A rambling and too-long article about the feminization of Christianity. In feminist rhetoric, Christianity is an evil tool of The Patriarchy. On the ground, in most parishes and local churches, though, females
dominate, not only in the pews but in the volunteer and paid staff,
making churches an increasingly uncomfortable space for men.
A thought on the man-defining triad of power, courage and skill the
distillation of our ancient hunter-gatherer script of fathering, fighting and feeding. Each one describes a contest with an archetypal
opponent: with women, with other males, and with nature.
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And yet, you know, there's no need for Christianity at all, or indeed Islam -- all there's need for is the ancient "hunter-gatherer script" even when supplemented by the warrior script which becomes the conquering script and which is co-opted into a ruling script.
The author of the article on the feminization of Christianity complains that churches have become a "drill sergeant for husbands." But evidently this is merely a fancy, as is evidenced by the excerpt from “The (Not) Virgin From The Sunday Morning Nightclub."
Church membership seems to me to be much more than 60% female. If guys aren't attending, they aren't learning the drill sergeant's message.
But if the churches are a drill sergeant, and if welcoming domination and getting boss'd around by a drill sergeant is what true noble manhood ought to mean for young guys, then surely churches are right to come around to the "ancient hunter-gatherer script" in this way. Jack Donovan should be pleased.
Away with sacred doctrine! What young men long to do is march uncomplainingly into journalistic-ecclesiastical man-bashing machine gun fire for the glory of the "father"land! Preferable anyway to experiencing deep meaningfulness via stepping on a land mine in Indo-China.
And yet, I suppose, withstanding machine gun fire from a pulpit that no longer threatens anyone with hellfire after death isn't that exciting. Better to stay home and play military video games.
Some MSM experts have complain'd recently that video game-playing 30-something men aren't "mature" enough to toil for 30-something women who want to stop sleeping around or giving FWB and instead get marry'd and raise a family.
But doing so would be insensitive to the lords and ladies of our culture. Almost no cultural effort has gone into the meaning of marriage and family. Apparently we all -- men and women -- believe that it is only "staying home and baking cookies." If raising children is contemptible for women to do, it is contemptible for men to do -- contemptible even for men to have supported a women raising children in the old days. Incomparably more impressive (amour-propre gratifying) to get a law degree and work for children's rights or do think-tank journalism than to have children of one's own.
On the other hand, the lords and ladies of our culture have apportion'd tremendous resources to video games -- hardware and software. For guys to abandon these things for the sake of raising a family for the approval convey'd in the label "matureness" would be as if medieval burghers scoff'd at Chartres cathedral as no great achievement.
P.S. The virtù involved in video games ought not to be dismiss'd as of no account simply because in such games boys aren't kill'd, crippled, blinded or have burning phosphorus pour'd on them in trenches from airplanes.
War's implements are culture-specific. A ttenage gangster with a Mac-10 could gun down all the Spartans at Thermopylae, but this reality is not consider'd by military historians to make the Spartans, who fought using shields and swords, contemptible or irrelevant. A war fought by video technics is similarly not contemptible. The same gangster could kill Leibniz and Spinoza or Descartes and Pascal in conversation with each other. A Spartan could have stab'd Homer with his sword while Homer was composing the ancestor-mocking Iliad. That doesn't make the gangster more noble and manly than Leibniz and Spinoza and Descartes and Pascal, or the Spartan more noble and manly than Homer. (Sparta's men were dominated by women -- despite Spartan men's reputation in today's agitprop for 100%-homosexuality plus total bravery.)
We would see this immediately if the political overlordship of Alsace-Lorraine had been determined by a video-game contest between a German champion and a French champion. Or decided by a chess match in 1871, and then in 1914.
Seems to me the matter of easy divorce which the article author complains of isn't a real problem. ... First of all, childraising or staying home and baking cookies may be contemptible as a purpose compared with having a career, but it is necessary for prestigious purposes. Ferdinand Foch and his soldiers were all raised by persons who stay'd at home and baked cookies. MacArthur had to be raised just so so that he would obediently not destroy the bridges from China over the Yalu River. ...
