Last Sunday, Rose and I released the first episode of our new podcast. Since then, we managed to get onto Apple Podcasts (iTunes), Google Podcasts, and Spotify. We got tweeted by J. Warner Wallace and Brett Kunkle, and Dr. Jonathan Sarfati. As of Thursday night we have 435 downloads, and 79 views on Youtube. Episode #2 drops early Sunday, so you can listen to it on the way to church.

Until then, here is a review that a Christian woman who works in information technology sent to me. I found it fascinating.

She writes:

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I came to this podcast after finding the blog of Wintery Knight, which I found after asking myself the question, “If Christianity is true, why doesn’t everyone believe?” I knew there is quite a bit of evidence in the physical universe but I’m no scholar and I wanted to at least be able to defend my faith on a minimal level.

I thought there were more “holes” in the evidence than there actually are, by which I mean things that could be shooed away with a shake of the all-knowing hand and a “pfft.” Rose talks about one of these dismissal techniques in the podcast, the hallucination theory, which seems to be how atheists used to disregard the resurrection – all those people who thought they saw Jesus were just hallucinating. Hallucinating en masse, in different places, at different times. Now, apparently, that no longer flies because it doesn’t make sense. Rose did a good job of explaining this.

But my initial question remains stubbornly unanswered – if atheist scholars have now exhausted their naturalistic attempts to explain the resurrection and are sailing under some general “something happened but we don’t know what” flag, isn’t that a bit like taking the ball and going home? At what point does someone cry uncle? I still don’t understand why everyone who sees the evidence doesn’t believe in Christ. The minimal facts argument and all that is compelling. In the beginning of the podcast, they talk about the importance of coming to agreement about the existence of God in the first place, and I guess that’s the point. Without a belief in God, I suppose you can’t believe in miracles, and even in the face of trustworthy evidence, you always seek a different answer because you simply can’t believe otherwise.

Churches should teach more apologetics, whether people really want it or not. My church talks about the resurrection as though we all believe it, not as though we might need to defend it. Having the knowledge that non-Christian scholars like Ludemann believe in the appearances of Jesus after he was resurrected is like WOW. I did not know that. Why was I never told that? I thought atheist scholars thought it was all bollocks. But as it turns out the Bible as a book of history seems to be well-respected by those who make a living of testing the accuracy of historical stories. So that’s a nice boost of confidence. I hear that many kids walk away from church after they leave their family of origin and I can’t help but wonder if that’s partially because they are under the impression that Christianity is embarrassingly false, nothing more than ancient judgmental mythology. We might not lose so many if we gave them some facts during years of kids church.

To the podcast itself. It is really refreshing to hear a woman do most of the teaching. Wintery Knight obviously knows apologetics, but he took more of a skeptic role and Desert Rose made most of the points. This seems rare. It seems to be mostly a male space and kind of a nerdy one. I am probably an unusual bird here because I am a female, and I don’t know a whole lot of females who are really into apologetics. But I wonder if that’s strictly because the female mind is not as analytical as the male mind, or if it’s somewhat also because apologetics is seen as a guy sport. That’s sad if that’s the case. I work in software development and surely there are plenty of girl engineers I know who might be interested in apologetics if it had a bit more balance. I could say the same thing on the other side about most of the books and studies aimed at Christian women – they feel overly touchy feely, to the point that a woman like me often finds them unappealing because of the lack of balance. At any rate it was nice to see this dynamic of balance between the sexes in an area that’s more geared to thinking rather than feeling. Both hosts were easy to listen to, seemed very knowledgeable, and had good rapport with each other.

Maybe one criticism. I would have liked to have seen the excerpts from the debates that were read. I found myself going back 30 seconds in the podcast to listen to them again, and then later going back again and trying to find them and not being exactly sure where they were in the podcast. It would have been nice to have those included in the show notes so I could read them, but I understand this would have added a considerable amount of effort for the hosts. An alternative would be to timestamp the major parts of the show so it’s easier to find one segment. Maybe that’s there somewhere and I just didn’t find it.

One other comment, it was fast-paced and packed with info. It was more of a “treadmill” podcast than a “grocery shopping” podcast. In other words, if I had to listen to it while simultaneously doing something else that required thought, I would have missed all the good stuff. Even during a treadmill listen, I missed a lot. No problem really, I just listened again. The key to most learning is listening/reading more than once, and I found I picked up so much more the second time around.

Great podcast. 5 stars.

Orual’s Babble

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That’s the review. I asked her if I could publish it. She agreed, and chose “Orual’s Babble” as an alias. I really liked what she said about her experiences in church, and her comments about Rose, women, and apologetics.

I updated the show notes to include the missing text that she was looking for.

Young, unmarried women vote overwhelmingly for Democrat party policies: abortion, same-sex marriage, daycare, public schools, no-fault divorce, etc. Cultural dominance of radical feminism has led to surging unhappiness, singleness, infertility and mental illness for these women. Nevertheless, young, unmarried women refuse to abandon radical feminism. They are doubling down.

