Christianity yields to Zoism

(That is Zoism, the politically incorrect term for primitive religion, not Zionism, the theory that Jews need a homeland and heavy weapons because people keep trying to kill them)

Theoretically, most western people still consider themselves Christian – including those that think that Jesus gay married Buddha and from time to time the loving couple visit earth in a flying saucer. But it is not the Christianity of 1950 or 1960. In the period 1900 to 1970, “Christianity” underwent changes that would have rendered it scarcely recognizable to anyone from the past two millenia, changes that render it psychologically inconsistent and no longer viable as religion. Christianity’s time has ended, and the question is what system shall replace it, the main contenders now being Islam, itself afflicted by a related deadly ailment, and state sponsored Gaia worship. Mormonism and Orthodox Judaism are the healthiest remaining deistic religions, and will win in the long run if deism wins, but it is not obvious that deism will win.

An essential part of the definition of Zoism is that it is a magical belief system that resembles those of savages. The term is part of the now forbidden frame work for understanding cultures and civilizations that assumes that civilization is better, that some races and cultures are better than others due to race and or culture, and that savages are apt to be savage, simple minded, cruel, ignorant, and self destructive.

Unwin categorizes religious belief in four levels:

  1. Zoism – subhuman, animal level culture.A zoistic society has no religious beliefs – it is not that they do not believe in the supernatural, but rather that they do not believe in the natural.  At a zoistic level of culture all influential and high prestige people engage in magical thinking, attributing to themselves and other people capabilities rationalists would consider supernatural. They dispose of the dead like garbage, and do not tend the graves of the dead.
  2. Manism. Some special men are attributed supernatural powers, much more than regular men. These men engage in mystical chants, and rattle magical stones and necklaces, as for example, the expert witness in a silicone or asbestos lawsuit. These special men can smell out other men who use their magical powers to do harm, thus witchfinders and radioactive pollution.
  3. Deism: We all know what deism is. Deism with god far away, a god who dumped problems on us and commands us to solve them as best we can, is pretty close to being rationalism.
  4. Rationalism: There is no supernatural, or if there is it is far, far away, and long, long ago, in the next world, not this one.

Notable exponents of Zoism are Oprah, and the best selling book “The Secret”. “The Secret” is teaching the popular message that optimism will cause magic, that if you expect good things to happen they will.

If you expect good things to happen, you may well be more inclined to take the risk of trying to make them happen, but this is not what “The Secret” preaches. It preaches that you can do magic, that good things will be caused by your thoughts, not by an empirical chain of cause and effect wherein your thoughts cause you to act, and your actions cause good things to happen.

Unwin’s studies of various societies suggests that where paternity is uncertain or unimportant, where fathers lack authority, societies tend drift down the scale of religions, from rationalism to Zoism, hence the death of Christianity. Patriarchal socities tend to move up the scale, matrilineal societies down the scale. Abrahamic religions are the religions of patriarchs.

Christianity used to be an unambiguously patriarchal religion. From the death of Jesus to before the second world war all Christians, all of them, one hundred percent believed, or at least made a pretense of believing, that at marriage the wife promised to love honor and obey till death do us part. All of them, one hundred percent believed, or at least made a pretense of believing, that a divorced women should not remarry, nor should a man marry a divorced woman. They notoriously tended to weasel around this in practice, but hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue. All Christians, all of them, one hundred percent believed, or at least made a pretense of believing, that in marriage a man and a woman consented to sex once and forever, that the wife had no right to withhold sexual gratification from the husband, nor the husband from the wife, that sex in marriage did not require continuing mutual consent, rather, to abstain from sex required mutual consent.

The Christian position on consent sounds in form as equalist as any modern leftist could desire, but in practice, because of unadmitted large differences between men and women, tended to favor the authority of the husband and undermine the power of the wife.

However the contrary position, that sex requires continuing mutual consent, as well as empowering the wife, necessarily leads to the result that marriage requires continuing mutual consent, necessarily leads to no fault divorce at will, abolishes marriage as Christians understood marriage for two thousand years.

These three positions:

  1. That the wife honors and obeys,
  2. that divorce is forbidden (especially for females),
  3. and that withholding sex from one’s husband or wife is forbidden,

are social conservatism.  For two thousand years, Christianity was socially conservative.

