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Mentoring

Why men should refuse a woman’s offer of casual sex

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I’ve been having some conversations recently with a good male friend of mine who is not a Christian. I like to talk to him about women because we disagree about women, and Lord knows I love to disagree with people. Anyway, he’s read my rules for chastity, courtship, etc., and he considers them, and me, quite weird. He is coming from the position of having a great deal of sexual experience with women, whereas I strictly avoid sexual activity for a variety of reasons. And what we disagree about is this: I think it’s wrong to have casual sex with women who offer themselves to a man before marriage, and he thinks it’s permissible as long as he warns them that the relationship is going nowhere afterwards.

First, let me talk about where we agree. Both of us agree that most women today have lost the art of making a man like them without using sex appeal. We are in broad agreement that the right way for a woman to make a man like her is by being feminine. And we agree on what that means – showing the ability to be a wife and mother. If a woman talks to a man, rages against feminism, listens to his plan, and tries to help him with his plan, then he will like her (because he needs her and appreciates her).  Also, it’s important that she have a plan of her own that he can help with, and she should let him help.

Now where do we disagree? Well, I think it’s a bad idea for a man to submit to casual sex with a woman who is unable or unwilling to set boundaries and have a Christian goal for the relationship. I think that casual sex is an inappropriate technique that some women use to make men love them without demonstrating that she really understands him or wants to help him. Sometimes this is done inadvertently because the woman has never learned how to deal with men appropriately, but sometimes it’s done deliberately.

Here are three reasons why men should not accept an offer of casual sex:

Reduced courting capability

A lot of men spend a lot of time and money and the best years of their lives pursuing a lot of different women for sexual gratification. But the pursuit of casual sex takes away from the goal of having a helpful wife and effective Christian children, (e.g. – children like Dr. J or WLC). It takes up time and resources that are better spent on building up teachable responsive girl friends. Chasing non-marriageable women also detracts from learning apologetics and theology in order to impress the tiny minority of women who want an involved nurturing husband and effective children. There is no way to assess a woman’s fitness for marriage and mothering through casual sex. It has no value whatsoever when it comes to courting because it removes the self-control needed for objective evaluation. Casual sex doesn’t show women that you can lead your future children, either.

Reduced vulnerability and romantic capability

I would not be able have sex and separate without suffering permanent emotional damage. In other areas of my life I make lifelong commitments, e.g. – to my pet bird (he’s 20, average lifespan is 15-18), my roadster (mint condition after 10 years), to my friends, (some friendships lasting over a decade), etc. I subscribe to the velcro theory of sexuality – the more you attach and separate, the less well you can attach. I simply do not believe that men who do intimate physical things with women can be as vulnerable and susceptible as when they remain chaste. Casual sex kills the man’s ability to love. If you want to be a knight, you have to be capable of chivalry and romance. If a man has casual sex with enough women, he will likely develop a low opinion of of the trustworthiness, wife-capability and mother-capability of women. He becomes cynical and predatorial.

Causes women to doubt God’s existence

Every woman was made for a relationship with God. When a woman uses sex to try to get a man to pay attention to her, to love her and to commit to her long-term, it usually fails. Sex doesn’t make a man who doesn’t want to marry suddenly want to marry. Without a Christian worldview, the woman may not realize how to tell a good man from a bad man, and how to drive a relationship through to marriage. If a woman has sex with enough men, she may develop a low opinion of the goodness and reliability of men. She may think that she is handling men correctly and that the relationship should work out. But the trauma from failed relationships with unreliable men can cause her to suffer emotionally, and even to doubt God’s existence or goodness.  Christian men should therefore avoid casual sex so that they don’t push women away from relationships with God.

Conclusion

Now I haven’t actually experienced this problem of women throwing themselves at me to make me “love” them, but if someone finally did offer me drunken hook-up sex, I hope that I would remember my little list.

But I might also remember something else.

Consider this passage from “A Man For All Seasons“, a play by Robert Bolt. The lead character Sir Thomas More has refused to compromise with King Henry VIII over the legality of divorce, and now the King wants to have his head chopped off. More’s daughter Meg tries to convince to take the oath supporting the divorce in order to save his own life.

