Tag Archives: Marriage

New study: grieving husbands are 30% more likely to have an early death

I saw that Dina tweeted this UK Daily Mail article which I think is important because it shows how sensitive married men really are about their wives.

Excerpt:

Male widows are more likely to die shortly after losing their wife than vice versa, new research suggests

Researchers from the Rochester Institute of Technology in America found that grieving husbands were 30 per cent more likely to die after being recently widowed, compared with their normal risk of mortality.

Women, however, did not have any increased risk of dying – perhaps due to them being more  independent and prepared, the researchers suggested.

Professor Javier Espinosa, who led the study said: ‘When a wife dies, men are often unprepared.

‘They have often lost their caregiver, someone who cares for them physically and emotionally, and the loss directly impacts the husband’s health.

[…]Prof Espinosa’s study, co-written by William Evans from the University of Notre Dame, was published in the Economics and Human Biology journal.

I think that it’s important not to be deceived into thinking that all men are brutes and have no feelings. Men do have feelings, and they bond to their spouses quite tightly. Women provide men with many things that they need in marriage. Not just sex and submission to leadership, but care, nurturing, attention and approval.

What North Korea teaches Christians about the importance of politics and economics

Christian apologist Frank Turek writes about it at Townhall.

Excerpt:

When I hear Christians saying we ought not get involved in politics but just “preach the Gospel,” I show them this satellite picture of the Korean peninsula. Here we see a homogenous population of mostly Koreans separated by a well-fortified border. South Korea is full of freedom, food and productivity—it’s one of the most Christianized countries in the world. North Korea is a concentration camp. They have no freedom, no food, and very little Christianity.

What’s the primary reason for the stark difference between these two countries? Politics. The South politically allows freedom, while the North does not.

Ironically, Christians who shun politics to supposedly advance the Gospel are actually allowing others to stop the Gospel. How so? Because politics and law affects one’s ability to preach the Gospel! If you think otherwise, visit some of the countries I have visited—Iran, Saudi Arabia and China. You cannot legally “preach the Gospel” in those countries—or practice other aspects of your religion freely—because politically they’ve ruled it out as they have in North Korea.

In fact, politics affects virtually every area of your life through the laws made by government. So if you care about your family, business, church, school, children, money, property, home, security, healthcare, safety, freedom, and your ability to “preach the Gospel,” then you should care about politics.

Politics affects everything, which is why leaders throughout the Bible—including Joseph, Moses, Daniel, Nehemiah, Mordecai, Esther, John the Baptist, and Paul— “went political” to influence civil governments to govern morally. Even Jesus himself got involved in politics when he publically chastised the Pharisees—the religious and political leaders of Israel—for neglecting “the more important matters of the law.”

[…]But what can Christians do? After all, we can’t legislate morality, can we? News flash: All laws legislate morality! Morality is about right and wrong and all laws declare one behavior right and the opposite behavior wrong. So the question is not whether we can legislate morality, but “Whose morality will we legislate?”

[…]When we fail to legislate morally, others impose immorality. For example, totalitarian political correctness is already imposed in states such as Massachusetts where the implications of same-sex marriage override the religious liberties of businesses, charities and even parents. As documented here and illustrated here, same sex marriage prevents you from running your business, educating your children, or practicing your religion in accord with your Conscience. And soon, as is the case in Canada, you may not be able to merely speak Biblically about homosexual behavior. That is because those who say they are fighting for “tolerance” are often the most intolerant.

Unless Christians begin to influence politics and the culture more significantly, we will continue to lose the very freedoms that enable us to live according to our beliefs and spread the Gospel all over the world. That’s why you should not vote for candidates because of their race or religion, but because they will govern morally on the more important matters of the law—life, marriage and religious freedom.

Dr. Turek says that some societies make it easier for us to carry out our responsibilities as Christians, such as evangelism. That’s true. But I want to make a different point from Dr. Turek related to the point that he made.

I get a lot of e-mails from people complaining that I spend too much time on fiscal issues, and especially on foreign policy. But I really think that Christians need to branch out and read widely about these issues, too. The more we know about everything, the better we will be able to connect what the Bible says to every area, and the smarter we will be at laying out plans for our lives and achieving the good goals we set for ourselves as part of our relationship with God.

It’s always better to know how things work. What good is it to say that you want to achieve some aim like helping the poor or making the world more peaceful unless you first study economics and foreign policy so that you will know how to achieve it? Many people try to achieve these goals by embracing policies that sound good, but they actually achieve the exact opposite ends that you set out to achieve.  If you want to drive a car to get somewhere, you must first learn how to drive a car. Why should faith be any different than anything else? Don’t take positions based on feelings or peer pressure, get informed and make a right judgment.

When government runs health care: NHS offers sex tips to children as young as 13

Dina sent me this disturbing article from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

Teenagers as young as 13 are being given explicit sexual advice and tips on how to lose their virginity from a taxpayer-funded website and iPhone app.

The respectyourself.info website contains graphic detail about various sexual acts – including those that involve a man physically abusing his partner during sex.

On the website, which is targeted at those as young as 13, teens can take an ‘Are you ready quiz’ and answer a series of multiple-choice questions to assess whether they are prepared to lose their virginity.

[…]A variety of degrading sexual acts are listed within it, with many too graphic to reproduce.

[…]The website and app, designed to cut teenage pregnancies, have been branded ‘grossly irresponsible’ by family charities.

The project, part-funded by the EU and Warwickshire County Council and designed by the NHS, is the first of its kind in the UK.

[…]The respectyourself.info website features sex tips for children as young as 13 and naked pictures of a man and a woman with their erogenous zones highlighted. There is also a ‘sextionary’ to describe slang terms for genitalia.

One section of the website – which is free to download and has been targeted at children as young as 13 – gives tips on anal and oral sex as well as losing your virginity.

This story reminds me of a line from Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House”. He wrote: “The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. ” Sometimes I wonder whether all of this effort by the government to encourage things like sex education, no-fault divorce, recreational premarital sex, discouraging chivalry and traditional male roles, etc. is all just an effort to break up the relatively self-sufficient nuclear family unit. People who have a ton of sexual experience before marrying don’t have stable marriages nor do they have high quality marriages (see studies below). Breaking up future families is what creates the need for bigger government: more social programs, more welfare, more divorce courts, more public schools, more day care, more police, more regulation, etc. Less freedom. Less love. Less intimacy.

This sort of story is particularly disturbing for me, because I have paid a lot of money in taxes during career. I have kept myself chaste all this time so that I would be able to bond tightly to whichever woman I marry. Now I see that if I were in the UK, my tax money would be going to indoctrinate the women I could be married into a lifestyle that would make them unable to perform the roles of wife and mother – shrinking the pool of candidates that I can choose from. My earnings would be used by people who don’t agree with my goals and my values to wreck my plan for lifelong married love and a house filled with children. We shouldn’t be voting for the government to control things like health care or schools or helping the poor or anything. They just wreck it all with their own immoral agenda.

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