One cannot today find a single Church that maintains these principles, and it is hard to find a Christian rightist so extreme as to endorse any of these principles. From everyone endorsing all three positions we have gone to no one endorsing any of these positions, with most of the change occurring in my lifetime.

There are some churches that equivocally tell us that the husband should “lead”, but the marriage oath did not say “follow”, it said “obey”.  In my marriage, I am the boss and always have been, and any marriage where the husband is not the boss, is apt to fall apart pretty quickly. You will not find any Church that says the husband should be the boss.

Today, there are no Christian social conservatives, none.  If we are to revive social conservatism, must revive it on Darwinian grounds, or perhaps on the basis of a religious or quasi religious movement as yet unimagined.

If you abolish marriage (what social conservatives mean by marriage) empirically the consequence is apt to be the abolition of Abrahamic religions. Abrahamic religions caused socially conservative marriage, and correlation suggests that socially conservative marriage caused Abrahamic religions.

In a previous post I gave a more detailed account of these various kinds and levels of religion, and other examples of zoistic thinking by influential and powerful people in our society.

The distinguishing feature of Zoistic thinking is that mere desire or belief is sufficient to allegedly be the cause of the effect, without any need for the Zoist to provide a material explanation of cause and effect. Bad beliefs supposedly lead directly to bad outcomes and good beliefs supposedly lead directly to good outcomes without any real effort to provide a material account of belief causing actions and actions directly causing effects. Thus, for example, black criminality and female unreliability is supposedly caused by people expecting blacks to be criminal and females unreliable. Conversely, all government programs supposedly accomplish their intended effect, even if the intended effect is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to accomplish. For example Obamacare will supposedly accomplish numerous logically incompatible objectives, because it creates numerous bureaucracies to accomplish these objectives and tasks them to create regulations to accomplish all these logically contradictory objectives simultaneously. Costs are budgeted on the assumption that these bureaucracies will successfully square the circle.

Zoistic societies tend to high levels of conflict, eventually erupting in high levels of violence, because if anything bad happens, it is supposedly someone’s fault, someone caused the bad thing by thinking bad thoughts, with no need to provide any causal mechanism, any concrete deeds, wherein this bad person’s bad thoughts caused bad consequences through bad deeds. Consider, for example, the various pollution, medical malpractice, and discrimination lawsuits. One does not have to do anything concrete to discriminate or pollute.

The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) regulations on micro particulates are a good example of this. The EPA finds it unnecessary to provide any evidence of concrete deeds that may have raised dust levels, nor concrete evidence that the dust has harmful consequences. Insufficient faith in the EPA is supposedly sufficient to cause harmful levels of dust, and proclamation by authority is sufficient to prove dust harmful. Supposedly the proclamation is based on empirical “studies”, but ordinary mortals are not allowed to see the contents of these studies, providing the nominal form of empiricism and rationalism, but not the substance. The EPA is regulating not dust, which is in practice difficult or impossible to regulate, for reasons painfully familiar, but dangerous thoughts about dust. The EPA therefore, makes state sponsored Zoism mandatory.

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38 Responses to “Christianity yields to Zoism”

  1. Becket says:

    Oh well. We can’t seem to please everybody.
    I’ve read plenty of internet websites charging Christians to change their moral stance, once some do, there are others like yourself to crictise us for doing it.
    There are too many leaps in logic in the passage- patriarchal- socially conservative- etc and even claiming:
    “Today, there are no Christian social conservatives, none. If we are to revive social conservatism, must revive it on Darwinian grounds, or perhaps on the basis of a religious or quasi religious movement as yet unimagined.”
    None? Are you sure? You mean I don’t believe in Love and Marriage? But I do.
    Now, Darwinism? I don’t think so. Social Darwinism was a very sick and silly idea. It led to hunting down Aborigines in Australia. Taking their skulls back to museums around the world to investigate the belief that Aborigines were the link between apes and White man, as well as forcibly removing children from their families to be adopted by whites. Darwinism led to the idea of ‘eugenics’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ and ‘Nazism’.
    Darwin himself ending his days as a sad old racist. Read the “Descent of Man” and Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and count the similarities for yourself. Hitler was inspired by Darwin and Nietzsche. To borrow your term, National Socialism was NOT socially conservative by any means.
    So, no thank you, we Christian believers do not want Darwinism and do not want to co-operate with wacky secular beliefs as some did in the past. We end up being blamed for secular weird parctices.
    But why use terms like Zoism? Why pretend to be saying something new? We’ve heard the death of Christianity for over two thousand years now- it won’t end being said, as the Bible prophesied it won’t, (2Pet 3v3-10) until the day Lord Jesus comes again.
    Take care.

