Tag Archives: Worldview

Does contemporary Christian music build up a lasting Christian faith?

Here’s an interesting account by a young woman who became secular by becoming very involved in Christian music and then jumped to secular music because it was better music.

Excerpt:

“Who’s in the House” is a hip-hop track about the presence of the Lord. Through megaphone distortion, Carman rapped a few lines: “You take him high / you take him low / you take JC wherever you go,” then led into a call and response hook reminiscent of ’80s-era De La Soul. “Tell me who’s in the house? JC!”

If you’re wondering what teenager in her right mind would listen to a forty-year-old Vegas showman with a Jersey accent rap about Jesus, the answer is: me. In junior high, I saw Carman in concert three times. The Standard was the first CD I ever bought. I rocked out to Carman on my Walkman on the way to youth group and dished with my girlfriends about what a hottie he was. At the concerts, I bought his T-shirts and posters, and when he called out “Who’s in the House?” I made my arms into letters, YMCA-style, with the rest of the crowd and shouted “JC!”

I was homeschooled up until tenth grade, and my social life revolved around church. I grew up submersed in evangelical youth culture: reading Brio magazine, doing devotions in my Youth Walk Bible, eagerly awaiting the next installment of the Left Behind series, and developing a taste in music that ran the gamut from Christian rap to Christian pop to Christian rock.

And she ends with this:

Basically, CCM caught on to the number one rule of coolness: don’t let your marketing show. The best bands—the successful ones, at least—learned to gloss over the gospel message the same way TV producers camouflaged corporate sponsorship. Explicitly Christian lyrics prevented DC Talk from crossing over to the secular market in the ’90s; today it’s difficult to imagine their unapologetic faith making it in the Christian circuit.

This trend spreads beyond CCM into many areas of evangelical culture. The church is becoming increasingly consumer-friendly. Jacob Hill, director of “worship arts” at New Walk Church, describes the Sunday service music as “exciting, loud, powerful, and relevant,” and boasts that “a lot of people say they feel like they’ve just been at a rock concert.” Over the past ten years, I’ve visited churches that have Starbucks kiosks in the foyer and youth wings decked out with air hockey tables. I’ve witnessed a preacher stop his sermon to play a five-minute clip from Billy Madison. I’ve walked into a sanctuary that was blasting the Black Eyed Peas’s “Let’s Get it Started” to get the congregation pumped for the morning’s message, which was on joy. I have heard a pastor say, from a pulpit, “Hey, I’m not here to preach at anyone.” And yet, in spite of these efforts, churches are retaining only 4 percent of the young people raised in their congregations.

Despite all the affected teenage rebellion, I continued to call myself a Christian into my early twenties. When I finally stopped, it wasn’t because being a believer made me uncool or outdated or freakish. It was because being a Christian no longer meant anything. It was a label to slap on my Facebook page, next to my music preferences. The gospel became just another product someone was trying to sell me, and a paltry one at that because the church isn’t Viacom: it doesn’t have a Department of Brand Strategy and Planning. Staying relevant in late consumer capitalism requires highly sophisticated resources and the willingness to tailor your values to whatever your audience wants. In trying to compete in this market, the church has forfeited the one advantage it had in the game to attract disillusioned youth: authenticity. When it comes to intransigent values, the profit-driven world has zilch to offer. If Christian leaders weren’t so ashamed of those unvarnished values, they might have something more attractive than anything on today’s bleak moral market. In the meantime, they’ve lost one more kid to the competition.

So, I’d like to look at whether listening to contemporary Christian music is a good way to build a strong faith that lasts.

Should people sing about things that they don’t know are true?

I would not be comfortable singing about a state of affairs that I did not know was true. And yet, that is exactly what happens in churches and youth groups. Young people are brought up to sing about a story without any evidence that the story is true. Imagine what that does to a person – what are they thinking about the purpose of the singing? They don’t know these things are true, but they sing anyway! And as they grow up, the church makes it a badge of honor to speak only about what the Bible says, and never links what the Bible says to anything in the real world. Naturally, as soon as children hit the university, they fall away. Their questions about the problem of evil, the problem of suffering, the problem of world of religious pluralism, the hiddenness of God, justice of Hell, etc. were never answered.

