Let me let you in on a little secret about 1990s nostalgia: you don't miss Blockbuster or dine-in Pizza Hut. You miss analog life with other people who weren't distracted and were really present to enjoy mundane moments with you.
Millennials who are very cavalier about not having children are in for a shock when they enter their 40s & realize life is only half over. What do you do at that point? Keep trying to be sexy & have fun? I expect to see a lot of sadness & confusion about what to do at that point.
Most of the "weirdness" of homeschoolers you guys complain about is just their God-given individuality that wasn't crushed out of them by your soulless system and its toxic adolescent subcultures.
Without the natural connections and belonging that literally emerge from marriage and fertility, the latter years become very cold and lonely. Those "Friendsgivings" will get old, quickly.
What I have learned from the replies here is that there is something called "socialization" that is absolutely critical to producing the most depressed, anxious, medicated and gender confused populace in human history, and it is Very Bad that homeschoolers do not receive it.
Most of the "weirdness" of homeschoolers you guys complain about is just their God-given individuality that wasn't crushed out of them by your soulless system and its toxic adolescent subcultures.
Reading Harry Potter to the kids. 3 underratedly wholesome things about Rowling's series:
1.) It is relentlessly pro-family. Harry's deepest longing is for his mom and dad. The poor & fecund Weasleys are celebrated, Arthur is shown as good & wise. One hero is a godfather. 1/
Left: "If you want to outlaw abortion, we'll outlaw men abandoning their kids!"
Christian right: "Your terms are acceptable."
Left: "If you want to restrict kids' access to porn, we'll just block porn in your state!"
Christian right: "What is this, Christmas?"
3.) It mercilessly mocks toxic matriarchy. Petunia the spiteful, Aunt Marge the condescending. Most hated character (Umbridge) is a saccharine, rule-obsessed school admin/HR type. The overbearing government is literally called the M.O.M. Beautiful. 3/3
2.) It accurately portrays the self-destructive tendencies of evil. Voldemort and others degrade themselves progressively through their wickedness and power-lust. By the end, he is literally a thing beyond human pity or help, like a ghost from Great Divorce. 2/
Light pollution is a spiritual problem and the fact that millions of people never get a proper look at the stars may be a demonic plot to make unbelief easier.
Abortion advocates have no arguments. Only euphemisms. Translate Hathaway's flimflam ("choice," "women's rights," "healthcare," "reproductive destiny,") into plain English ("I should be able to kill my baby to achieve my career goals"), and it's obviously monstrous.
BREAKING: Anne Hathaway just gave the clearest reasons why Donald Trump’s overturning Roe v. Wade is devastating to millions of Americans. The only way to end this is by electing President Biden & a democratic Congress. Retweet so all Americans see this.
We vastly underestimate the extent to which debates over gender roles even within the church are founded on the presumption that sex can reliably be had without producing babies. The sheer fact of birth control has thrown even Christians into a world of artificial confusion here.
Women in the lefty urban bubble have this weird image of pro-life men like we have all the same sexual morality as lefty urban dudes but are just hung up on abortion. So they keep threatening to make us take care of the children we conceive and we're just like, sounds good! lol
A quick 🧵on lying w/photos. A while back, the NYT ran this story titled "Early Abortion Looks Nothing Like What You've Been Told." They featured the left image of a 7 week "gestational sack" after an aspiration abortion and "sieving" (rinsing out all the blood). 1/
If only a large contingent of evangelicals had vocally warned everyone eight years ago that the character and beliefs of a lifelong liberal, godless nominee would come to redefine the party forever. Alas, we had no warning.
The GOP has effectively abandoned evangelicals for barstool populism, … or exposed that the contemporary sociological category of “evangelicals” is largely coterminous with barstool populism
Pro-choice dude I talked with recently on a boat: "What would you do if your daughter got pregnant unexpectedly before college?"
Me: "....Not kill my grandchild."
One of the weird parts about being 35 and married for 13 years with 4 kids and a bunch of working class church friends doing the same is listening to the world scream non stop that what we do every day is literally impossible.
This a hill I will die on: almost all technology is getting objectively worse. Overcomplicated, overpriced, over-proprietary, unreliable, and dependent for maintenance on companies that can charge what ever they want and may go out of business or retool and leave you stranded.
Boomer complaints, car edition:
-These touchscreens are inferior to buttons
-LED headlights should be illegal
-I don't want my car to connect to the internet
-I want to be able to change my own headlights
The highly online right is at a crossroads right now. Having driven on the turnpike to "stupid" for a while, they are flirting with the interchange to "evil."
There's rly only so much mileage you can get, morally, out of your youth pastor using a bad analogy for sex in 1997. Grow up. Read the church fathers. Look at how harsh Christians have been re sexual sin for 2k years. "Purity culture" didn't ruin your faith. You rejected Jesus.
When someone tells you he or she was "burned" or "hurt" by the church, it's good to ask for specifics before you let that grievance do a lot of lifting, because as often as not when I hear this, it turns out they just wanted to sin and the church said no.