    • jim says:

      Government programs to aid aboriginals in Australia implicitly admit what they explicitly deny – that full blooded aboriginals are subhuman. Government rural housing for aboriginals is zoo housing thinly disguised as human housing. Their more politically correct programs are primarily for “aboriginals” that are predominantly white – in many cases probably entirely white. A lot of white people have declared themselves aboriginals in order to get onto the gravy train of grants, preferences, and subsidies that few actual aboriginals have the necessary competence to utilize, and conversely, those programs that actual full blooded aborigines do utilize, look a lot like services aimed at non human animals.

      The New Testament however takes no position on racial differences, or if it does take a position, its position is, contrary to Darwin, that there are no racial differences, that race does not exist.

      However, the New Testament is mighty clear that gender does exist: That women should serve men, and obey them.

  2. Bruce G Charlton says:

    I’ve come across this

    John Derbyshire the Evangelist by John Zmirak

    http://takimag.com/article/john_derbyshire_the_evangelist#axzz21cllnrrU

    which puts the critique better than I have been able to:

    especially this satirical but precise characterization of the secular Right perspective:

    “… since I only get this one go-round at consciousness before the hungry spark I call my “self” drops like a match into a toilet, why should I trouble myself with the dreary business of reproduction? My DNA may be selfish, but so am “I.” If it’s so bloody determined to replicate itself, it had better rejigger my neurons to offer me a better set of hedonic rewards for taking the effort to do its bidding. So far, no sale.

    “Sure, the tribe tells me that having children is somehow essential to “happiness,” but I’m not convinced. I’ve seen those dreary, weary parents emerging, drained, from Chuck E. Cheese. I’ve read a compelling study that shows the happiest married couples are the childless—who are free to use their resources to gratify their own actual desires, instead of pouring their time and toil into some other, smaller person, to help him gratify his. To this end, men work longer hours at tedious tasks, give up the chance to travel, move out of exciting cities full of cool ethnic restaurants and beautiful buildings into sprawling, sterile suburbs with “decent schools.” They even allow their mates to gain weight that is hard to lose, to accumulate stretch marks and droopy breasts—and all for what?

    “What’s the payoff for those who let entropic “nature” take its course? Best case scenario: If all goes really well and their spawn don’t turn out ugly, stupid, or dead, the parents will gain some secondhand happiness—a warm fuzzy glow acquired vicariously, gussied up with the language of “sacrifice.” I’m doing the math right now, and it adds up to this: Vasectomy.”

    • jim says:

      A lot of people make that decision. And most of them are leftists, who also tend to be markedly more suicidal and less happy than conservatives.

  3. With few local exceptions, until 1545, Christian marriages in Europe were by mutual consent, declaration of intention to marry and upon the subsequent physical union of the parties.

  4. Samson J. says:

    Jim, I was slow in responding to this post because I’ve been thinking about your argument – still thinking about it, in fact, and trying not to trivialize the import of what you say simply because of what I “want” to be true. I do agree that it’s quite stunning that almost no church in the West is willing to demand what *every* church in the West would formerly have demanded about wifely obedience.

    But to go from that to “Christianity no longer exists” – well, I really don’t think this argument holds, and I think you are distorting and magnifying the issue of sexual relations out of all proportion to its actual importance within the Christian faith. The central claim of Christianity is that Jesus died for our sins, and that is the same now as it has been for the past 2000 years.

