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How to be an alpha male and signal manliness without being a promiscuous predator

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Telling a woman how to make wise decisions protects her
Telling a woman how to make wise decisions protects her

These days, there seems to be a perception that in order to be an alpha male, you have to become a pick-up artist and sleep with a whole bunch of fatherless women, then ghost them (don’t talk to them any more). But as a Christian man, that’s all off-limits to me. Still, my best friend Dina tells me that I am an alpha male, despite being a virgin. How can that be?

In this post, I’m going to lay out three ways for a Christian man to be an alpha male without being a promiscuous predator who preys on vulnerable fatherless girls.

1. Never let a woman override your vision to serve Christ

It can be challenging to project the attitude of aloofness that women associate with strength while still being a good, moral man. One way to do that is to self-sacrificially invest your time, money and effort into some enterprise that benefits Christ. For example, in my case, I’ve invested time in learning apologetics, having a blog as a platform, and giving charity to invest in organizations to do apologetics events. I was pressured from Christian women to “tone it down” for their friends and family. I was also pressured to redirect my attention from apologetics to their need to have a good time (travel, zip-lining, skydiving, surfing were mentioned as good ways to spend my money on them). Alpha males don’t give up their mission in order to get the girl.

It is tempting for a man to let a woman re-focus his time, money and effort on giving her what she wants. If she is his wife, then some of that will be legitimate, just as some government spending is legitimate because it is Constitutional. A man should love his wife, protect her and provide for her. But he should not be distracted for other frivolous priorities that have nothing to do with a Christian marriage plan. Christian women often absorb secular left priorities from the culture, and they expect Christian men to give them what the culture says they ought to want or need, e.g. – putting the kids in daycare and public schools so she can have a career like her non-Christian friends. Alpha males put their own vision above what the secular left culture says they should be doing.

2. Never let a woman disrespect your leadership / mentoring role

It’s important for you to have areas of your life where you actually know what you are talking about, and have demonstrated success at mentoring others. In my case, those areas are education, career and finances. I have invested time in learning what to study. And I achieved a BS and MS in computer science. I have invested time in learning how to interview, what skills to train, and what jobs to take, and how to keep a job. And I achieved a 20-year+ gap-less resume with good companies, using good skills. I have chosen not to borrow money at interest (ever), not to spend money on travel / fun / thrills, and to invest early and often. And I have achieved a six-figure income and will have a 7-figure net worth by my mid-forties. A man needs to have areas like that where he studies and achieves, so that he knows how to advise others, and has a record of successful mentoring.

I sometimes mentor women. Some of them listen to me and some do not. I’ve gotten women to drop their non-STEM majors to study engineering or computer science. I’ve gotten women to stop wasting money on fun and thrills, in order to pay off their debts and start investing and giving to charity. I’ve gotten women to dump hot bad boys who would not commit, and choose commitment-minded men. I’ve gotten women to quit bad jobs in order to take better jobs. In the areas where I have demonstrated competence, I expect women to respect my leadership, even if it makes them feel bad in the short term. Men signal alpha male status when they obtain good results in their mentoring activities.

Also, I’m just going to throw this out there: “spiritual leadership” does not mean telling a woman that God really is speaking to her through her feelings, when she wants to make impulsive, impractical decisions that are likely to result in failure.

3. Never let a woman stop you from expressing your moral convictions

In the 2012 election, most single / unmarried  / divorced women voted pro-abortion and pro-gay-marriage.

Excerpt:

NBC News national exit polling shows that 67 percent of unmarried women said they voted for Obama. That’s in line with the 2008 election, when 70 percent of single women helped usher the president into office. This proves it wasn’t a single-election phenomenon: unmarried women have solidified into a powerful voting force, experts say.

[…]By the way — this isn’t just young women, Maatz pointed out. Many of the single women voters were over 50 — divorced, widowed or never married.

These women voted for a candidate who voted multiple times for infanticide as a state senator in Illinois. Why is this? Well, young unmarried women are more influenced by feelings like compassion. They tend to see themselves as “exempt” from moral standards, because they are constantly told that they are “special”. They tend to see the predictable consequences of poor choices as “unexpected”, causing them to think that people aren’t responsible for their own poor choices. As a result, they tend to be more progressive in their voting, and less Christian in their moral convictions.

A man can signal his alpha male status to women by being bold and persuasive on moral issues (and issues of policy that touch on moral issues). This may not work on all women, but it will work on the ones he should be interested in for wife and mother roles. Men should never just express their feelings about moral issues, or just tell about their experiences. Men ought to go further, and make logical arguments supported by scientific evidence. Instead of sharing “their opinion” (subjective), they ought to press those who disagree to change their minds. It is the studying of arguments and evidence that allows the Christian man to signal alpha male status when these moral issues are debated.

