Tag Archives: Chastity

Should Christian men marry Democrats who claim to be Christians?

I don’t think that Christian men should marry women who are politically liberal who claim to be Christians, because I don’t think that political liberalism is compatible with Christianity. But I’ll write some things that liberal Christian women tell me and you can see if you think it’s compatible with a Christian worldview, and a Christian view of marriage and parenting.

Some of this is based on a recent comment I received from a liberal Christian woman who accused me of being a racist (I’m darker than Barack Obama) and opposed to women succeeding (I have a longstanding record of supporting Michele Bachmann for President in 2012), etc. She also basically called me homophobic, because I oppose the gay agenda of sexualizing preschoolers with gay propaganda and because I think that children do best with a mother AND a father.

Her comment shows that the best liberals can do when debating policy is name-calling. Imperialist! Racist! Corporatist! Homophobe! Sexist! Bigot! Greedy! That’s what this woman did, and I encounter these Christian feminists a lot in churches.They learn their secular leftist worldview in the schools, and then they “read” the Bible by having feelings about what the secular leftists tell them to believe. If you ask them what the Bible says, they’ll say “it says that all religions are equal, that people should feel good, and that people shouldn’t judge other people”. This is what the secular leftists told them that the Bible said, and they believe it. And then they vote. And then they expect that Christian men will marry them for voting for policies that utterly destroy the minimal social requirements for Christian marriage and Christian parenting, (e.g. – she votes for things like no-fault divorce, etc.).

So I thought I would list out some of the things I’ve heard from women in churches over the years and you can tell me if you think that marriage to them would be a good idea (by marriage I mean real practical marriage meant to provide God with an ROI higher than he would get if the two people stayed single). Should a Christian man marry a woman whose entire worldview consists of slogans without any evidential support? Should Christian men accept the bare statement “I’m Christian” as though it proves that a woman has a worldview that is compatible with the Bible? Should the Christian man ask her to connect a Christian marriage plan to specific policies and laws,  such as one might read about in Jay Richards’ “Money Greed and God”, Nancey Pearcey’s “Saving Leonardo”, Jennifer Roback Morse’s “Love and Economics”, or most importantly Wayne Grudem’s “Politics and the Bible”? Do “Christian” women have any idea what moral values, skills, policies and experiences are conducive to a successful marriage and the production of effective, influential Christian children?

According to liberal Christian women:

  • conservatives are close-minded
  • conservatives are oppressive
  • morality is not objective, it’s relative to each person, or to different cultures
  • God does not expect people to avoid sinning
  • it’s wrong to judge others
  • all religions are equally true
  • there is no such thing as the Devil or Hell
  • sinning is OK because God will still let unrepentant sinners into Heaven
  • there is nothing wrong with abortion
  • there is nothing wrong with the gay agenda
  • opposition to Islamic terrorism is racism
  • world war II was an imperialist, unjust war
  • the best way to prevent a war is to disarm your own forces, withdraw to your own borders, and appease evil dictators by granting them concessions and abandoning your democratic allies to their aggression
  • Christianity is about agreeing with people who do everything the Bible forbids, and making non-Christians feel good about their rebellion against God, so that they will like you
  • conservatives are racists (FYI, I have dark brown skin and am the son of first generation immigrants)
  • the best way to avoid being a racist is to obsess over the color of people’s skin and demand that people with different skin color be treated differently
  • the desire of Christian husbands to keep the money they earn is greedy
  • Christian husbands have a duty to have the money they earn confiscated by the government so it can be redistributed as the secular government sees fit to redistribute it
  • Christian men are stupid and evil and cannot be trusted, which is why women should be able to count on big government social welfare programs
  • fathers are not needed to raise children, and can be replaced with sperm donors and welfare checks
  • it is bad for poor people to have to depend on their neighbors if they make poor decisions, because asking their neighbors for money and being accountable to their neighbors will make them feel bad – it is better if the government takes money from Christian husbands (in part) and then just gives the poor people the money directly, no matter what poor decisions they made – so that they don’t feel bad about making the poor decisions and they don’t have to change their poor decision-making
  • the government should use the public schools teach children as young as 5 to have sex, use fallible contraceptives, and have abortions, and this teaching should be done using the taxpayer money collected in part from Christian husbands
  • if an individual or a group has a lot of money, then the secular government should be able to take that money away to redistribute it – regardless of how hard they worked for that money
  • taxing and regulating businesses will have no effect on a Christian husband’s ability to hold onto his job, or find a new one if he is laid off or fired
  • the best way to create more jobs is by taxing and regulating businesses and raising tariffs and the costs of energy
  • the best way to have an intelligent discussion with someone you disagree with is to attack their character and call them names that your teachers taught you to call them – reading good books by the people you disagree with and watching academic debates is a complete waste of time
  • watching Michael Moore movies is adequate preparation for debating policy with conservatives
  • watching the Comedy Network and listening to NPR are excellent ways to stay aware of the state of the world
  • the secular leftist government can be relied on to use money from Christian taxpayers to protect religious liberty and practices like homeschooling
  • economic policy can be determined through feelings and intuitions – as long as politicians say happy words and expressing good intentions, then the people they claim to care about are sure to come out ahead
  • capitalism doesn’t create wealth, socialism does – just look at how much richer North Korea is than the United States
  • churches have too much money and they don’t spend it on the poor, so they should be taxed and regulated by secular government
  • private and parochial schools are only available to “the rich” so they should be abolished and all children should be forced to attend public schools, which are run by the secular government
  • homeschooling should be outlawed because parents can teach their children moral values that are offensive and close-minded and make liberal special interest groups feel offended
  • a baby isn’t a person until a woman decides it’s a person, and abortion should be taxpayer-funded
  • children don’t need a mother and a father, and we should have policies that make people feel good about raising fatherless children – like welfare programs
  • corporations “control people” by making useful products, and providing useful services, that people are free to buy, or not, depending on whether they think that those products and services are worth the money being asked for
  • government doesn’t control people when it forces preople to buy health insurance that covers abortions, sex changes, drug rehab, IVF, or any number of things that Christians will never need and may even object to on moral grounds
  • it is ok for Christians to vote for a secular government that reduces the costs of pre-marital sex by allowing taxpayer-funded abortions and taxpayer-funded welfare payments, because the God of the Bible wants people to have premarital sex more easily and at a lower cost
  • conservatives support the death penalty for people who disagree with them on religion and morality (not on a criminal matter, this woman called herself a Christian and literally thought that conservatives wanted the death penalty for people of other religions and sexual orientations – no criminal charges or anything)
  • the death penalty is mean and has never been shown to have a deterrent effect on violent crime rates in peer-reviewed research
  • Christian women can best impress Christian men by showing no understanding of the needs of young children, and by having no plan to produce effective/influential Christian children in a challenging secular environment
  • the best way for a Christian women to understand the needs of men and children is by focusing on her own education and career and avoiding any peer-reviewed research that addresses the needs of men and children
  • marriage consists of the woman working full-time and treating her husband as a roommate and treating her children as pets who are dropped off at the day care – preferably government-run day care – and eventually moving the children on to government-run schools
  • conservative men, especially the Tea Party supporters, are sexist and don’t want women to be successful – especially the ones who want Michele Bachmann to be President