    I furthermore think that you are confusing a “new interpretation” of the bible with something more akin to laziness. In many cases Christians go along with the feminist/liberal zeitgeist out of laziness, because it takes effort to mentally combat the reigning paradigm, but I would argue that there are a lot of conservative Christians who, if you spelled this out for them very clearly, would understand the point and say, “Hey, yeah, you’re right, we’re doing this wrong nowadays.” My answer to your repeated question, for one, is the same as Vox Day’s: there is no such thing as “marital rape”. But I say this because I’ve had the issue explained to me and I’ve thought about it.

    Here’s a question (since my appreciation for the Roman Catholic Church has been growing): has the Roman Catholic Church altered its position on this question during the past hundred years? I honestly don’t know the answer.

    I see a lot of guff that the husband should lead in the marriage, but this seems to subtly back off from the position that the wife should obey.

    Can you explain where these “husbands as leaders” churches err? Don’t confuse biblical ordinances with Euro-Christian traditions. The explicit statement that a wife should *obey* her husband doesn’t actually appear in the bible. (I mean that the actual word “obey” is not used.)

    Did we get in another prophet when I was not looking, to ditch the disturbing parts of the New Testament, the way we got in a prophet to ditch the disturbing parts of the Old?

    I wish that you would stop saying stuff like this. No “disturbing” parts of the Old Testament were “ditched”, at least not in the sense that you mean. God still loves and hates the things he always loved and hated. “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill”.

    Anyhow, in the end, not everywhere is suburban America, and if you really think Christianity is “dead” I wish you had been at my church this past weekend. We had third-world missionaries visiting, and their tales of brown-person evangelization were pretty encouraging (to me) – that there is life in this Gospel yet.

    • Bill says:

      Here’s a question (since my appreciation for the Roman Catholic Church has been growing): has the Roman Catholic Church altered its position on this question during the past hundred years?

      No and yes. The Church has not formally repudiated its old teachings on marriage. However, actual Bishops and priests don’t tend to ever get around to actually mentioning them. As you may know, our readings at Mass cycle through pretty much the whole Bible over a three year period. — and the relevant passage in Ephesians (below) is read every year. Priests usually shirk their duty to preach on the difficult parts of St Paul. At traditionalist and at very conservative parishes, priests will mention and preach on the difficult bits, but, in general, the practice is to ignore the difficult bits, or even to deny that they mean what they plainly mean. A typical moderate conservative take on this is here. For a traditionalist take, see my links way above.

      This is part of a larger phenomenon, in which most of the Church suddenly stopped talking about all of Her anti-modern teachings in 1965.

      The explicit statement that a wife should *obey* her husband doesn’t actually appear in the bible

      St Paul, in Ephesians, says “Let wives be subject to their husbands as to the Lord: because a husband is head of the wife, just as Christ is head of the Church, being himself savior of the body. But just as the Church is subject to Christ, so also let wives be to their husbands in all things.”

      The actual word “obey” may not appear in this translation, but St Paul is plainly saying that wives should obey their husbands. Chapter 5 of St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is translated in many different ways, some translations using words like “submissive” and “obey.” The King James Version says “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands.” Every attempt at interpreting this away that I have seen has been utterly lame.

    • jim says:

      But to go from that to “Christianity no longer exists” – well, I really don’t think this argument holds, and I think you are distorting and magnifying the issue of sexual relations out of all proportion to its actual importance within the Christian faith.

      When Christianity collides with progressivism, as it very frequently does, which one yields? If it is Christianity that yields, the pastor is preaching progressivism, not Christianity.

      As Screwtape should have said, but did not, the question is “Who, whom?”

      Progressivism is not, in practice, a very attractive faith. It does not need to be, since it replicates via the state. As a result, progressive churches empty out, converted into megaphones of progressivism, used up in the process and turned, as in Britain, into empty shells, museums to a faith that no longer lives.

      It is not that I am worried about the disappearance of Christianity, but rather the disappearance of western civilization. The lek mating pattern does not motivate men to maintain civilization, or reward them for doing so. If Christianity was replaced by some other system wherein prosocial behavior in men led to them having sex and children and living with and raising their biological children, that would be fine with me.

      there are a lot of conservative Christians who, if you spelled this out for them very clearly, would understand the point and say, “Hey, yeah, you’re right, we’re doing this wrong nowadays.”