Joshua Harris's ex-wife's memoir is out, & wow. Full deconstruction. Six years ago I said the backlash against "purity culture" was mostly a cover for rejecting Christian sexual morality + the household. Ppl had all kinds of more nuanced takes. I'm satisfied w/ how mine has aged:
As an adolescent,
@racheljwelcher
“naively read ‘Boy Meets Girl,’” the tale of Joshua and Shannon Harris’s courtship, “as a love story.”
“Decades later, holding Shannon’s memoir, I can practically feel the weight of her untold stories in my hands.”
It is a sin for two healthy people to enter marriage without intending to have children.
This statement would have been utterly uncontroversial among Christians for 19/20 centuries since Jesus ascended.
We have this dumb modern conceit that our great-grandparents were prudes with their modesty standards and shotgun weddings. They were not. Sex made babies back then. Do you really understand that? To even think of fooling around was to invite a cascade of life-altering events.
They're saying they want to chemically isolate the very beginning of the human reproductive cycle so they can dwell in maximal gratification indefinitely while pursuing idealized middle class hobbies and status symbols. They just need the right buddy/roommate for it.
I didn't always agree with him, but I have to say, it has been bizarre watching the Tim Keller I read and heard during his life morph into the mythological architect of Christian surrender in America, the great Negative World denier who ushered in a dictatorship of drag queens.
We've forgotten this because the spell of contraception has so altered our worldview that we don't even understand our bodies, anymore. When young people today (even in the church) say they're not sure they want kids, they are almost never saying they're not sure they want sex.
There is this persistent delusion/rhetoric on the left that the men who don't like abortion are the men who like getting women pregnant out of wedlock and leaving. Let me explain this to you: those men LIKE abortion. The ones who oppose it are the marrying-and-staying kind.
All you MEN who don't like ABORTIONS? STOP GETTING WOMEN PREGNANT. Shut it down. Turn it off. Keep it in your pants, Get a vasectomy. Become celibate. Change sexual preferences. Use your hands. There are MANY options. This is on YOU. YOU CAUSE UNWANTED PREGNANCIES.
The worst part about the exvangelical phenomenon is how profoundly boring it is. The least interesting thing you can do with your life is to spend it in perpetual overreaction to your upbringing.
Take away the drugs and devices used to artificially suppress her reproductive system, and a stunning number of these questions simply answer themselves. People's whole mental landscape about sex changes, because it's no longer some self-expressive game. It's the origin of life.
1 My wife made an interesting observation. One reason we often stumble accidentally into offending infertile couples these days (by saying things like, "when are you guys going to have children?") is that contraception has made such couples invisible.
For almost all of human history, the choice was: celibacy or babies. Those limits were very good for us in some very important ways. Marriage and exclusivity flowed naturally out of them, together with culturally-appropriate gender roles. Marriage really is natural.
Our medical and chemical wizardry may prevent conception, but it cannot change our natures. The pain, questions, confusion, and chaos surrounding sex and gender today are largely, I am increasingly convinced, the result of an innovation we didn't realize would subtly destroy us.
There's this common misfire conservative male preachers and writers still make where they slam men as failures to launch or cads or sissies and assume that if they just manned up, great women would flock to them. 1/
Those seething at my tweet about millennials not having kids should read this old masterpiece, then ask themselves whether they have reckoned with what it will really mean to be aging seniors with no family to visit or check on them.
They know it's a baby. We all do. No one thinks it is a wad of phlegm. But if you can run a minimally informative image that makes it look indistinct and then call those w/ sharper, more detailed visuals liars, your conscience might quiet down. That's how you lie w/photos. 7/7
I've seen Christian young people get married with this mentality--without even the intention or openness to having kids. We all have. What we don't often realize is what an absolutely bizarre and unnatural frame of mind this is, and how dependent it is on technology.
That time Barack Obama was rebuked by Alan Keyes on same-sex marriage, using Natural Law. This debate was held on October 26, 2004, when both were running for office to be a State Senator in Illinois.
But the Times' image is not, in fact, a good or informative picture of what a 7-8 week fetus looks like! Try, instead, these actual photos women posted of their miscarried babies at that stage, not scrambled by a suction hose. Humbling and stunning. 5/
Nobody who is psychologically sound, including progressives, actually believes that trans women are women. It's an ideological transaction whereby certain delusions are officially tolerated in exchange for the final dissolution of Christian sexual norms and natural law.
The point is simple: a 1-week zygote, which looks nothing like a baby doll, is still a unique human individual. It doesn't matter "what it looks like." Yet even when they claim appearances are on their side, pro-aborts must lie & obfuscate, zoom out and soften the focus. 6/
We have mastered ourselves, as Jeff Goldblum might say, without cultivating the discipline necessary to wield that mastery. And we haven't yet begun to grasp the act of self-abolition that was. For further thoughts, see Humanae Vitae, Mark Regnerus, and C.S. Lewis' AoM.
I grew up Southern Baptist. I am no longer a Baptist. But the older I get, the more I realize what a good job those folks did. Oceans of sincerity, care, faith, love for Scripture, and zeal for mission. People whose names I can't remember who pointed me straight. God bless them.