Meg: Then say the words of the oath and in your heart think otherwise.

More: What is an oath then, but words we say to God? Listen, Meg.
When a man takes an oath, he’s holding his own self in his own hands… …like water.
And if he opens his fingers then, he needn’t hope to find himself again.
Some men aren’t capable of this, but I’d be loathed to think your father one of them.

That’s how men should try to be with their chastity. I agree that it is almost impossible not to see things and to think things that are unchaste – but I am talking about doing something unchaste. Men need to avoid that, at least. The problem is that men don’t realize what they are giving up by being unchaste, because they don’t study these issues to know the costs, the lost capabilities to love unselfishly, or the virtues that give them honor with God. No one tells us. Instead of reading “A Man for All Seasons” or “The Faerie Queene”, we pick our role models off the bottom shelf. The schools are no help at all, many parents are busy, and the church just orders people around without any arguments or evidence.

But my main point is that even if there wasn’t a woman left in the world who believed in chastity, courting, marriage and family, that would still not be a justification for a Christian man to give up on his ideal of chastity.

I am pretty opposed to marriage right now because of the way society and government has gone with divorce courts, feminism, public schools, high taxes, etc. But even if marriage seems irrational now, I still think that offers of casual sex should be rejected. I can still make friends with Christian women and treat them nicely. Maybe something will change… lower taxes, school choice, marriage penalty abolished, shared parenting, charter marriages, etc., and then marriage will make sense again. Right now, it just seems like there are too many policies that make it irrational.

Other resources

For anyone who would like to see chastity in action, I recommend picking up the old 1960s spy series “Danger Man” on DVD, starring Patrick McGoohan. You can see some videos here and here. I like to give these as gifts, along with movies about virtue like “A Man For All Seasons”, “We Were Soldiers”, “Amazing Grace”, “Horatio Hornblower”, “Gettysburg”, “The Crossing”, “Henry V”, “Ivanhoe”, “Cyrano de Bergerac”, “Bella”, “Fireproof”, etc.

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Commentary

Dennis Prager explains the conflict between liberty and equality

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A classic column by well-known Jewish scholar Dennis Prager.

Excerpt:

Right and the left do not want the same America.

The left wants America to look as much like Western European countries as possible. The left wants Europe’s quasi-pacifism, cradle-to-grave socialism, egalitarianism and secularism in America. The right wants none of those values to dominate America.

The left wants America not only to have a secular government, but to have a secular society. The left feels that if people want to be religious, they should do so at home and in their houses of prayer, but never try to inject their religious values into society. The right wants America to continue to be what it has always been — a Judeo-Christian society with a largely secular government (that is not indifferent to religion). These opposing visions explain, for example, their opposit views concerning nondenominational prayer in school.

[…]The left envisions an egalitarian society. The right does not. The left values equality above other values because it yearns for an America in which all people have similar amounts of material possessions. This is what propels the left to advocate laws that would force employers to pay women the same wages they pay men not only for the same job but for “comparable” jobs (as if that is objectively ascertainable). The right values equality in opportunity and strongly believes that all people are created equal, but the right values liberty, a man-woman based family and other values above equality.

And the same thing goes for education, health care, etc. If a man chooses to work hard so that he can afford to send his children to Christian schools to help them to form a Christian worldview, the left steps in and confiscates his earnings and uses them to operate secular public schools to undermine his children’s worldview. If a man chooses to work hard so that he can buy the best health care for his beloved wife if she gets sick, the left steps in and confiscates his earnings and uses them to pay for breast implants (NHS). They call it equality. But where is a man’s liberty to pursue his life the way he wants to?

By the way, I noticed that Dennis had the chance to speak to the Republicans in Congress.

Here’s a part of his remarks that is relevant:

I have a motto that I offer to you because this is the ultimate moral case for us: “The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.”

We have to learn to make our complex beliefs simple — though never simplistic. And this is our powerful response to government doing more and more for people: “The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.”