Conclusion

My friend Dina likes to say that the essence of manliness is when a man refuses to let a woman redirect him away from his vision and his moral convictions by using sex, sexual attraction, the promise of sex, or by withholding sex (from her husband). I think men can learn something from her definition. Women are useful as helpers, but we shouldn’t automatically assume that they are wise and virtuous, and give them the authority to rule over us in areas where we ought to lead. Dina also says never to trust women’s words, when deciding whether they will respect your leadership in your vision and moral convictions. Before you marry a woman, you must observe her taking the initiative to perform independent actions that help you with your vision – actions that go against her own feelings and desires. The most important part about being an alpha male is not losing your alpha male status by marrying someone who won’t respect it.

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U.S. birth rate hits record low, despite secular left’s obsession with “overpopulation”

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Total fertility rates have decreased globally by about half since 1960.
Total fertility rates have decreased globally by about half since 1960.

I had lunch with one of my co-workers on the secular left recently. I asked him what his biggest concern with the world. After telling me that he was a “libertarian”, he said that he was alarmed that people were having too many babies. I asked him what he wanted to do about it. He said keep abortion legal, and use the government to stop people from reproducing. Some libertarian!

Anyway, he was just factually wrong about the overpopulation, and I had to launch into a long, detailed explanation of replacement rates, birth rates across the world, and how the prosperity created by capitalism has caused birth rates to decline in even poorer countries. I also explained to him that once a country dips below the replacement fertility rate (2.1 births per woman), it never returns. I concluded my refutation of his assertion by stating that he should be more worried about underpopulation than overpopulation.

Anyway, I had to repeat the same explanation again with another secular leftist that same week. So when I saw this recent Daily Caller article about a new report from the US Centers for Disease Control, I figured I might as well equip you guys to respond to other people with the same wrong view.

It says:

The United States birth rate hit a record low in 2018 with numbers reflecting the lowest birthrates in the past 30 years, reports say.

A new report from the National Center for Health Statistics at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveals that almost every age group of women under 35 showed birth rate declines in 2018. The provisional number of births in the U.S. in 2018 was 3,788,235, down 2% since 2017. For every 1,000 women, the fertility rate declined 2% from 2017 to 1,728.0 births.

Birth rates had reached a record low in 2017 as well, marking a continuing trend of declining birth rates over the past four years, according to CNN.

[…]These 2018 birth rate numbers are below the necessary threshold needed for population replacement, which is 2,100 births per 1,000 women, CNN reports.

So we’re down to 1.73 births in the USA, which is below the 2.1 rate needed to maintain current population levels.

This new report isn’t an outlier. It confirms what we knew about from previous reports.

Here’s an earlier report from the far-left Pew Research Center, reported by the radically-leftist Slate, of all places.

Excerpt:

A report issued last month by the Pew Research Center found that immigrant births fell from 102 per 1,000 women in 2007 to 87.8 per 1,000 in 2012. That helped bring the overall U.S. birthrate to a mere 64 per 1,000 women—not enough to sustain our current population.

Moreover, the poor, highly fertile countries that once churned out immigrants by the boatload are now experiencing birthrate declines of their own. From 1960 to 2009, Mexico’s fertility rate tumbled from 7.3 live births per woman to 2.4, India’s dropped from six to 2.5, and Brazil’s fell from 6.15 to 1.9. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, where the average birthrate remains a relatively blistering 4.66, fertility is projected to fall below replacement level by the 2070s. This change in developing countries will affect not only the U.S. population, of course, but eventually the world’s.

Now I have a couple tools for you to share to those people who might have irrational views of this issue.

Useful videos

This video explains what’s wrong with overpopulation fears:

And this one explains what the replacement rate number is:

You can share those for people who don’t have time to read. It at least makes the point, even if it doesn’t link to a reputable report.

A useful podcast

This podcast featuring famous economist Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse will be useful for you to understand why the overpopulation myth is something you should be concerned about.

The MP3 file is here. (from 1/22/2010)

Topics:

  • how the transition from country to city discourages child-bearing
  • how religion impacts how many children parents have
  • what is the US birth rate, is it high enough?
  • can we just import immigrants to alleviate the low birth rate?
  • has increased prosperity encouraged people to have more children?
  • how has the purpose of sex changed after the sexual revolution?
  • how does the demographic crisis threaten entitlement programs?
  • what do we learn from the declining birth rate in Japan?
  • how does population growth impact stock market performance?