But some womengirls are addicted to this contemptible purpose, and our culture exploits this addiction in order to maintain the production of personnel units. Many women, allegedly especially in some demographics, will even go ahead and have several children without the least expectation that the biological father will co-habit or contribute any financial support; stingy welfare payments and grim public housing are sufficient! ... It's a wonder to me that womengirls of the educated class who have opportunities to do something with real importance, namely a bourgeois career, waste time and energy on child-raising at all, unless maybe to write op-ed articles or a book about their experience of pregnancy and parenthood.
(By "educated class" BTW we must now mean not those with just any post-secondary degree, but a "meaningful" post-secondary degree, or two, from a real university; and not e.g. a bachelor's degree in business or whatnot from a state school or even an online distance 'education' "university." Unless one attends the proper sort of university, one can have a post-secondary degree but also for example be an American anti-Darwin creationist autodidact, or a Canadian who doesn't revere the CBC.)
The author doesn't state why he objects to easy divorce. Perhaps he objects for the sake of the children. Yet his remarks could permit the conclusion that he objects for guys' sake: for it seems to be his opinion that ecclesiastical-journalistic drill sergeants encourage women to conclude that their husbands aren't good enough and accordingly may use divorce law to get rid of their husband when they wish -- and maintain custody of the children and get support payments.
But what is the basic situation he addresses? A husband is so odious to his wife that she would like to get rid of him even though the support payments he will be required to send will be much less than what his entire income would be, and even though a woman with children in tow has almost no chance of marrying again. In what way would abolishing divorce improve the situation? We are to believe that the husband is happy in the marriage even though his wife would rather be free of him?
What our culture seems to be doing, then, is to depend on womengirls' addiction to child-raising for procreation of children. Financial support is to come from mothers' own pay'd employment outside the home, plus some support payments from the biological or ostensibly biological fathers, or plus welfare. It's a system of neglect for childraising, but then we all agree that raising children was only staying home and baking cookies. Today for some demographics of womengirls, it is baking cookies while also toiling for the Man in pay'd employment outside the home. But if sufficient procreation is happening, then there's no need to throw more money at it, let alone any increased valuational respect.
Womengirls who raise children enjoy the sub-human, animialistic gratification that this experience has for these children. Since womengirls with little or no maternal aspiration aren't pressured by religio-moral culture into marriage and family, our culture can rest confident that the womengirls who do go ahead with parenthood will tend to ensure that future generations of womengirls will want to do this. That is, womengirls without maternal aspirations will tend to be Darwinistically weeded out of the gene pool.
The "chump" fathers, as the author refers to them, who do marriage for a while and then are divorce by the wife who sticks them with support payments don't have the animalistic gratifications that the mothers have. But again, since clever guys will avoid this sort of trap in order to focus on career and lifestyle, chump-ness in men will be reinforced by breeding patterns. Cleverness that avoids chump work will tend to be weeded out of the gene pool. The future seems secure, as least in this way.
I see, then, no Darwinian objection to the behaviour complain'd of by the author in the no-longer-young women from who have been doing FWB with exciting guys in their 20s and then decide to feign Christian morals in order to wait for marriage before giving sex -- to the less exciting guy (a "chump" if you will) that she intends to marry (if only until one or possibly two children have been begotten).
As for the harmful psychological effects of divorce on children: psychical derangement, neediness, semi-criminality can be advantageous to the emerging culture. Off-line organizations -- call them "gangs," call them "priesthoods" accordingly as you prefer -- will be able to completely replace the authority of the "nuclear" family. As Herbert Marcuse proved, sublimation is unjust. What's really wrong isn't "immorality" but oppression, exploitation etc by racism, sexism, capitalism or class. Oppression has been possible only by the special claims made possible by Christian revelation, and the glory of this that or the other authority figure. ... The threat of Christian dominion founded in grace has been the power of capitalism or whereby Selfs were deprived of 'surplus value'. Locke only arranged that everyone agree to put his ultimate concern in the transcendent God (he forbids atheism to Selfs, since neighbours can't threaten to inform on an atheist Self and thereby enforce conformity with the system). By alienating the "shadow" side of one's self, surplus value accrues to the transcendent God. As Rousseau says, derision is a thousand times more wounding for philosophic pride than having to drink hemlock (First Discourse i [¶33]).
