My friend Dina is extremely wise, about men, women and relationships. She gave me a definition of masculinity a while back that stuck with me. She says that masculinity is when a man refuses to compromise his moral values and duties in order to get favor from a woman. Knowing her background, she’s probably seen a lot of men make fools of themselves for young and pretty women. She hates it.

So, with that in mind, take a look at this news story. I’ll only quote a little because I have a lot to say about it below.

This is from the far-left ABC News:

Samuel Forrest says his life turned upside down last year after he was faced with the devastating choice of giving up his wife or his newborn son with Down syndrome.

[…]Forrest, 37, told ABC News last February that the day Leo was born in Yerevan, Armenia, on Jan. 21, 2015, he was told, unexpectedly, that Leo had Down syndrome.

After the news sank in, Forrest held Leo for the very first time: “They took me in to see him and I looked at this guy and I said, ‘He’s beautiful — he’s perfect and I’m absolutely keeping him,’” he said last year.

Forrest was living in his Armenian wife’s home country where she presented him with an ultimatum: Put the child in an orphanage, or she would leave.

He chose Leo and decided he would return to his native New Zealand, where he said they’d receive support from loved ones. Ruzan Forrest filed for divorce.

So, that’s the story. Armenia has an epidemic of abortion. And that attitude has spilled over into a general disrespect for children’s rights. Armenia has a huge problem with sex-selection abortions. Many men cannot find women to marry. And if they are killing their unborn girls, what chance does a Down syndrome child have?

So in this story, the man is resilient to the woman’s youth, beauty, and offer of sex. Nothing that she can do sways him away from his moral obligation to protect the weak little one from her superior strength. This is the essence of masculinity. It takes a strong man to stand up to a panicking woman and tell her that her happiness is less important than doing the right thing for the children. The children are weaker. They did not ask to be made. It is up to the adults to give up their selfishness, and give the children what they need.

The challenge to atheist concepts of morality

Anyway, I had another point to make about this. And that point is – how do atheists handle this? According to atheism, moral behaviors are just the common behaviors of a species that allow it to survive. But the first rule of survival is for the strong to live, and the weak to die. That’s why Richard Dawkins is so in favor of aborting unborn children with special needs. They are unfit. They have to die. It would be terrible for the grown-ups to be burdened by them. So, on the Darwinian view of morals, what this man did was wrong.

Another view of morality on atheism is utilitarianism. This is the view that what is right for an individual is what makes the majority of the people in his society happier. Well, in Armenia, the majority of the people want this child dead. If not dead, then throw the baby into an orphanage and give him no contact with his mother. The majority decides what’s right. So, on the utilitarian view of morals, what this man did was wrong.

Another view of morality on atheism is moral relativism. This is the view that what is moral is what the majority of the people in a society says is moral, is moral in that society. So, widow-burning was moral in India when the majority of the people there believed in it. And in Armenia, aborting this unwanted child, or throwing him into an orphanage, is moral. A majority of people believe that there. So, on the relativistic view of morality, what this man did was wrong.

Another view of morality is that objective moral values do exist on atheism. But this is not possible, since if there were an objective design for how humans should act, that applies in all times and places, then there would have to be a moral lawgiver with the authority to say what his creatures ought to do. That’s the only way to say that anything is really right or wrong, but it’s off limits to atheists. Atheists claiming objective morality are really trying to steal something from theism. But there is no rational grounding for morality in an atheist worldview.

Does anyone really think that what this man did is wrong though, other than atheists? His action is a disproof of their systems of morality.

Restoring masculinity

It seems to me that we’re living in a time where male leadership has been so attacked that it has eroded into nothing. It’s been attacked from the feminist left, and from the traditional conservative right. The good men need to refuse to let women break their integrity. Even if it means that women will continue to pass over the good men for bad boys who let them do what they want. Obligations to God and little children and animals are more important than sex. Tell them no, and maintain integrity.

A young lady friend has gotten to know me very well in the past months. She wondered why I never married. The more she’s gotten to know me, the more suitable she thinks I’d be for marriage. So, here a shortened version of the post I wrote from 2011 about my problems finding a suitable Christian wife. It was 3800 words, but I deleted some of it so that this post is only 2400 words.

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I have noticed some very alarming things about single Christian women lately, and I want to write about some of them.

I think that the main thrust of courting from the man’s perspective is that you want to 1) communicate your plan to make the marriage and the children have a positive impact for Christ and his kingdom, 2) you want to demonstrate that you understand the needs of women and that you are capable of meeting those needs, especially the needs for love and companionship, 3) that you understand the roles of a man and you have made preparations and decisions to be ready to fulfill those roles, and 4) you want to ask the kinds of questions that will allow you to ensure that the woman you are courting is ready to fulfill her roles – because she has also made preparations and good decisions.

