Tag Archives: Morality

News

MUST-READ: How feminism’s war against men ends up hurting women

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From the The Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

There’s been a 145% rise in unmarried births among college-educated women since 1980, more than twice the increase in such births among women without college educations. That’s just births; adoptions are another outlet for women seeking families on their own. But there’s a largely unexplored part to this story: Why is this happening?

Part of the answer is found in a Pew Research Center report released this week: A sea change in relationships is taking place as everyone adjusts to the new reality of women being better educated and in some cases more preferred than men in the workforce. Especially unsettling to some men is their role as second-best earner in the family. As the Pew report documents, 22% of men with “some college” are now outearned by their wives, up from 4% in 1970.

[…]Women are feeling the pinch from years of gender imbalances on college campuses, where today nearly 58% of all bachelor’s degrees and 62% of associate’s degrees are earned by women. Given that women prefer to find a well-educated, reliable earner as a husband, this creates a simple math problem. Well-educated women can’t find enough equally or better-educated men to marry.

Couple the education gap with the current economic “man-cession”—as many as 80% of the jobs lost in the recession were held by men—and the dilemma for single women becomes even worse. Today, more and more well-educated women have to ask themselves: Am I willing to “marry down”?

As I’ve written about before, the reason why men are not able to do well in school is because they are discriminated against by the teachers, legislators and educrats. There are almost no male teachers. Men do better with male teachers. But there is a fear among educrats of male teachers getting near children, so boys end up suffering. Affirmative action keeps many men from attending college. And then of course in the workplace, companies have quotas to fill, which shuts even more men out of jobs.

Children need to have a mother and father, and the father typically gets his authority and his role by being the primary earner. What women have done is that they have decided that it is a better idea to compete with the man for money. But this undermines the man’s authority in the home. Why would a man get married only to have his influence diluted? The threat of false charges of domestic violence or of a unilateral divorce can also easily be used to control and silence him. Why try to lead a family if you are going to be silenced and coerced?

More importantly, the more that a woman focuses on vocational skills, the less time she has for reading about marriage, education, economics and parenting, e.g. – Jennifer Roback Morse, Laura Schlessinger, Maggie Gallagher, Stephen Baskerville, etc. If a man is a software engineer, the last thing he wants in the home is another software engineer. A mother needs to teach the children everything they need to know to succeed and to have a relationship with God that will stay with them as they grow. And she must also be able to talk to her husband about his interests, like science, economics, politics, theology and apologetics.

And it’s not just a question of having the right knowledge. It’s a question of character. She has to make choices and have experiences all along the way to build up the capacity to care, nurture and communicate. That means actually doing things that cause her to become comfortable caring for others even when it goes against her own selfish interests. Being selfish disqualifies a women from being marriage material. Instead of being focused on making money, women should be studying how husbands and children work.

And I think this is why women are so anxious to throw themselves at men sexually. They are trying to get men to love them without actually having to care about men, marriage or children. They don’t want to have to take on the traditional role of mother and wife, which is what causes a man to love and need a woman in the first place. But a woman cannot make a man love her by tricking him with sex. Women can only make men love them by being willing to encourage and support him in his plan to serve God and to raise children who also know God and serve God. It’s a relationship, not a slot machine.

NOTE: When I say that women should be more focused on children, I mean while the children are not yet all in school. Once they are all in school, then women can go back to work full-time, or part-time, or work out of the home, whatever they want to do.

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News

France introduces bill to require boards of directors to be 40% female

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Story from the UK Times.

Excerpt:

The French version of the glass ceiling has just been cracked open by parliamentary vote. With the backing of President Sarkozy’s administration, the National Assembly last night passed a bill that aims to force big companies to appoint women to 40 percent of their seats on the board.

[…]Norway introduced a 40 percent rule in 2002 when women accounted for only 6 per cent of board seats there. Spain has also just passed a similar law.

The measure will mean an upheaval because the boards of France’s top companies remain male bastions, along with those of southern Europe (see chart below). Women occupy just 10.5 percent of board seats in the 650 publicly quoted companies to which the new law will apply. Corporations will have six years to reach the 40 percent mark. After that, all board appointments will be voided if they do not maintain at least a 60-40 share between men and women.

Women today seem to prefer a pay check and government social programs over relationships with husbands and children. A relationship means that the other person may say or do things that hurt you, and that they may make demands on you to act morally or to think rationally or to take care of others. I have heard the demands of men and children described as “harassment” by women, and compared unfavorably with workplace relationships. For some reason, women have decided that the workplace is less “harassment” than the family.

Women may still marry for the spectacle of the wedding. They may still have babies to play with and show off. (But the man should change the diapers). But the willingness to accept the demands of relationships is gone. Today’s women think that life should be about their happiness all the time, and that no one should ever confront them with moral judgments and moral obligations. So a husband’s demands for a woman to spend less will be met with a unilateral divorce. And a child’s demands for attention will be met with day care.

Today’s women are just not interested in communication, relationships, commitments, and nurturing.

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Commentary

How did universities reject the concepts of theological and moral knowledge?

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I spent all day Saturday listening to fun lectures and an audio book, (“The Divine Conspiracy“), from Dr. Dallas Willard, a professor of philosophy at USC. (This is why I’m not responding to any of your e-mail or writing any long posts about courting and apologetics).