      And they would say it quietly, after looking over their shoulder to see who might hear them, to see if any progressive members of the congregation might hear them and rat them out to the authorities.

      Can you explain where these “husbands as leaders” churches err? Don’t confuse biblical ordinances with Euro-Christian traditions. The explicit statement that a wife should *obey* her husband doesn’t actually appear in the bible. (I mean that the actual word “obey” is not used.)

      The meaning of “obey” is used. “Lead” as applied in churches submitting to progressivism means that if the wife does not follow, she is not sinning, rather the husband is not doing an adequate job of making her feel like following.

      The problem is that women are tempted to gaining power over their men, to not obeying, but if they succeed in gaining the upper hand, it does not make them happy, but instead breaks up the marriage. So the preacher needs to preach “Don’t do that”. Just as in the ancestral environment, it was impossible for someone to eat too much sugar, in the ancestral environment, it was impossible for the woman to get too much power. To remedy this maladaption, need teaching and social controls.

    • jim says:

      We had third-world missionaries visiting, and their tales of brown-person evangelization were pretty encouraging (to me) – that there is life in this Gospel yet.

      The primary concept of virtue in progressivism is that it demands that you do good to strangers far away, something that Christianity approves of, but does not emphasize to anything like the same extent, and that traditional pre Christian morality rejects entirely. To what extent was the church emphasizing evangelization (Christian) and to what extent was the church celebrating foreign aid providing material benefits (primarily progressive)?

      Progressive foreign aid has generally been utterly disastrous for the recipients. For example:

      1. Tanzania was ravaged by foreign aid far more thoroughly than it was ever harmed by slave raiding pirates, or foreign conquerors demanding tribute in gold, ivory and slaves.
      2. Medical aid wound up with infecting large numbers of people with aids, because the more people at the clinic were infected by dirty needles, the more money the clinic got. Eventually someone noticed that unrealistically high estimates of heterosexual aids in Africa reflected not the number of women with aids in the general population, but the number of women with aids attending clinics funded by white progressives – that African heterosexual aids is not transmitted heterosexually, but progressively, by progressive funding, not promiscuity, that it really should be called progressive aids, not heterosexual aids. The African aids epidemic was half incompetence, half murderous cynicism. They did not really mean to kill all those people, but when they found that they were killing them, they found killing them profitable and politically convenient, so were in no hurry to stop.
      3. “We are the world”, the aid program for the Ethiopian terror famine, which was in fact aid for the government committing the terror, not aid for the peasants whose crops were confiscated or destroyed by state terror.

      Help for strangers far away is apt to be incompetently done, even if sincere, and is apt to be grotesquely insincere. If you were recruiting far away strangers into your church, then that is something that Christianity demands, and that traditional pre christian morality endorses as recruiting allies. If you were funding their aids treatment, you were probably funding murderous progressivism.

      Charity begins at home, and in traditional pre Christian morality, ended not very far from home. Progressive morality begins far, far, away from home, where its consequences are conveniently out of sight.

  5. spandrell says:

    You don’t have daughters do you?

    • jim says:

      No. I do have sisters and nieces though. What would I have learned if I had daughters?

      • spandrell says:

        That some guys are douches who shouldn’t be obeyed. And some are pussies who obey their wives.

        I do like patriarchy in theory, but it doesn’t work like that. The reality of higher man variance means that women always search for weapons against male authority. Even Muslim wives use their extended family to put pressure on their husbands. Family life is messy, couples don’t exist on a vacuum. Not until recently at least.

        And what’s Zoism anyway? Even Papuans honor their dead. Any real world examples? Magical thinking rings very much of ‘manism’ to me.

        • jim says:

          I do like patriarchy in theory, but it doesn’t work like that. The reality of higher man variance means that women always search for weapons against male authority.

          Yes they do. It is in a woman’s nature to fight hard against the authority of her lover. See my post “The ancestral environment of women

          You just have to win. Because if your women win, they will not be happy, and will not even notice that you exist.

          And what’s Zoism anyway? Even Papuans honor their dead.