I think this anti-intellectual approach is really damaging. The impression of Christianity that young people will have is that truth doesn’t matter, that you can sing about something just to be part of a group, and for emotional pleasure. Then with the end-of-the-world fiction and other Christian fiction – all for enjoyment, and all not connected to knowledge. How does any of that connect to the real world? When young people are taught that being a Christian has no connection to reason, evidence or the real world, then their Christianity doesn’t survive leaving the safety of their home and church. If Christian parents wanted their children to be able to integrate their faith with what is taught at the university, then they would have to do better than singing, end-of-the-world fiction, praying about romantic relationships, and so on.

Christian music reinforces the idea that Christianity makes you feel good

The problem with Christian music is that a person listening to it can quickly develop the idea that what Christianity is about is having happy feelings, because people feel happy when listening to music. I’ve noticed that a lot of Christians leave the faith because they have this idealized notion that the world should be a happy place, where no one ever feels bad. Then they find verses in the Bible that are exclusive and judgmental, and they leave the faith because Christianity is too “mean”. This is especially the case with young women who are inclined to doubt God’s existence because of the problem of evil and the doctrine of Hell. If young women are not aware of the reasons why Christianity is true, then the experience of being perceived by others as “mean” can cause them to abandon their faith. Social pressure is an enormous factor in the behavior of women – they want to be accepted and liked by everyone.

Those emotions of compassion and intuitions about happiness are not compatible with hard verses of the Bible and exclusive Christian doctrines. Many people If we teach children that happiness and doing good things are what Christianity is about, then eventually they will dump it when the open profession of their faith causes them to have bad feelings and to lose friends. I think Christian women especially feel pressure to jettison Christian rules when it comes to dating and marriage – because they want to be happy, and they think that the rules shouldn’t stop them from pursuing happiness. If they don’t know why the rules are there (truth) then they will just reject anything that conflicts with their intuitions, emotions and desire to be happy. If the purpose of life is to have good feelings about yourself, and to have everyone like you, then Christianity is not the answer. If the purpose of life is to know the truth and to live according to it, then Christianity is the answer.

English is not a subject that is very friendly to Christian beliefs

I note that she seems to have studied English at the undergraduate level and is currently studying it at graduate level, which I think is significant. English is well known to be a hotbed of postmodernism, deconstructionism, feminism and socialism on campuses. She would therefore be under enormous pressure there to abandon her faith, especially in order to get good grades. Nothing that she did as a young person would equip her to deal with the pressure from peers and teachers when challenged on her Christian faith. Singing, reading fiction, Bible reading and prayer do not help a young person who is confronted by peer pressure and secular left professors holding the grading pen – especially in English where marking of essays is subjective.

My first career choice was to be an English teacher – I won simultaneous awards for English and Computer Programming in high school (public school, not homeschool). But then I took an early university course in English, while still a high school student, and realized that it had been compromised by feminism and postmodernism and other untestable ideologies. Personally, I think that mathematics, computer science and engineering are much safer fields for Christians to study. My background is in computer science, and I have an undergraduate and graduate degree in that area. These areas are safer because it is much harder for the professors to inject politics into the curriculum, so that students don’t have to be forced to accept things on faith, without any critical thinking or debate. Math features answers that are right or wrong regardless of politics, and programming features programs that either run or not, regardless of religion.

It’s not a good idea to stay a student all your life

To be a Christian, it helps to be able to have your own source of income so that you can buy books and debates to learn with. I have been working in the field of computer science for 15 years, starting in middle school, and have saved pretty much everything I’ve earned. I saved about half of what I make. I never take money from the government, although I accepted scholarships from the university because I just considered it a reduction in tuition. The problem with getting things for free is that you get what other people give you – in this case, the government and the university. If you want to rebel against the secular leftist zeitgeist, you have to have arms to rebel with – and arms cost money. William Lane Craig debates and F.A. Hayek books cost money. And you can’t depend on the government or the university to provide you with those.