This podcast explains how some countries aren’t making enough young workers to pay for the social programs needed by a growing number of elderly people wanting to retire.

Please share the post if you found it useful.

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The true story of Thanksgiving: Squanto’s miraculous path to Plymouth

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"The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth" by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe (1914)
“The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth” by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe (1914)

God’s providence in action, as reported by Eric Metaxas in the Wall Street Journal.

Full text:

The story of how the Pilgrims arrived at our shores on the Mayflower—and how a friendly Patuxet native named Squanto showed them how to plant corn, using fish as fertilizer—is well-known. But Squanto’s full story is not, as National Geographic’s new Thanksgiving miniseries, “Saints & Strangers,” shows. That might be because some details of Squanto’s life are in dispute. The important ones are not, however. His story is astonishing, even raising profound questions about God’s role in American history.

Every Thanksgiving we remember that, to escape religious persecution, the Pilgrims sailed to the New World, landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620. But numerous trading ships had visited the area earlier. Around 1608 an English ship dropped anchor off the coast of what is today Plymouth, Mass., ostensibly to trade metal goods for the natives’ beads and pelts. The friendly Patuxets received the crew but soon discovered their dark intentions. A number of the braves were brutally captured, taken to Spain and sold into slavery.

One of them, a young man named Tisquantum, or Squanto, was bought by a group of Catholic friars, who evidently treated him well and freed him, even allowing him to dream of somehow returning to the New World, an almost unimaginable thought at the time. Around 1612, Squanto made his way to London, where he stayed with a man namedJohn Slany and learned his ways and language. In 1618, a ship was found, and in return for serving as an interpreter, Squanto would be given one-way passage back to the New World.

After spending a winter in Newfoundland, the ship made its way down the coast of Maine and Cape Cod, where Squanto at last reached his own shore. After 10 years, Squanto returned to the village where he had been born. But when he arrived, to his unfathomable disappointment, there was no one to greet him. What had happened?

It seems that since he had been away, nearly every member of the Patuxets had perished from disease, perhaps smallpox, brought by European ships. Had Squanto not been kidnapped, he would almost surely have died. But perhaps he didn’t feel lucky to have been spared. Surely, he must have wondered how his extraordinary efforts could amount to this. At first he wandered to another Wampanoag tribe, but they weren’t his people. He was a man without a family or tribe, and eventually lived alone in the woods.

But his story didn’t end there. In the bleak November of 1620, the Mayflower passengers, unable to navigate south to the warmer land of Virginia, decided to settle at Plymouth, the very spot where Squanto had grown up. They had come in search of religious freedom, hoping to found a colony based on Christian principles.

Their journey was very difficult, and their celebrated landing on the frigid shores of Plymouth proved even more so. Forced to sleep in miserably wet and cold conditions, many of them fell gravely ill. Half of them died during that terrible winter. One can imagine how they must have wept and wondered how the God they trusted and followed could lead them to this agonizing pass. They seriously considered returning to Europe.

But one day during that spring of 1621, a Wampanoag walked out of the woods to greet them. Somehow he spoke perfect English. In fact, he had lived in London more recently than they had. And if that weren’t strange enough, he had grown up on the exact land where they had settled.

Because of this, he knew everything about how to survive there; not only how to plant corn and squash, but how to find fish and lobsters and eels and much else. The lone Patuxet survivor had nowhere to go, so the Pilgrims adopted him as one of their own and he lived with them on the land of his childhood.

No one disputes that Squanto’s advent among the Pilgrims changed everything, making it possible for them to stay and thrive. Squanto even helped broker a peace with the local tribes, one that lasted 50 years, a staggering accomplishment considering the troubles settlers would face later.

So the question is: Can all of this have been sheer happenstance, as most versions of the story would have us believe? The Pilgrims hardly thought so. To them, Squanto was a living answer to their tearful prayers, an outrageous miracle of God. Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford declared in his journal that Squanto “became a special instrument sent of God” who didn’t leave them “till he died.”

Indeed, when Squanto died from a mysterious disease in 1622, Bradford wrote that he wanted “the Governor to pray for him, that he might go to the Englishmen’s God in heaven.” And Squanto bequeathed his possessions to the Pilgrims “as remembrances of his love.”

These are historical facts. May we be forgiven for interpreting them as the answered prayers of a suffering people, and a warm touch at the cold dawn of our history of an Almighty Hand?

America is truly a blessed nation. Why this story is not taught in all the schools of the nation is beyond me.