But Herbert Marcuse de Sade arranges for the abolition of surplus value -- if anything what is alienated to the transcendent God is a nobler or at least less disgusting concept of one's self, not a baser concept. A Marcusean Self's "Shadow" is in a way a finer aspect than the sunshiney aspect reveal'd by a Self who starts by letting it all hang out. A sub- Darwinian slob who apparently doesn't even care about surviving let alone 'higher' interpretations surely can't be control'd or shamed by cultural authorities inform'd by Freud or Darwin or whomever. "Honest" (socially conformist) sublimation-rejecting selfing surely doesn't have a "shadow" he denies.
Marcuse's moral system permits journalistic claims that the pornographer is a fine citizen, or at least not part of the problem the way Hitler was, or Apartheid -- especially if the pornographer is pro-choice and supports social spending. I mean, who is worse -- Jean Calvin and Oliver Cromwell, or Hugh Hefner and Pat Robertson? If pornography makes guys even more odious as boyfriends or temporary husbands, this will tend to confirm the divorce culture, which is so helpful in removing family authority from the culture, while also potentiating independent criminal or sacerdotal patriarchies for fatherless boys.
My remarks here should not be construed as obedience to Zarathustra's "push what is falling," for for I don't agree that the desublmation system is collapsing. In a real way, desublimation is an edification, an honesty or honnêteté. The wasteland doesn't need containing if we see in it a great edification. Desublimation morality seems to be able to affirm, not conceal, that the ego is hateful, odious. ... Even if porno tends to erode birth pattterns further in some demographics, the West can import personnel from poor nations for some decades yet. And how much "personnel" is needed anyway, since so little labour really needs to be done? Very few people are needed to do the farming, mining, manufacturing, shipping, etc required to produce necessary goods and their delivery. The rest is make-work -- computer tending, lawyering, op-ed journalism, entertainment, the evangelicalization of the RCC, etc.
If at some point there's too few personnel units to do the mining that's necessary, say, some lawyers could be re-assign'd to this task. (Everyone has agreed in principle that we're all one diverse-divorce community of own'd co-owners of everything. If the Man wants to send you from the Beltway to Appalachia in order to operate heavy machinery in a coal mine, well, you've already agreed to go!) If this re-apportioning of human resources causes a shortage of lawyers, the law system could be put into regular English -- Al Gore once porposed this -- in order to diminish the number of lawyers necessary. And so on.
Formerly the structures had a serious purpose, namely Christian civilization. But Christianity and its aftermath (Marx, existentialism, Nietzsche) have been rejected. Even 'desublimation' isn't really a task but only the ruining of the residue of Christianity. Once God's pilgrim people -- led by the RC hierarchy -- has pilgrimaged right out of the world qua perdition, there won't be any Christian residue. In that glorious glory-free and free-glory day neither teacher nor pornographer will have to labour to confound Christian idealism. Sheer horizonlessness will reign. Then we will be able to ease up on the tremendous desublimation efforts and simply stroll around whistling -- as Rousseau originally advocated, eh? -- except for those few who lose in an ongoing lottery system and have to toil at producing and delivering the goods and services that are strictly necessary (food, clothing, housing etc).
In the meantime, what could be more Christian than for the power system of perdition to obey Jesus's beatitudes to do no work for the oikoumene, and to give away others' wealth?
The author rightly implies that future Christianity even in the west won't bother with revelation. What he doesn't mention is that there's no need for Christianity at all without revelation. Proposing restoration of a male-only clergy and even islam-style "segregation by gender" in the assembly (ecclesia) could be important only if Christian doctrine is to be preserved.
P.S. One could say that womengirls have choice between the liberal package of increasing indecentness plus increasing social spending package on the one hand, and the conservative package of decency but diminish'd social spending on the other. Conservatives, however, aren't offering much if any decency; so womengirls may as well go for the liberal package since it does at least offer increased social spending.
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