Our CCM woman seems to have been a student all her life. She doesn’t have the skills or the money to make it on her own. She has to agree with them in order to get tuition, student loans, etc. – in order to live away from her parents. This would be another pressure on her to turn away from her Christian faith. She is trapped by not having any marketable skills that would allow her to earn a living without having to agree with anyone’s views. Students also have the things they read handed to them – it’s much harder for her to find the time to read things that the professors don’t want her to read – and she could never bring those things up in class safely anyway. A lot of people who thrive on being told that they are good prefer to stay in school where it is easy to just do whatever the (secular left) teacher says in order to get good grades.

Avoid women who do not know why they believe what they say they believe

I just want to reiterate to Christian men that they should be asking questions of Christian women before falling in love with them, to make sure they know why they believe what they say they believe. Here are some questions to ask to find out if a woman is a solid Christian that should help men to detect women like the one who wrote the essay. This post may also be useful. Christian men: be careful with women like this who look good, but who fall away. Don’t get hurt.

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Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, Elin Nordegren, Elizabeth Edwards and Maria Shriver

All of these women were cheated on, to some extent, by their spouses:

  • Hillary Clinton is the wife of Bill Clinton.
  • Huma Abedin is the wife of the Anthony Weiner.
  • Elin Nordegren is the wife of Tiger Woods.
  • Elizabeth Edwards is the wife of John Edwards.
  • Maria Shriver is the wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

So what do they all have in common?

Andrew Klavan explains a common mistake that each of these women made when choosing their spouse.

Excerpt:

I wanted to take a serious look at this situation and get at the reasons men such as Weiner behave in this grotesque way.

I blame women.  No, really.  Women — by which I mean each and every single member of the female gender — you know who you are — need look no further than themselves to explain why Weiner-types behave toward them in this fashion.   We men are always hearing complaints from women about how badly we treat them, what pigs we are, how pushy and abrasive…  on and on.  But what these same women conveniently fail to mention is that this stuff really works on them!

Charles C. Johnson writing about Weiner’s johnson at Big Government reports that the media has long described Weiner as “a lean, mean dating machine,” who has “a bevy of babes surrounding him,” wherever he goes.  In other words, this guy has been cleaning up in the romantic department.  Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t seem to have any trouble getting dates either.  Neither did alleged serial rapist Dominique Strauss-Kahn of the IMF.  Chicks dig these creeps!

So, then, ladies — what do you expect?  All we guys want is for you to love us.  If this is the sort of guy you follow after in droves, this is the sort of guy we’re encouraged to be.  And I have to admit:  I don’t get it.  I look at Weiner and I see a rude, arrogant, entitled and clearly dishonest little piece of Democrat thoroughly convinced of his wholly non-existent superiority.  Physically, he’s a dead ringer for a turtle that’s been pulled out of its shell.  And as for his manners…  did I mention he takes pictures of his absurdly eponymous package and sends them to women on Twitter!

And that’s the sort of stuff that wins you over, ladies?  Well, if it is, expect to see a lot more of it.  It’s Darwin 101:  men evolve to attract the opposite sex.  By natural law, women get what they want from men…  it hardly seems fair for them to complain about it when it turns up in their inbox.

So women, here’s some free advice.  Stop dating creeps.  It only encourages them.

Now, I don’t think that Klavan’s criticism applies to ALL WOMEN, only to women who have not though carefully about the requirements of marriage for men and women, and how to test men to see if they have what it takes to handle their responsibilities. It’s THOSE women who end up with men who cheat.

So how should women test men for marriage?

