoring around is zero. Let’s put aside foolish and worldly talk.

I don’t know whether he means to be disingenuous or if he is just remarkably unobservant, but what he wrote is exactly the sort of thing Christians say to themselves and one another to excuse whores from being described as whores. It was these statements I had in mind when I decided to write discussion posts on four generations of whores.

The paragraph itself is a give-away of it’s intent to pretend the real world isn’t really here; as it’s actually a list of well-practiced objections rather than a cohesive statement. That’s fair enough play in the truncated world of blogs and comments, but their combined purpose is to disorient and so I hate them and will smite them individually as I go forward.; with–I should add–no ridicule meant towards GW himself. Everyone here came from there.

• Certainly not all young females who delay marriage do so because they want to fornicate with multiple men, and in the church this demographic is rarer.

This statement must be factually true, (I doubt all women do anything for exactly the same reasons every time), but it is functionally a useless statement meant to lull cracking eyes back to sleep. A lot of women are tempted to fornicate with multiple men. My observation is that most woman, like most men, are fully capable of desiring the affections of more than one man. They are just less likely to admit it if they think such insight might harm them.

Notice also the descriptor rarer. Rarer than what? The implication is that women’s desire to fornicate is rare among non-church females. Just like the “all” statement this is meant to distract us from the facts found in the study Relationships in America:

Figure 12.1Premarital sex, by age group

In what might appear at first glance as ironic, older married respondents tend to report higher levels of premarital sex. The percentage of each age group reporting premarital sex increases as the age of the respondent increases through the age group 35-44, where the percentage of each group reporting premarital sex levels off. But before you conclude too much about this, remember that younger married respondents likely exhibit lower frequencies of premarital sex because more religious young adults are more apt to marry prior to age 25, or shortly thereafter. Which brings us to the key question we hear about premarital sex: does religion matter?

In short, yes. Increased religious service attendance is negatively associated with reports of premarital sex. Among married weekly religious service attenders, 65 percent reported first sex prior to getting married, compared to 88 percent who report occasional attendance and a full 96 percent of those who never attend religious services. But perhaps those who attend regularly are more prone to social desirability bias and less likely to give a straight answer to the question.

Just before the graph the authors of the Relationships in America study include a caveat about these numbers:

In these analyses, then, we are talking about premarital sex in the technical use of the term—sexual experience with a spouse prior to getting married (among currently-married persons). Because we define premarital sex in this way, we focus our attention on married respondents and tally those who report having sex with their current spouse before they married as those indicating premarital sex.

If you were cheering about that lower 65% number among 18-24s, I must interrupt your party to let you know that these numbers only account for people who actually married, and only counts the pre-marital partner. They did not count the sexual partners before the sexual partner who was eventually joined in marriage. So if Tammy slept with Brad only to get dumped, and then she decided no more sleeping around before she eventually married Bobby (who she made wait), Tammy and Bobby are not included in the percentage of pre-marital sex because the bridal bit with Brad never occurred.

How many people do you know unmarried by 24? How many people do you know who didn’t marry their first sexual partner?

So how much “rarer” did churched people practice premarital sex with their eventual spouse, but not counting the ones they didn’t marry, or those of the same age who haven’t married yet?

Figure 12.2Premarital sex, by religious service attendance

If you read those numbers and think, “See? That’s much rarer.”, then… I can’t even.

A Preface to the Discussion on Whores

The Bible tells us that our conduct will speak for us and for Christ as we make our way through this time of exile in the world before our Lord returns. We can either honor Christ and ourselves with our conduct, or bring both into disrepute.

Last week I saw a retweet from someone in California of a guy who looked like someone from around where I live. So I followed the original tweet to its owner to see if in fact he did live in Texas. I didn’t find out, but I did see his tweet was also retweeted by some young woman not only in Texas, but in the town where I live. Small world and so forth. That young woman had in her Twitter feed an exhortation to herself that Jesus was looking out for her. So far so good, you may think.