  • if a man asks a woman to read anything on economics, science, philosophy, etc., then he is oppressing her because she should be free to construct her entire worldview based on her feelings, intuitions and peer expectations
  • whenever a woman is asked how she has prepared to deal with a husband and children, she should turn the question around and ask what men and children will do to serve her and make her happy
  • government subsidies for unmarried women who raise fatherless children doesn’t cause more women to have babies out of wedlock, and out of wedlock babies do not increase poverty or criminal behavior
  • corporations who sell products and services to people who are willing to buy them of their own free will causes poverty and criminal behavior
  • the best way to prevent a mortgage lending crisis is for government to lower interest rates for extended periods of time and then impose restrictions on housing construction, driving home prices higher, and then to force banks to make loans to unqualified applicants who don’t have to report their citizenship, report their income, or even make a downpayment
  • the best way to respond to the policy question about whether high tax rates are bad for Christian families is to ask the questioner how much money they personally give to charity
  • God is more impressed by people who give their money to voluntarily homeless alcoholics than by people who give money to sponsor an on-campus academic debate where university students will hear arguments for and against God’s existence, God’s character, and what God has done in history through the person of Jesus
  • the best way to learn about marriage and parenting is by listening to feminist teachers, not by reading Jennifer Roback Morse and Laura Schlessinger
  • the best way to learn about economics is by listening to socialist teachers, not by reading Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams
  • the best way to learn about what the Bible says about politics is by listening to secular teachers, not by reading Wayne Grudem and Jay Richards
  • the best way to learn about foreign policy is by listening to draft-dodging bleeding-heart hippy teachers, not by reading Frank Gaffney and John Bolton
  • developing a Christian worldview is best achieved by believing whatever ignorant, inexperienced teachers in government-run secular schools tell you to believe so that you can get an A – this is called “critical thinking” and conservatives don’t do that
  • it’s more important to be liked by your liberal teachers and inexperienced, foolish peers than to conform your behavior and worldview to what the Bible actually says
  • if a Christian woman engages in global warming alarmism, recycling, veganism and yoga then Christian men will think that she is moral and suitable for marriage and parenting
  • Church is a place where you sing songs and meet people, have happy feelings, and get comfort for the uncertainties of life and death
  • men are just as likely to marry and have children with a 50% tax rate, a 15% unemployment rate and a 20 trillion dollar debt as they are with a 15% tax rate, a 5% unemployment rate and a 5 trillion dollar debt – what really matters is whether they are in love or not
  • men are just as likely to marry and have children with a no-fault divorce law and 90% sole-custody awards for the woman as they are with at-fault divorce laws and mandatory shared-parenting
  • if you pay poor people $35,000 a year in cash and benefits for not working, then they will try as hard as they can to get out of poverty
  • affirmative action is a great idea and it is no problem at all that 60% of all undergraduates are women, because men are just as willing to be husbands and fathers when they don’t have college degrees or jobs
  • God doesn’t want us to do anything effective to advance his causes and his concerns or to defend his moral values and moral duties – God just wants us to have happy feelings and to be liked by others, no matter what they believe and what choices they make
  • the purpose of having children is to let them do what they want so they are happy, and not to make them effective and influential for God
  • it’s wrong to call your children “garbage” even if they later look back on you with love for spending so much time parenting them effectively and are accepted to Harvard and Yale and are set to have an enormous influence for Christ – that’s bullying and God doesn’t like parents bullying people into Harvard and Yale (he prefers poets and ballet dancers)
  • the best way for mothers to deal with children is by handing them to strangers and then assuaging the guilt from child neglect with excessive permissiveness coupled with excessive spending on material rewards and suppression of the father’s desire to discipline and lead the children toward greater effectiveness and influence for Christ
  • defending the faith is something that only a few people do if they have that “spiritual gift”, but other people have the spiritual gift of reading Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer and J.K. Rowling novels – both choices are equally pleasing to God, though
  • if  a Christian man cares about keeping the money he earns for his current or future family, then he is selfish and only cares about himself
  • patriotism, national honor, advanced weapon systems and a large military are all ways to encourage aggressors to attack other nations
  • peace talks, appeasement, betraying your allies, weakness, moral equivalence, coddling terrorists captured on the battlefield, and a weak military causes aggressors to not attack you or other nations
  • legal firearm ownership causes violent crime rates to increase
  • multiple victim public shootings never occur in areas where weapons are banned (for the law-abiding), like shopping malls and schools
  • slavery was invented by Americans and has never been practiced anywhere else or in any other time
  • slavery is only practiced by whites against blacks
  • slavery was abolished first by non-whites, and then only at the very end by whites
  • the American military is largely a force for evil in the world
  • man-made catastrophic global warming is real and needs to be countered by imposing a communist government to control industry, because the Earth has never been warmer than it is now, certainly not during the Medieval Warming Period
  • America is imperialist because Americans spend their blood and treasure liberating other countries from tyranny like South Korea, France, Kuwait, East Germany, etc. and then instead of occupying those countries they leave, and then airdrop supplies (The Marshall Plan) or foreign aid or massive private donations