Well, the problem I wanted to talk about has to do with objective 1). I have communicated my plan to many women and I find that there are particular parts where they resist. The main thing I would like to do is to have four children who all go into different interesting fields and make an impact for Christ.

The goal here is that the children will be able to pursue their field of study without being persecuted by secular leftists, and be able to earn a living, and be able to make a contribution in an area that matters.

So what I normally do is lay out this plan to the woman and then see if she is supportive and helpful and starts to take action to help with that. But I have had some alarming reactions and I want to talk about some of those below.

1) Several women have told me that children can have as much impact for Christ as a ballet dancer or poet as they could as a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court or as a President.

For me, the whole point of getting married is to serve the Lord – and if my plans to serve are threatened by marriage, then I will not do it. I would rather use the fortune I have to make donations to individual events than to be married and have those resources wasted on ballet dancers and poets. Further on this point about education and careers, I feel that one of the things that a man struggles with is the fear that his children will not be able to grow up and be prosperous and independent in the world. I especially worry that they will feel pressure to compromise their faith because of financial concerns.

Many people think that there is this Santa Claus in the sky who will magically provide money no matter how reckless they are – but I don’t think God is like that. I think he values stewardship, wisdom and prudence – and that’s what I intend to teach my children. I want my children to have enough money so that they can be independent of the state, and resilient against peer pressure. I see many many people who get degrees in fields where they fall under pressure to adopt viewpoints that are non-Christian simply because of financial concerns. Money matters a lot to keeping your convictions, especially when you get married and have children – it’s something that needs to be planned for.

There is a reason why people know who William Lane Craig and Michele Bachmann are – they have the skills. But what I am seeing from Christian women is that Christianity can be reduced to just reading the Bible, singing in church and praying to hear the voice of their emotions. (Which they call the voice of God) There is no thought being put into how to make children achieve at a high level by setting goals and funneling them into areas that matter. It’s like Christian women think that the children’s happiness is more authoritative in the family than my knowledge and experience about how to build up children who will retain their faith, maintain their financial independence and have an influence in the world.

Often, the women who tell me that the choice of career doesn’t matter are themselves riddled with credit card debt. And the ones who tell me that science apologetics doesn’t matter are the ones whose parents and siblings are becoming apostates after reading Richard Dawkins books. If I am the one who is earning the money and providing the savings up front, then I am the one who should be leading on things like education, careers, jobs and so forth. If I was smart enough to study the right things, to work and to save before I got married, then I shouldn’t be overloaded after the marriage by someone else’s feelings, emotions and desire to be her children’s “friend”.

2) Another concern I have is about how these Christian women are moved by liberal sob stories so that they vote against a strong foreign policy, self-defense, deterrence, capital punishment, and men using force to punish evildoers in general. On the foreign policy front, one woman complained to me that American helicopter gunships had used excessive force by attacking Islamic terrorist infantry with the gunship’s machine gun.

I took a look at the full guncam footage she linked me and read the AARs and noticed that there was a convoy of Humvees coming into range of the [insurgent] infantry, and that the infantry was armed with RPGs. I asked her to tell me what she thought an RPG could do to a Humvee. She had no idea what an RPG was or what it could do to a Humvee. I explained that RPGs are ROCKETS that explode and it would kill all the occupants of Humvees.

It seemed to me that her only reason for complaining about it was that her friends had sent it to her, and she felt pressured to agree with them. She had no understanding of the capabilities of the arms and vehicles at all, yet she felt qualified to make judgments about unnecessary violence. In fact, it became clear that she was taking this position because she thought that it made her look morally superior. She felt “compassion” for the poor Islamic terrorists. It’s so easy to second guess American military forces when you know nothing at all about war in general, or Islamic extremism in the Middle East in particular.

I do not want to be overruled by someone who makes decisions based on ignorance, emotions, intuitions and peer pressure. This person went on to assure me that shooting terrorists was the same as blowing up busloads of children, and that killing convicted serial killers was the same as killing unborn babies. Because killing is killing, right? It’s hard to consider someone for marriage who can’t see the difference between good and evil or guilt and innocence, but instead tries to lift up evil and bash down good. (Not only was she anti-capital punishment but also anti-self-defense – all without having done a moment’s worth of research on the peer-reviewed studies showing how capital punishment deters crime, and how concealed-carry laws reduce rates of violent crime).

Should I marry someone who is uncomfortable with the male role of making moral judgments and exercising force against evil? Someone who takes positions without knowing anything about the details of what she is talking about? Of course not. No one can be happy married to someone who takes positions on moral issues based on ignorance, emotions, vanity and peer pressure. And some Christian women are unwilling to learn anything about war, or even to come to the firing range to fire a handgun. They have opinions, they make pronouncements about how they will overrule you if you get married to them, they vote to undermine national security and world peace by emboldening aggressors and then they refuse to learn anything about the issues. All they need to know are their feelings. And they vote based on those feelings, not based on studies or history or anything factual.