          Australian aboriginals do not have graves, nor monuments, nor mementos of their dead, except that missionaries organized them. Aboriginal burials are normally found as clusters of human bones eroding from the ground, or exposed during ground disturbance. Sometimes the person was buried with ornaments and mementos, but more usually he had nothing – the survivors took all his stuff and buried the body naked, if they buried it at all. All aboriginal graves are unmarked. Ancient and modern aboriginal “graves” are most commonly found in aboriginal garbage heaps, with large amounts of discarded food residue and food preparation materials, such as shell middens or oven mounds.

          • spandrell says:

            I see it as a status problem, the exercise of authority assumes that the wielder of authority has more status than the other. In the old days if the wife had a more powerful family than the husband’s he was very often screwed too.
            Of course modernity gives woman status by default, which makes the problem worse by an order of magnitude. Still I wonder if women in patriarchal places are ‘happy’. Women in patriarchal couples today are happy because it takes some balls to be patriarchal today.

            BTW if you have some data about micro particulates I would like to see it. I go to China often and it’s easy to get paranoid with the US embassy tweeting daily how we are all gonna die from air pollution.

            • jim says:

              Still I wonder if women in patriarchal places are ‘happy’. Women in patriarchal couples today are happy because it takes some balls to be patriarchal today.

              Looking at Muslim web sites featuring converts to Islam, most of the white converts to Islam are single, divorced, or soon to be divorced females in their high fertility years, often pretty close to their years of maximum fertility or slightly after it, when marriage panic sets in. At the time of conversion, they generally do not have a Muslim boyfriend, but the thought is obviously on their minds.

              In the interviews Christian females converting to Islam often explicitly deny, without anyone asking them, that they are converting to look for a husband. That the denial comes out unprompted suggests that they protest too much.

              Looking at Christian web sites featuring converts from Islam, they are pretty much all males, which indicates that Muslim women are mostly content with their religion.

              White western converts to Islam in Britain outnumber converts from Islam to Christianity by about ten to one. The US may well differ, probably does, since the churches in Britain are in considerably worse shape than the churches.

              BTW if you have some data about micro particulates I would like to see it. I go to China often and it’s easy to get paranoid with the US embassy tweeting daily how we are all gonna die from air pollution.

              I cannot recall the relevant links. It is no longer PC to doubt the deadliness of micro particulates, but the it used to be well known that the lungs have efficient means for cleaning them out, rendering them a non problem unless you are overwhelmed by very large amounts. I would therefore be inclined to suppose that if you cough up stuff to clear your lungs, and the sputum and phlegm is not obviously filthy, you are OK. If it is filthy, the dirt may be overwhelming your capacity to clear it, at which point you should worry – but I have no papers on this point. I am making a conjecture because no one thought microparticulates a big problem until after it became PC that they were a big problem, so no real investigation has ever happened on this issue.

              The main thing in Chinese pollution that really is harmful is sulfur oxides. Safe levels for sulfur dioxide are about three hundred times the EPA safe levels. I say this not on the basis of any scientific papers, for the evils of sulfur oxides have been PC almost as soon as they started investigating air pollution, but on the basis of what happens on Hawaii the big Island:

              The Hawaian volcano routinely creates very high sulfur dioxide levels in densely populated areas. The health effects that the EPA claims for sulfur dioxide only become noticeable at three hundred times to a thousand times the level that supposedly causes these effects. When the level exceeds EPA levels by about a thousand, then people start showing up at hospital with breathing problems. Since the pollution comes and goes, it is a natural experiment on a gigantic scale.

              Killer smog was first noticed in London, when they noticed that people were hitting the hospitals when the smog was so thick as to endanger traffic – you could see only short distance. This is roughly what happens on Hawaii. When the volcanic smog is so thick that you have to slow down, then you get noticeable health effects.

      • Zach says:

        If I was to bounce the question back, and ask you the same thing, would you have an answer?

        Imagine, you had daughters. What influence might that have to your thinking, if any?

  6. Tmanz says:

    “In the period 1900 to 1970, “Christianity” underwent changes that would have rendered it scarcely recognizable to anyone from the past two millenia, changes that render it psychologically inconsistent and no longer viable as religion.”

    I feel that statement has some truth to it, but would definitely like to see more detail. How is modern Christianity psychologically inconsistent, for example?