First, lets review this article by Amanda Prestigiacomo from Daily Wire, that talks about a recent study on women’s declining happiness.

According to a recent study from Yale University researchers, liberated, college educated women are freezing their eggs because they can’t find a man to marry and have children with before their natural childbearing years expire. In the U.K., for instance, one in five women is childless when their natural reproductive years expires, as opposed to one in ten women a mere generation prior.

So what’s to blame for this onslaught of college-educated yet terribly empty women?

The short answer is feminism.

Feminism teaches women to delay marriage for college. College is worth it if you study nursing, computer science, etc. But it’s not worth it to get a worthless non-STEM degree in grievance studies. Especially if the degree comes with secular left indoctrination, promiscuity, misandry, contempt for male leadership, and student loan debt. None of these things are attractive to men who are considering marriage.

And guess what? The marriage rate is plummeting:

So, how are women reacting to the failure of feminism to deliver the things that make women really happy and fulfilled, i.e. – traditional marriage, and stay at home motherhood, a big family, successful moral children? Are young, unmarried women pulling back on their support for feminism? Are they looking for marriage-ready men to lead them? Are they returning to Christianity? Are they becoming more pro-life, and more opposed to sexual anarchy? Are they voting for school choice? Are they voting for smaller government and lower taxes, so that men can afford marriage and children?

Consider this article from The Federalist, my favorite news source, written by Joy Pullmann, my favorite Federalist writer.

She writes:

NBC News recently compared several polls to find huge shifts from Democrats to Republicans in 2022 midterm voter preferences. The big exception to these shifts across many demographics was college-educated women, who in NBC’s aggregation showed even stronger support for Democrats now than ahead of the last midterm election.

“[T]he gender gap between Democrats and Republicans is actually a marriage gap,” noted columnist Mona Charen in 2014, another midterm year. “Single women vote disproportionately for Democrats and married women vote by a comfortable margin for Republicans. The decline of marriage inclines more women to vote Democrat.”

When women undertake a life plan that delays marriage, they are less attractive to marriage-minded men. Marriage-minded men want to marry early, so they have help during their struggles in school and work. They want lots of well-behaved, successful children. They want to have a legacy, especially Christian men.

When young, unmarried women vote for Democrat policies, men are faced with higher taxes, more regulation, more pressure from cancel culture, more invasion of the home by secular leftists. Men don’t get married in order to have their kids stuck into daycare and public schools. Men don’t get married to have their kids transed by anti-male teachers, doctors, lawyers and judges. Men get married to lead a home. They don’t marry women who have been indoctrinated against male leadership in the home.

Women who make themselves unattractive to marriage-minded men tend to vote for bigger government. They want to be reckless and irresponsible in their young years, then have a safety net later that makes finding a husband “optional”. Remember Barack Obama’s “Life of Julia” plan for women?

The Federalist article continues:

Beyond the obvious fact that big government functions for some single women as a husband substitute, at least financially, it’s also true that women respond more strongly than men to emotional arguments of harm and victimhood of the kind that the Democrat Party of today specializes in. Women are also on the forefront of making the leftist kind of emotional “grievance politics” arguments in both academia and the public square, as Richard Hanania and others have noted.

Men don’t marry women who decide what to believe based on feelings and peer-approval. But that’s the kind of women that society has been making in recent years. Men don’t want that. Men marry women who have solid worldviews that provide a rational grounding for moral values and moral duties.

She also notes the study I blogged about before, about high rates of mental illness among progressive white women:

Pew found in 2020 that more than half of white women who identified as political liberals had been diagnosed by a professional with a mental disorder, such as depression or anxiety.

Men don’t marry women with mental illnesses, either.

Normally, I would write a conclusion here. But her conclusion was too excellent to skip:

Women have been earning more bachelor’s degrees than men have since 1982. From 1982 to 2013, women earned 10 million more degrees than men did. Not surprisingly, women dominate even more the social science fields that incubate leftist political extremism.

It’s well-documented that most colleges now function more as political grooming and social signaling centers than centers of learning. College graduates have for some time demonstrated, on average, no intellectual development from attending college, while college attendance now does correlate with a massive increase in affiliation with the Democrat Party.

At the same time colleges have become essentially academically worthless, if not toxic, they have become saturated with women, and have increasingly marketed and reorganized themselves in feminine terms. The feminization of our culture led by this academic dominance has fueled popular and pervasive messages of cruel and unrestrained female domination of men, rather than the loving cooperation with men that marriage and family encourage.

I love when older, wiser women hold young, unmarried women accountable for their reckless, irresponsible choices. Women today have a visceral hatred for being evaluated for marriage or mentored by men. They don’t think that men with achievements have any ability to lead them. That’s why it’s wonderful when older, wise women step up and teach young, unmarried women that they are their own worst enemies. That’s what Titus 2:3-5 says, isn’t it?

Men aren’t going to solve the problem of young women’s skyrocketing unhappiness. It’s not our responsibility to save women from their own embrace of self-destructive ideologies. Young women don’t listen to men with moral convictions and solid theology. The problem will only be solved when young women choose to make better decisions.