And here’s how we explain it: The bigger the government, the less I do for myself, for my family and for my community. That is why we Americans give more charity and devote more time to volunteering than Europeans do. The European knows: The government, the state, will take care of me, my children, my parents, my neighbors and my community. I don’t have to do anything. The bigger question in many Europeans’ lives is, “How much vacation time will I have and where will I spend that vacation?”

That is what happens when the state gets bigger — you become smaller. The dream of America was that the individual was to be a giant. The state stays small so as to enable each of us to be as big as we can be. We are each created in God’s image. The state is not in God’s image, but it is vying to be that. This is the battle you’re fighting. You are fighting a cosmic battle because this is the most important society ever devised, the United States of America.

This conflict between equality and liberty used to be a pretty well understood back when people understood politics and government, but not anymore. Now everyone votes based on their emotions. Compassion, not knowledge.

UPDATE: Andrew comments:

Let me just clarify something regarding EQUALITY: The right believes in both liberty and equality . The difference is that the right believes in “equality of opportunity” while the left believes in “equality of outcomes”. Equality of opportunity is where everyone gets the opportunity to better their lot in life, whether they do so or not. Equality of outcomes refers to the re-distribution of wealth (if you work too hard and do well for yourself your money will be forcibly taken and given to those who don’t work very hard).

Polemics

MUST-READ: Book review of “If there’s a God, why are there atheists?”

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Brian Auten has a new book review posted up at Apologetics 315.

The book is “If There’s A God, Why Are There Atheists?”, by theologian R.C. Sproul. R.C. Sproul is one of my favorite theologians. The book in question has a very, very special place in my heart, because I think that it is one of the major reasons why I was able to resist pernicious ideas like religious pluralism and postmodernism for so long. Once you put on the glasses of Romans 1 and see for the first time what man is really doing with respect to God, you can never see things the same again. I’ll say more about this at the end, but let’s see what Brian wrote first.

When I first saw Brian’s review come up, I had high hopes that he would write something so compelling and delightful that you would all rush out immediately and get a hold of this book right away.

And he did not disappoint!

The review

So often, you hear atheists complaining about religion is nothing but wish-fulfillment or some sort of crutch for people who are frightened by a variety of things. They think that God is invented to solve several problems. 1) how does the world work?, 2) is there meaning to suffering and evil?, 3) why should I be moral?, and 4) what will happen to me and my loved ones when I die?. On the atheistic view, God is just a crutch that people cling to out of weakness and ignorance. But is this really the case?

Sproul starts the book by investigating three atheists who sought to explain religious belief as a result of psychological factors.

Brian writes:

Before tackling the psychology of atheism, Sproul spends a chapter on the psychology of theism, from the perspective of Freud’s question “If there is no God, why is there religion?”11 What follows is an overview of various psychological explanations of theistic belief: Feuerbach’s “religion is a dream of the human mind.”12 Marx’s belief that religion is “due to the devious imagination of particular segment of mankind.”13 And Nietzche’s idea that “religion endures because weak men need it.”14 The author properly reiterates: “We must be careful to note that the above arguments can never be used as proof for the nonexistence of God. They can be useful for atheists who hear theists state that the only possible explanation for religion is the existence of God.”15 That being said, Sproul also reveals what these arguments presume:

Their arguments already presupposed the nonexistence of God. They were not dealing with the question, Is there a God? They were dealing with the question, Since there is no God, why is there religion?16

Sproul points out the weaknesses of each of these approaches and says “there are just as many arguments showing that unbelief has its roots in the psychological needs of man.”

Wow, could that really be true? What are the real reasons why people reject God? Does the Bible have anything to say about what those reasons are?

Brian cites Sproul’s contention:

The New Testament maintains that unbelief is generated not so much by intellectual causes as by moral and psychological ones. The problem is not that there is insufficient evidence to convince rational beings that there is a God, but that rational beings have a natural hostility to the being of God.

[…]Man’s desire is not that the omnipotent, personal Judeo-Christian God exist, but that He not exist.

In Romans 1:18-23, the apostle Paul explains what is really going on:

18The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness,

19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

20For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

21For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.

22Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools

23and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

By now, all my readers know the scientific, philosophical and historical arguments for Christian theism, and you’ve all seen the debates with William Lane Craig and other scholars. So you know that atheists never win these debates, and that not only logic but the entire physical universe, past, present and future, falsifies atheism. What, you don’t believe me? I’ll prove it.

When you ask Daniel Dennett how the universe came into being, he’ll say that it brought itself into being. When you ask Martin Rees what causes the fine-tuning, he’ll tell you about an unobservable multiverse. When you ask Richard Dawkins what created the simplest living cell, he’ll speculate about unobservable aliens in another galaxy – aliens that he knows a priori evolved by natural mechanisms. And so on, and so on. Christopher Hitchens’ entire case against God in his debates is “I don’t like him”. So something else is going on here.

Sproul explains why atheists have to oppose rational argumentation, as well as scientific and historical inquiry.

The cumulative effect of this knowledge that is clearly seen is to leave men ‘without excuse.’ Herein lies the basis of the universal guilt of man. No one can claim ignorance of the knowledge of God. No one can cite insufficient evidence for not believing in God. Though people are not persuaded by the evidence, this does not indicate an insufficiency in the evidence, but rather an insufficiency in man.

[…]The basic stages of man’s reaction to God can be formulated by means of the categories of trauma, repression, and substitution.

[…]If God exists, man cannot be a law unto himself. If God exists, man’s will-to-power is destined to run head-on into the will of God.

And this is the force that is animating atheists today. They get a little bit of knowledge in some obscure field. They don’t want to look stupid in front of their colleagues. They abandon their faith. Maybe there is a financial dimension to their apostasy, (e.g. – Bart Ehrman, Dan Barker). It’s not something they’ve looked into – it’s something they do because of psychological reasons. No atheist disbelieves in God on the evidence – there is no evidence. It’s all just feelings and desires. E.g. – the need to be seen as smart and compassionate.

The rest of the book review, and the book, deals with explaining in detail how atheists respond to an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing Creator/Designer. I encourage you to click through and read the whole book review. You can read the review, and the book, and then investigate for yourself whether atheists really are like that. Two other books to pick up on this topic is Mere Christianity and The Great Divorce, both by C.S. Lewis. And dont forget my recent post on a new book coming out on this exact same topic.

I am really grateful to Brian for taking the time to pull explain the thesis of the book with such perfect quotes. By the way, I left out the best quote of all, but you have to go look through Brian’s review for that!

Note: Brian isn’t nearly as mean as I am, and he probably doesn’t go nearly as far as R.C. Sproul and I do. But I’m telling you this – TRY IT. Go and sit down with these atheists and ask them how they got to be that way. This also works on people from other religions. I’ve tried it on Postmodern relavist “Christians”, Muslims, Hindus, Jews and Mormons. And don’t be mean to them, either. Just because I’m being mean now it doesn’t mean that I am being mean when I investigate other people’s worldviews.

My survey of atheists

By the way, did you all see my survey of atheists that I did a while back? It’s relevant because one of the questions I asked to my volunteers was “How you begin to follow Christ if it suddenly became clear to you that Christianity was objectively true?”. I got some very strange responses that dovetail nicely with Sproul’s book.

Here are a few of the responses:

  • I would not follow. My own goals are all that I have, and all that I would continue to have in that unlikely situation. I would not yield my autonomy to anyone no matter what their authority to command me.
  • I would not follow, because God doesn’t want humans to act any particular way, and he doesn’t care what we do.
  • I would not follow. Head is spinning. Would go to physician to find out if hallucinating.
  • I hope I would be courageous enough to dedicate my life to rebellion against God.
  • I would not have to change anything unless forced to and all that would change is my actions not my values.  I would certainly balk at someone trying to force me to change my behavior as would you if you were at the mercy of a moral objectivist who felt that all moral goodness is codified in the Koran.
  • He would have to convince me that what he wants for me is what I want for me.

This is all part of my series discussing whether morality is rationally grounded by atheism.

Yes, they really think like that! Just ask an atheist those questions and you’ll see how “objective” they really are. Ask them how much time they’ve put in to studying to see if these things are really true.

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