    • jim says:

      If you don’t believe the politically incorrect parts of the New Testament, you are probably not going to believe any of it, since the politically incorrect bits are precisely the bits which are the most believable and for which we have the most compelling evidence.

      If one believes the founding miracle of Christianity, the resurrection, was true rather than a pious fraud, one would believe it because the New Testament tells one so, and if one believed that because the New Testament tells one so, one would believe in social conservatism because the New Testament tells one so. But there are no Christian Religious Right social conservatives any more.

      In the Christianity of my youth it was pretty disturbing and shocking for a man to marry a divorcee, and women when they got married, swore to love, honor and obey, and were expected to love honor and obey. Today, if you expect your wife to obey, you are some kind of thought criminal, and if she obeys, you are obviously committing a serious crime and getting away with it, which crime the Church piously disapproves of, making the Church no longer the Church, but merely yet another megaphone for the Cathedral of progressivism.

      Progressives, including progressive Christians, like to deny the historicity of Jesus the man, and claim that the gospels were written long, long after the events in question had gone mythical, but on the internal and external evidence, it is clear that the Gospels were written before the execution of James, brother of Jesus, written when the events were still fresh in living memory. There is ample historical evidence that Jesus lived, preached, and was crucified by Pontius Pilate. The evidence that he still lives is, however, considerably less convincing. Which is more likely: That a man would rise from the dead, or that his disciples would ply the guards with wine, steal the corpse, and ring in a Jesus impersonator?

      • Erik says:

        Seemingly the latter. AFAIK, the stock reply is to note that most of the disciples were martyred, and ask in return which is more likely: that men would die for a fraud, or that they would die for a teacher who had shown them death could be overcome?

        • jim says:

          But the main message of progressive Jesus is not that Jesus overcame sin and death, but that we should use nice words and drive priuses, for which message it is entirely standard procedure to lie in support of a higher truth.

          Plus, if you don’t believe the Gospels were written until after the fall of the temple, then you don’t believe any Christian history, in which case there is no evidence that any of the disciples were martyred, or even existed, and the Church is a social club for the propagation of niceness.

  7. Baduin says:

    Its Unwin, not Udwin – it is important for anybody wanting to find it.

    Unwin’s Sex and Culture may be found on the Pirate Bay, and probably on other torrent sites.

    • jim says:

      Thank you. I fixed the error

    • Zach says:

      I got my first copy right here on this blog.

      It may still be lurking somewhere (here) in the refuse, but then again it may not. If it was I’d think Jim would have spoken of it in his reply.

      You can google it too, because I redownloaded it on another blog. For those looking, it’ll pop up somewhere with little effort.

      I shamelessly refused to offer any help at all, really. 🙁

  8. Jehu says:

    Nearly every denomination has churches within it that endorse all three. It’s the functional Remnant for those that like such terms.
    Here’s how you find such a church.
    Don’t go for the fake—doctrinal statements and the like will frequently lead you astray, even the most heretical churches often have shiny statements on shiny webpages.
    Instead, go to the church and estimate the ratio of men to women. If it’s very close to 50/50, you’ve almost certainly got a patriarchal church. Men go where they’re wanted and stay where they’re well treated. Regularly attending and being involved in such a church will give you substantial bonus ‘structural alpha’ (hat tip for this term to Athol) with your wife if she also attends.

    • jim says:

      I have not seen any of these fake or real doctrinal statements that endorse the new testament position on sex and marriage. Perhaps I am looking in the wrong places. I see a lot of guff that the husband should lead in the marriage, but this seems to subtly back off from the position that the wife should obey.

      • Jehu says:

        Jim,
        The hallmark of an orthodox pastor is that they preach the Bible as written. The best way in my experience to keep themselves honest is to use the method of ‘scriptural exposition’—which is to say, march through the Bible in some order, preaching every single chapter of a book in a series, and not glossing over any uncomfortable topics.
        I have heard preached in my own church that wives are to respect and obey their husbands, that husbands are to love and cherish their wives, and that neither wife nor husband is to deny or weaponize sex to the other in the same sermon (although we call them ‘Messages’ as opposed to sermons).