Here are some questions that the five women who chose these disgusting creeps for husbands SHOULD have asked:

  1. What is the public purpose of marriage?
  2. What are the expected public outcomes of a good marriage?
  3. Does chastity before marriage provide any indication about a person’s ability to stay faithful in a marriage?
  4. What should men and women bring to a relationship so that they are able to perform expected marital behaviors?
  5. Is marriage more about self-indulgence or about self-sacrifice? Can you get used to self-sacrifice by being self-indulgent?
  6. If a person is pro-abortion, what do they believe about taking responsibility to avoid harming others with their poor decisions?
  7. If a person is pro-same-sex marriage, what do they believe about the needs of children compared to the needs of adults?
  8. If a person believes in wealth redistribution, do they have a correct understanding of working, saving and investing?
  9. Does a person’s superior appearance, wealth, or power determine whether they will be faithful in a marriage?
  10. Can you cause your spouse to be faithful by spending a lot of money on a wedding?
  11. Can you cause your spouse to be faithful by inviting famous people to your wedding?
  12. Is it a good idea to choose someone to marry who your parents and elders disapprove of?
  13. Is it a good idea to choose whether to have sex with someone using “the 180-second rule”?
  14. Is it a good idea to choose someone to marry in order to impress your friends (or to make them jealous)?
  15. Is it a good idea to marry someone because most of your friends are getting married?
  16. Is it a good idea to avoid studying the effects of divorce on children prior to marrying?
  17. Can you expect a spouse to adhere to objective moral obligations without a knowledge of God’s existence, grounded on evidence?
  18. Can you expect a spouse to adhere to objective moral obligations without a knowledge of God’s character, grounded on evidence?
  19. Does holding a Bible for a photo-op make someone into a William Lane Craig or a Wayne Grudem?
  20. Does singing praise hymns in church make someone into a William Lane Craig or a Wayne Grudem?

Those last items are to show that you really cannot have a moral standard that is binding unless there is some way that the universe ought to be, because it was designed to be a certain way by a Designer. If a person is convinced that there is a Designer who made people, it rationally grounds the idea that there is a way that humans ought to act – independently of how we may feel individually, or even in different cultures in different places and times. The more a man knows whether God exists and knows what God is like as a person – based on evidence – the more seriously that man will try to incorporate God’s personality into his decision making. A serious study of the evidence for God’s existence and character helps people to take moral obligations to others more seriously – especially when they don’t FEEL LIKE IT. That is why marriages where both spouses attend church regularly last. Women need to be asking men these worldview and morality questions, and insisting on seeing the behaviors that raise the probability of having a stable marriage to a faithful man.

Basically, instead of relying on feelings and peer approval to choose a man, women need to ask men questions to find out whether they are trustworthy and equal to the tasks that men perform as husbands and fathers. I don’t think that women who were cheated on really asked questions about their chosen spouse’s worldview, and how the man’s worldview grounded moral obligations, such as the obligation NOT to cheat. It seems that today, a well-grounded worldview that grounds moral obligations is regarded by some women as being superfluous to marital stability. I guess they think that fidelity is basically random – that Elliot Spitzer is as likely to be a faithful spouse as James Dobson. They just don’t ask men to explain what they believe and why, and why any particular man can be trusted to make moral decisions. And they shouldn’t be satisfied with words – they should demand to see evidence that the man has studied these issues, written about them, debated with others about them, and acted on these convictions personally.

I think that women today are also giving up their responsibility to read about marriage and parenting, to read about risks and challenges that threaten stable marriages, like no-fault divorce laws and cohabitation, and to read about how important it is to stay married because of how divorce affects children. Women should not abdicate the responsibility to judge men, they should not say that “men are unpredictable”, and they should not set themselves up as helpless victims. They need to keep men at arm’s length, keep their wits about them and do the work of evaluating men for the roles that men play in marriage and family.

Character and knowledge count. Just because a man can put on a show for you, it doesn’t mean that he is capable of producing the results of a thoughtful Christian worldview.

What does Dr. Laura say about marriage?

“Commitment to marriage and child rearing was once viewed as the pinnacle of adulthood identity, so that women looked carefully for the “right” man for the job, and parents were consulted for opinions and blessings.”
Source: Dr. Laura Schlessinger, The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands, page 53.

You can read more about the Anthony Weiner scandal here. Bill Clinton officiated at Anthony Weiner’s wedding. Huma Abedin was the personal assistant of radical feminist Hillary Clinton. Ironic, isn’t it?

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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?

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