As you know, newest tweets are at the top and you have to scroll down to go back in time, as it were. Long story short, about four hours before she tweeted about Jesus, she had tweeted, “I miss being choked at night.” My hope is that there is no connection intended.

I can hear your wheels spin from here. “Oh, she’s not a real Christian.”, your mind ejects. Whew! That was a close one. Now you can go back to pretending girls like that don’t know really know Christ is the son of God, born of the virgin Mary, and was crucified for our sins and raised on the third day. Right? Therefore she’s not a girl from your church who went off to college to learn a career and “find herself”. Shhh… Be at ease, sleeper…

The next day I went into work and heard this conversation between three college-aged coworkers:

Senior Cody: …and just say to her, Look, you swiped right, I swiped right. We both know what this is about. Let’s get it on!

Underclassmen: Hahahaha! Right! Exactly! What else could she be thinking?

Cody: And, hey, listen…listen…if she’s got a Bible quote on her profile then definitely go for it because you know she’s a ho!

Maybe your daughter isn’t one of these two women. Maybe she’s just one of her hundreds of co-eds, roommates, coworkers, social media followers, church group buddies, and BFFs.

When All Else Fails Read the Instructions

Commenter 7817 at Dalrock’s (and sometimes here) brought to my attention a newsletter from (I believe) Bnonn and Michael Foster which argues the case that Christians are to order their homes in either recognition–or avoidance–of things like: “the locus of control”, “masculine hypoagency”, “toxic matriarchy”, “gyneolatry”, and several other strange terms which normal men should mock.

What all those words have in common is that they are set within a nearly 3,000 word screed which never actually quotes the Biblical instructions we Christians are given for the ordering of our households.  I will list below, again, the instructions with which God blessed us, through his apostles, in the order they appear in the Bible.

1 Corinthians 11:8-10

⁸ For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. ⁹ Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. ¹⁰ That is why a wife ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels.

1 Corinthians 14:33-35

³³ For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.

As in all the churches of the saints, ³⁴ the women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. ³⁵ If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.

Ephesians 5:22-24

²² Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. ²³ For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. ²⁴ Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

Colossians 3:18-19

¹⁸ Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.¹⁹ Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them.

1 Timothy 2:11-12

¹¹ Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness.¹² I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.

Titus 2:3-5

³ Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good,⁴ and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, ⁵ to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.

1 Peter 3:1-7

3 Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives,² when they see your respectful and pure conduct. ³ Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear— ⁴ but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious. ⁵ For this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves, by submitting to their own husbands, ⁶ as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord. And you are her children, if you do good and do not fear anything that is frightening.

What the Word of God  says–if we trouble to read it– is that men are the heads. There is a distinction. I wrote last year in Though the Best Retort is to Live It:

“Husbands are not called to ALWAYS lead, but wives are called to ALWAYS obey. Sometimes the head may give a subordinate the lead because that is the prudent thing to do. He does not give up the rule. He may take back the lead at his pleasure, and the subordinate is only right if she gives it up in submission. A wife is to submit and obey her husband.”

 Men are to love, care for, instruct, provision, and protect our wives and children. You will not find one single verse which explicitly says that a wife’s or child’s obedience is dependent on the goodness of the husband’s or father’s leadership. 1 Peter 3 says the opposite is possible, in fact.

There is in the Scriptures the strong implication of the goodness of leadership skills for husbands and fathers; certainly for the selection of elders and deacons from among the men of the church in 1 Timothy 3. We should consider it soberly, and that means we consider that good leadership or good submission may win over apathetic husbands or rebellious wives. Sober consideration also shows that the great emphasis of ordering Christian households is for husbands is to love their wives, and for wives to obey their husbands. We are both to follow Christ: Men are to love women while they follow, and women obey men while they follow. I encourage the writers of the newsletter and everyone else to go dig into the surrounding passages of the verses I quoted above; verses which the authors of the newsletter eschewed in favor of long-winded theories of “gyneolatry” and “masculine hypoagency” that interest no normal man, and which–if they did interest him–would not do him good.

One more thing: The newsletter never mentions headcovers except in a quote of my words and they never address that point. It was utterly disregarded.