3) A final example has to do with Christian women embracing socialism because it is “compassionate”. Believe it or not, some women do not really understand the effect of having the government spend more and more money equalizing life outcomes.

One Christian pro-life activist wrote to me that she was “great with kids” and was going to have one out of wedlock and raise it with money from the government. This woman never finished college and had not held any sort of serious job. She complained that no men were marrying her (note: this woman was completely irresponsible and penniless and unsuitable for marriage) and blamed the men. I told her that the reason why men were not marrying her was because they were paying a third of their income in taxes and looking at the 1.65 trillion deficits and 14.5 trillion national debt. She said that men didn’t really care about money and numbers and that if they loved her, they would marry her anyway, but they were just selfish lazy cowards. She was willing to inflict fatherlessness and day care on a child, but she was “great with kids”.

Another Christian woman told me that the government should provide free meals to children so that they were all equal regardless of whether their mothers had married or not. I explained that every time that government takes a responsibility away from men, that our household income would go down because of higher taxes, and my job would be put in jeopardy because of government debt. I also explained that the more government does, the less control there is inside the family – like when Christians have to pay for public schools so that all the children will be equal. Equally illiterate and innumerate. Instead of proposing free market solutions to poverty that retain family integrity – like school voucher programs – they always seem to leap to the big government solutions first.

But you can see how this idea of economic equality captures the emotions of some Christian women and they don’t even realize how they are undermining men’s desire and ability to achieve their goals for the marriage. Christian marriage plans cost money. Men need money in order to put their own children through college. Men need money for homeschooling, stay-at-home moms and private schools. And men need money for apologetics books and to take children to apologetics conferences. It’s amazing because this woman expected me to keep her at home as a stay-at-home mom, but she wanted my salary to go to subsidize the single mothers by choice.

For example, take health care. I know another Christian woman who complained to me about some poor child of a single mother who could not get treatment for some condition or other. Notice how there was no emphasis on what this single mother chose to study, whether she chose to work, whether she chose to save, or whether she married a good provider. No. The problem is taken as is – as a case of spilled milk and all questions of responsibility and accountability are dismissed. I was asked how capitalism can solve the problem.

Well the first thing to point out is that her solution is to defund the family, grow government, reward irresponsibility, [and diminish] the earnings [that husbands] save that fund [their] plan. These are the people who claim to be opposed to abortion and then vote for single-payer health care which provides… taxpayer-funded abortion. If her solution to poverty is the secular government taxing your family and your employer, and reducing the family’s earnings and destabilizing the family’s revenue stream, then she does not have a Christian view of family, government and charity. She will undermine your role as provider because she values socialism MORE than she values marriage and family.

Secondly, there are solutions to poverty that are compatible with the Bible and capitalism that she ought to know about. The first thing that should have come into her mind is private charity. If the government has any role at all, it should be to provide tax credits for private charity. It is important for government not to crowd out the virtuous character of the people by taking over the job of helping neighbors. Our job as Christians is not primarily to make people have equal net worths regardless of their personal decisions. Our job is to make them know about God’s existence and character, and we can do that better with private charity – certainly better than any secular government can. Your money is your voice. Don’t give it to a SECULAR government that will turn around and enact taxpayer-funded abortion, taxpayer-funded IVF, taxpayer-funded day care, taxpayer-funded fatherlessness welfare, and so on.

I’m going to end by explaining what the underlying problem is.

Conclusion

Basically the underlying problem is this: when some Christian women say they want marriage, they actually don’t want marriage at all – not a marriage to a man who is going to take on the traditional male roles anyway. The reason why men work is so that they are the sole or primary breadwinners – so that they have the authority to make decisions and lead in the home. Men want to have children who are self-sufficient and morally upright, and who can have an influence for Christ and his Kingdom. And they know that although the compassion of their wives is useful in the early years of a child’s development, that moral responsibility and accountability are needed later on to change children into adults.

Some Christian women [just] want the money to be brought into the home and the wedding to be photographed and the babies to play with, but they don’t want the men to act in the traditional male role of protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader. It is very important for men to get this out there and in the clear during the courting process. And I also really recommend that men avoid sex before marriage, because sex makes you stop caring about male roles and serving God.

The thing about Christian women that you need to fear most is this emotional happy-clappy intuition they have that the world is a happy, safe place and that people can do whatever they want and that God’s job, (and later government, as they drift into atheism), is to make everyone happy and prosperous. That is completely incompatible with a marriage designed to serve God.