And then they wonder why men do not think that women are suitable for marriage or children. I think it’s an act of treason against God for authentic Christian men to marry Democrats, or even to give them the time of day.

The point of this post is that today I am seeing a lot of women complaining about men not wanting to marry them, and going on to have children out of wedblock as an alternative (and then they collect welfare and throw the children in day care and public schools – i.e. – child abuse). The thought never occurs to them that men HAVE thought women and marriage and children through, and they have decide that many women are simply not qualified morally or spiritually for the tasks of marriage and parenting. Men decide this based on their knowledge of the needs of men and children, and women’s lack of preparation to meet those needs, and women’s unwillingness to sacrifice their own interests to meet the needs of others. What many women, Christian and atheist, seem to believe is that men should fall in love with them with a complete disregard for their worldview and preparation for marriage and parenting. And what they mean by marriage and parenting is not self-sacrifice and service to men and children, with the larger goal of serving God. They actually mean a combination of postmodernism, moral relativism and narcissistic hedonism. They think that this is what marriage provides – a perpetual state of bliss where they do whatever makes them feel good moment by moment and men and children just celebrate that. Rah rah day-care! Rah rah sex-withholding! Rah-rah wealth redistribution! That’s apparently what men and children should expect from a woman in a marriage situation. And of course, God, if he exists, exists only to guarantee happy feelings and cannot judge or interfere or impose moral obligations on the woman.They think marriage is fairy-tale narcissism. Even the wedding is a day of expensive attention-getting narcissism.

A woman’s relationship with God, and the amount of thought and effort she puts into it, is a valuable window into how she views her relationships with men and children. If she reads a lot and takes on a lot of obligations to understand God and to serve him in effective ways (apologetics, politics, economics, foreign policy) then men should think that she will treat relationships with men and children the same way. But that takes time to assess. Men need to keep their hands off of women when dating/courting in order to assess her real views. You can’t assess a woman for marriage and parenting based on her physical appearance, weight and sexual skills. You would be surprised how little Biblical worldview capability there is for young attractive women, how little practical thinking about money and education, etc. has been done, how little planning has been done beyond the desire for wedding pictures and baby pictures, and how little is understood about how men and children impose obligations on women. God is better than men and children are. She won’t treat men and children well if she doesn’t treat God well. If she projects her feelings onto the Bible, and resents its plain meaning, and rejects the obligations it places on her, then she isn’t going to treat husbands and children any better. If she responds to God’s character by rejecting his differences, his judgments, and his expectations, then she isn’t going to respond well to the those same concerns in men or children.

A nice physical appearance and the willingness to hook-up on the first date are not qualifications for marriage and parenting. And they are not qualifications for serving God either. And women who soft-pedal immorality like abortion and gay rights in order to be liked by leftists are not Christians. Christianity means something. It doesn’t mean having happy feelings and being liked and projecting your goals and beliefs onto God. Men – don’t complain if you are shallow enough to think that you can test a woman by having fun with her. Going on trips and having fun experiences is not courting. Make her read hard books, make her do hard things, make her write essays on men, marriage, parenting, apologetics, science, politics and economics. Demand that she give you 10 scientific arguments from the peer-reviewed literature for God’s existence. Demand that she explain how laws and policies challenge the goals of a Christian marriage. Judge her on moral grounds at every opportunity. Load her up with moral obligations and tasks. Because that’s what she’ll be expected to do in a marriage.

I think that the liberal “Christian” commenter probably places herself more of the good end of the moral scale than the bad end, but I just want to be clear – I consider don’t consider her a Christian or even a good person. It’s not that she is deliberately evil, she is just incredibly ignorant on every subject, having imbibed her views from secular leftist teachers like a trained seal who is rewarded with fish by her trainer. She hasn’t read anything outside of schoolwork, she just parroted her way to good grades. The harm comes when she tries to pass herself off as a Christian to gullible Christian men who will be swayed by her looks and youth and physical contact instead of her knowledge, wisdom and experiences at practical things – like running a business, or evangelizing atheists in her workplace. Men need to have their goals for love, marriage and parenting clear, and to understand what questions to ask women to detect their real suitability for marriage and parenting. This woman simply has no capability to do the job. She hasn’t looked into these issues at all, she just accepted what the people around her believed. When you scratch the surface, she isn’t a Christian at all – she just uses frilly God talk to put window dressing on her own narcissism, vacuity and conformity.

By the way, the quickest way for her to join the reality-based community would be to buy and read Thomas Sowell’s “Intellectuals and Society”, which I just finished last night. Thomas Sowell is the official economist of the Tea Party movement, and, of course, he is black. As is the other great Tea Party economist Walter Williams. I would also recommend Wayne Grudem’s “Politics and the Bible”. He writes theology, which is something that these liberal Christian woman have never looked into. And of course they will never have looked into apologetics either, so they won’t have read William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland’s “Philosophical Foundations for Christian Worldview”. After all, they have feelings and intuitions and social expectations to guide them. Who needs truth?