        • jim says:

          I have heard preached in my own church that wives are to respect and obey their husbands, that husbands are to love and cherish their wives, and that neither wife nor husband is to deny or weaponize sex to the other in the same sermon

          Which is a pretty fair paraphrase and summary of the New Testament on marriage, and the standard and almost universal Christian position from the beginning of Christianity to the early 1960s

          So I guess a remnant exists, whereas I was very much under the impression when I wrote this post that no remnant large enough to form a congregation remained in the west.

          • Jehu says:

            Jim,
            All of these points are in the same book—one of Paul’s letters, and the same chapter if memory serves also.

            Finding a Remnant church isn’t as hard as you might think—forget mostly about denomination and look at WHO attends it. That’s far more important that the denomination.
            The atomization of our society has also created some serious outliers of churches, since people rarely just attend the church closest geographically to them. For instance, in my church, the culturally dominant personality type is the INTJ, with something close to 20% of the regular attendees fitting inside this box. Even for the area that we live in, that is extremely non-random. There is almost certainly a church for you, but you’ll have to go look for it.

    • JZ says:

      “If it’s very close to 50/50, you’ve almost certainly got a patriarchal church.”

      Don’t let the beta males in the pews confuse you. There’s nothing on the west coast that’s patriarchal, not in Protestantism, anyways.

      • Jehu says:

        JZ—here’s what you’re missing. If you, and more importantly, your wife, are attending a patriarchal church (read, one that actually preaches the Bible straight), you will get some serious structural alpha. This is especially true if your wife is plugged into the social circle of the rest of the women in the church and they are reinforcing the scriptural message that the pastor is preaching. With a fair bit of structural alpha going on, even fairly beta males can be patriarchs, just like in the 1950s. There’s also serious discouragement of talking down one’s husband in such circles, which ironically makes women happier.

  9. Bill says:

    One cannot today find a single Church that maintains these principles, and it is hard to find a Christian rightist so extreme as to endorse any of these principles. From everyone endorsing all three positions we have gone to no one endorsing any of these positions, with most of the change occurring in my lifetime.

    I endorse all three. Traditionalist Catholics mostly endorse all three. The main traddie organisation, the Society of St Pius X, is a small, splinter group with deeply problematic relations with Rome. But it endorses all three. There are other Catholic organizations which give some indications of being crypto-traddie on these matters. The majority of the hierarchy and the majority of priests are just as you say, however. Whether the majority of young priests are as you say is an interesting question. They are certainly to the right of the baby boomer priests.

    Similar things seem to be true of Protestants. All the big denominations seem to have fallen at this point, but you have little groups here and there which preserve sanity. The Orthodox I don’t know about, but one hears that the Russian Orthodox are experiencing a revival.

    • jim says:

      The main traddie organisation, the Society of St Pius X, is a small, splinter group with deeply problematic relations with Rome. But it endorses all three.

      Does it? Its sermons and such are on the web. Can you point me to where they tell wives to obey, and husbands and wives to do their best to pleasure each other even if one of them is not in the mood?

      • Bill says:

        Sorry it took so long to respond. Searching on “marriage debt,” which is the right term for this, brings up an enormous amount of stuff about the legal and moral issues surrounding marriage and money debts.

        Anyway, here are FAQ answers from the SSPX website which are almost verbatim what you have said:

        http://www.sspx.org/Catholic_FAQs/catholic_faqs__morality.htm#marriagedebt

        http://www.sspx.org/Catholic_FAQs/catholic_faqs__traditional.htm#wivessubmission

        Let me know if this is not convincing, and I will see what else I can dig up.

        • jim says:

          Pretty convincing: One says it is a mortal sin for a wife to refuse her husband for frivolous reasons, such as getting leverage over him, or feeling unappreciated, and the other says “wives will take delight in denying their own will and obeying their husbands.”

      • Bill says:

        Oh, on the marriage is permanent thing, here is a sermon or lecture by an SSPX priest. Notice, he specifically criticizes the Church’s recent leniency in granting absolutions (to the point where, in the US at least, they pretty much are just “Catholic divorce”).

        • jim says:

          I notice they are accommodating liberalism on points where it does not directly contradict scripture, but where liberalism contradicts scripture, they hold fast to scripture – that is to say, they are not rightists, but are Christians.

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