Here are a couple lectures he did in 2002 at Ohio State University about what it means to be human.

You may have to download them twice, I notice that the first time I try to download lectures that it gives me some short little 250Kb file which isn’t the whole lecture. The second time it works fine.

Anyway, he talks a lot about the work of a Harvard professor named Julie Reuben, who wrote a book called “The Making of the Modern University”. I hunted around and found a three-part book review that I have summarized for you below. The book review is by Mark Hansard at Christian Leadership Ministries, which is the faculty ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ.

Here’s part 1 of 3.

Excerpt:

The first chapter, entitled “The Unity of Truth,” explains the educational philosophy of the early 19th century, and how it fell apart near the end of that century. What caught my eye was the robust view of knowledge that professors and university presidents believed at that time. According to Reuben, they believed not only that all knowledge in different fields could form a coherent whole, but also that its pursuit would lead to a good and more virtuous life. All knowledge led to better action. In fact, she says, university leaders at that time believed that the “the good, the true, and the beautiful were interconnected, and that successful education promoted all three together” (12). All knowledge inevitably lead to worship of God and an understanding of his wisdom.

Part of this 19th century construct was natural theology, which in this case was not merely the admission that design was detectable in nature, thus pointing to a Creator. It consisted of stronger claims such as: the harmony of nature reflected God’s wisdom, that the more we understand of nature the more we can understand God’s character, and that, as one professor put it, “the knowledge of God, derived from the study of nature, is adapted to add greatly to the impulsive power of conscience” (20). In other words, a study of nature would strengthen virtue in the student.

This is why the first scientists (and some today) are Christians. They were trying to find out something about God’s existence and character by looking at nature. They wanted to see what God was communicating to us through the natural world.

And one more:

But even more serious is the loss of belief that moral knowledge is possible. There is no wisdom (in the ancient sense which Plato and Aristotle discussed) in the universities today, because there is no way to know what the good life is, how life ought to be lived. Such things, since they no longer constitute part of the curriculum, have simply been lost. Is it any wonder there is so much moral confusion among us?

This is really what Willard is concerned about in the lectures. If there is no God to create and design the universe, then there is no objective way we ought to be. And when the university stopped doing theology (or insulated it from critical inquiry), they stopped having a foundation for robust morality. Morality is hard. It’s not the kind of thing you can do if you have to take it on faith. Sometimes, moral rules go against our selfish desires, and it’s those times where you really need to know if these things are true.

Here’s part 2 of 3.

Excerpt:

According to Reuben, Darwinism brought with it a new, revolutionary view of science that viewed scientific knowledge as imperfect but progressive, always seeking to correct itself through further research and experiment. The new science relied on hypotheses, theories, even imagination as it attempted to explain the world, and a good scientific theory would have practical, measurable results.

[…]Eventually scientists came to view theology as a meddlesome interloper who made a priori pronouncements about truth that simply got in the way of free inquiry and scientific advancement. Theology would have to be abandoned if the new, modern university founded upon the progressive philosophy of science would be allowed to pursue scientific research unfettered. But how could this be done, while maintaining the importance of Christianity? According to Reuben, the solution of scholars and administrators “was to distinguish theology, defined as a mode of inquiry and a set of doctrines, from religion, which was left largely undefined as sentiment, experiences, ritual, and ethical values” (57).

Theology is a knowledge tradition, which purportedly carries authority because it consists of truth claims that carry weight in describing the real world. However, in teaching religion, the knowledge conveyed was not about doctrines of God, man and salvation, but instead a set of propositions about what religious people believed, how they worshipped. In short the study of religion conveyed knowledge about how religious people acted apart from asking the question of whether their beliefs were true. Theological knowledge, and with it moral knowledge, was permanently lost. Instead of strengthening Christianity with science, the new religious studies departments actually weakened Christianity by taking away its authority, an authority that is based upon knowledge. Not surprisingly, administrators could not get students to be interested in their new religion classes.

If Christianity is just a set of beliefs and rituals designed to make people feel good, act morally to please parents, and to have a sense of community, then it is worthless. As the apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:14, “And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.”

Either Christianity is a knowledge tradition, or we are wasting our time with yesterday’s fashions. If Christianity is about our feelings, then it will die, because we can always to make us feel better. What will happen is that you will have people jumping around in church singing songs on Sunday morning, then having abortions and divorces on Monday morning.

Here’s part 3 of 3, but I didn’t find anything earth-shattering in it. It sounds like Christians were too authoritarian and dogmatic in responding to science’s desire for increased autonomy. You cant make an argument from dogma – it just makes people dislike your dogma. What we ought to have done is what we’re doing today: doing good science and good history without any pre-suppositions and seeing if what we find in cosmology, biochemistry, ancient history, etc. confirm or deny Christianity. The lesson to be learned here is that when you insulate your faith from rational inquiry, you reduce it to personal preference and you lose your authority – authority that comes from knowledge.

It’s interesting to think about how different things used to be just a few decades ago when people were not so different to throw off the constraints of knowledge and the obligations of morality in a desperate pursuit of pleasure in this life.