Related posts

New CDC report finds that virginity is on the rise in America

From Maggie Gallagher at Real Clear Politics. (H/T Ruth Blog)

Excerpt:

Shocking news: Virginity is on the rise in America.

The source is sober, academic, practically irrefutable: the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Its latest analysis of the sex lives of Americans age 15 to 44 includes a startling finding: Virginity is increasing among teens and young adults in the U.S.

Compared with data from the 2002 (National Survey of Family Growth), a higher percentage of males and females 15-24 in 2006-2008 have had no sexual contact with another person. In 2002, 22 percent of young men and women 15-24 had never had any sexual contact with another person, and in 2006-2008, those figures were 27 percent for males and 29 percent for females.

The survey was was drawn from in-person interviews with a national sample of 13,495 males and females. The data were collected using audio computer-assisted self-interviewing, or ACASI, in which the respondent enters his or her own answers into the computer — known to be the most accurate way of collecting sensitive data.

The response rate for the 2006-2008 NSFG was 75 percent — very high for this kind of data.

The increase in virginity is not just “technical virginity,” mind you. These are young adults who say they have had no sexual contact of any kind: no intercourse, no oral sex, no anal sex. (Presumably, a lot of them have, however, kissed and hugged!)

I’m an old hand at stats. But even I was surprised by this finding buried in the report (Table 3): 32 percent of currently married women under the age of 45 say they have had only one sex partner in their life.

Slightly more than 50 million Americans are married. If the figures for those under 45 mirror the national figures (a conservative assumption), that means the number of women who have never had sex with anyone but their husbands is at least 8 million.

I’m one of the virgins who doesn’t kiss, although I might hug, if the person could pass all of my grueling tests and requirements.

Related posts

New OUP book links premarital sex and promiscuity to poor mental health

Found in the freaking New York Times of all places. (H/T Robert Stacy McCain)

Excerpt:

[E]arlier generations of Americans waited longer to have sex, took fewer sexual partners across their lifetimes, and were more likely to see sleeping together as a way station on the road to wedlock.And they may have been happier for it. That’s the conclusion suggested by two sociologists, Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, in their recent book, “Premarital Sex in America.” Their research, which looks at sexual behavior among contemporary young adults, finds a significant correlation between sexual restraint and emotional well-being, between monogamy and happiness — and between promiscuity and depression.

This correlation is much stronger for women than for men. Female emotional well-being seems to be tightly bound to sexual stability — which may help explain why overall female happiness has actually drifted downward since the sexual revolution.

Among the young people Regnerus and Uecker studied, the happiest women were those with a current sexual partner and only one or two partners in their lifetime. Virgins were almost as happy, though not quite, and then a young woman’s likelihood of depression rose steadily as her number of partners climbed and the present stability of her sex life diminished.

When social conservatives talk about restoring the link between sex, monogamy and marriage, they often have these kinds of realities in mind. The point isn’t that we should aspire to some Arcadia of perfect chastity. Rather, it’s that a high sexual ideal can shape how quickly and casually people pair off, even when they aren’t living up to its exacting demands. The ultimate goal is a sexual culture that makes it easier for young people to achieve romantic happiness — by encouraging them to wait a little longer, choose more carefully and judge their sex lives against a strong moral standard.

Stacy McCain adds:

What if Regnerus and Uecker are right?

What would be the consequences of having scientific proof that pre-marital chastity and marital fidelity — “One Life, One Wife”  – confer socio-economic advantages not only on individuals who uphold such values, but also produce advantages for the larger society?

The implications for public policy, I’ll leave to the wonks. Rather, I suggest the likelihood that this scientific insight could lead people to consider the possibility that the Bible is actually true.

I have to confess that I am always hopeful of getting tweeted by Brian Auten on his Apologetics 315 twitter feed. And when I write posts like this, I just know that Brian takes one look at the headlines and says “tsk! tsk! another anti-feminist political post from WK! Nothing to do with Christian apologetics!”. Then he passes my post over for a philosophical term of the day (like “aseity”). But I wish he would read through my whole post and see what the purpose of these posts are – to show that real research can confirm or disconfirm what the Bible says, and that we need to be thinking, as apologists, about the many ways that we can defend the Christian worldview using evidence. Sometimes, people don’t become atheists because of scientific or philosophical arguments. Sometimes people become atheists because they way to have sexual pleasure without worrying about moral rules (men) or they want to get attention without worrying about moral rules (women). I’m sorry, but that’s really the kind of thing that causes people to become atheists. And broken families and missing fathers have a lot to do with that. So I think Christian apologists need to address that with evidence.

But there’s more to this story.

I get a lot of flak from Christian women (let’s face it – the men all agree with me) because of my intent to raise effective, influential children and my further intent to shepherd those children into good fields where they can make tons of money with impunity and/or have a big influence on society. (The make-money track is to support scholars who are going more for influence than money, like William Lane Craig). All I get when I say things like that is a lot of feminist kickback about how wives are happier when their children are happy, and children are happy whenever they do whatever makes them feel good. There is no room for the wisdom and leadership of fathers in a feminist Christian woman’s home. Their goal is feelings of happiness. But that’s not my goal. I want to raise effective Christian scholars, like Regnerus.

Consider the author of this OUP book that is being cited in the New York Times.

His faculty page at the prestigious University of Texas (Austin):

Mark Regnerus is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin (PhD, 2000, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and a faculty associate at the university’s Population Research Center. Author of over 30 published articles and book chapters, his research is in the areas of sexual behavior, religion, and family. His book Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying (Oxford University Press, 2011) is available beginning in December 2010. His previous book Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press, 2007) tells the story of the sexual values and practices of American teenagers, paying particular attention to how participating in organized religion shapes sexual decision-making. Mark’s research and opinion pieces have been featured in numerous media outlets in the US and elsewhere. Forbidden Fruit has been reviewed in Slate, the Dallas Morning News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and The New Yorker. His op-ed on marital timing norms appeared in the Washington Post on April 26, 2009.

Two books with OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.

And do you know what else? He writes stuff for a Christian web site.

Excerpt:

Virginity pledges. Chastity balls. Courtship. Side hugs. Guarding your heart. Evangelical discourse on sex is more conservative than I’ve ever seen it. Parents and pastors and youth group leaders told us not to do it before we got married. Why? Because the Bible says so. Yet that simple message didn’t go very far in shaping our sexual decision-making.

So they kicked it up a notch and staked a battle over virginity, with pledges of abstinence and accountability structures to maintain the power of the imperative to not do what many of us felt like doing. Some of us failed, but we could become “born again virgins.” Virginity mattered. But sex can be had in other ways, and many of us got creative.

Then they told us that oral sex was still sex. It could spread disease, and it would make you feel bad. “Sex will be so much better if you wait until your wedding night,” they urged. If we could hold out, they said, it would be worth it. The sheer glory of consummation would knock our socks off.

Such is the prevailing discourse of abstinence culture in contemporary American evangelicalism. It might sound like I devalue abstinence. I don’t. The problem is that not all abstainers end up happy or go on to the great sex lives they were promised. Nor do all indulgers become miserable or marital train wrecks. More simply, however, I have found that few evangelicals accomplish what their pastors and parents wanted them to.

Indeed, over 90 percent of American adults experience sexual intercourse before marrying. The percentage of evangelicals who do so is not much lower. In a nationally representative study of young adults, just under 80 percent of unmarried, church- going, conservative Protestants who are currently dating someone are having sex of some sort. I’m certainly not suggesting that they cannot abstain. I’m suggesting that in the domain of sex, most of them don’t and won’t.

What to do? Intensify the abstinence message even more? No. It won’t work. The message must change, because our preoccupation with sex has unwittingly turned our attention away from the damage that Americans—including evangelicals—are doing to the institution of marriage by discouraging it and delaying it.

The article goes on to explain his ideas, supported by research, on how to solve this problem. (I disagree with everything he says about why there are more Christian women than men, but still… smart guy – his solution to the marriage problem seems to be similar to Danielle Crittenden in her book “What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us”)

Do you see what I mean about people having an influence? What sense does it make to talk about what you like and what you are good at? No one cares. God doesn’t care about what you like nor does he care about what makes you happy. He cares about what increases knowledge of him, and what increases goodness in all of our behavior – Christians and non-Christians. You are expected to lay aside your need for happiness, and ease, and to do hard things. Hard things that will actually count.