At no point does Christianity demand we believe a logical contradiction. It demands we affirm mysteries, which are not contradictions but logical truths whose fullness evades human understanding. It is surprising how many people conflate mystery and contradiction.
The passion with which middle-class Westerners my age will assert things made up yesterday as fundamental, self-evident human rights is breathtaking. The whole progressive moral edifice really is what Glen Scrivener calls a "castle built in midair."
I have this private theory that if you took away everyone's smart phones and high speed internet, even the craziest overpriced liberal arts school social justice Tumblr warrior would revert to normie 90s opinions about race, sex, and gender within 2-3 weeks.
Just objectively, not even from a Christian perspective, the Democrat Party is not even trying to disguise the fact that it is a faction, at a kind of open war with a very large segment of the American population.
Outrage as Biden proclaims Easter Sunday as 'Trans Day of Visibility' - as White House BANS children from submitting religious-themed Easter egg designs at annual event for military families
@DavidAFrench
But that graph is bunk because the people who made it are not within my epistemic outrage tribe which is formed around knowing that graphs like this are bunk because the people who made it...
Those who want to double down & say, "Of course these folks rejected Christianity, purity culture ruined it for them" should pay attention to what these exvangelical authors mean by "purity culture." They're quite clear: original sin, chastity, traditional gender roles, the home.
The tie between sex and babies has shaped our households, our clans, our clothes, our legal system, our economies, our nations, our civilization, our psyches. And in about a single generation, we broke that tie. What did we think would happen?
Things I think are screwed up and awful: The expectation and pressure among college-educated Christians that moving across the country and building a new life far from parents and siblings is normal, or even ideal. 1/3
Now those roles and even marriage itself looks incredibly quaint and arbitrary. So much so that many delude themselves into thinking they actually ARE arbitrary. But they're not. They're deeply fitted into the grooves of human nature, and have honed us for millennia.
"Every 2,000-year-old social teaching of Christianity I don't like was invented by white American evangelicals in the 1980s" sure is an unbelievably prolific book genre, these days.
But the idea that modern women are virtuous trad damsels waiting for guys to put down video games & porn to sweep them off their feet is catastrophically naïve. Very often, women will MANIPUATE & CRUSH good men & leave them weeping in a brother's arms. Women sin, too, guys. 6/6
In 2020, they kneeled in front of black people to prove that they’re “not racist.”
In 2024, they’re kneeling to Allah to show that they’re “against genocide.”
Gen Z is like a South Park episode unfolding right in front of our eyes.
They were taught that godliness consists in niceness, and the moment they find themselves in the position of being a Bad Person, they wither. We need to teach our daughters that sometimes, godliness requires you to be, you know, hated. Like Jesus said.
No one you meet in the West, not even an atheist or secular progressive, is beyond the influence of Christianity. With basically no exceptions, they're driven by old Christian instincts to argue in Christian categories about a vision shaped by Christian eschatology.
"Christians should stop seeking political control and do gospel evangelism stuff because Jesus said 'my kingdom is not of this world' and early Christians didn't take over Rome, they built Christ's invisible kingdom in hearts.'"
-Seeing variations on this over and over.
A strict abortion law that took effect in Texas in 2021 may have led to nearly 10,000 more births than expected in the last nine months of 2022, according to research published in the journal JAMA.
Images like the one at right, from a medical photo library, detail the intact fetus at 7-8 weeks. Both of these are at the same stage of development, yet the Times quoted pro-abortion activists who crowed about how "inaccurate" and "misleading" pro-life imagery is. 2/
If you see a Christian writer right now saying pro-lifers should stop anywhere short of overturning Roe v. Wade, never take that person seriously, again.
Should a woman build a career or be a mom? What city will she live in? How much education will she pursue? Should she date around or settle and get married? How many kids should she have? What standard of living does she demand? What will her work-home balance be w/ her partner?
Someone please write an op-ed about how Jesus' immediate forgiveness of those who were crucifying Him cheapened His suffering and drew attention away from the systemically broken and oppressive Roman provincial government in Palestine.
Barring some sort of collapse, that tie will of course not be re-established in the foreseeable future. Sex will continue to mean subjective things other than babies. But it is critical that we understand that we are the products of an iron link between sex and reproduction.
As a guy who grew up in "mainstream" homeschool circles, had IBLP friends, and thought their lifestyle was bizarre, I can assure everyone that it just was never representative of conservative, evangelical homeschoolers. It's being foregrounded for the same reason Westboro was.
Shiny Happy People should be commended for exposing Gothard’s abusive cult, but much like its evangelical disaster porn predecessor, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, SHP takes the opportunity to launch a broader attack on conservative Christians in general. 1/2
This is *crazy.* Men are 12% more likely than women to say they want kids. It is difficult to overstate just how thoroughly feminism has warped the instincts or stated preferences of several generations of women away from what's natural.
Among young adults without children, men are more likely than women to say they want to be parents someday
Among those who don’t have children, young men (57%) are more likely than young women (45%) to say they want to have children in the future.
.
A lot of Christians (esp young ladies) leave their home church bubble, go off to college, and immediately embrace some sort of support for LGBT ideology because they met some nice gay friends. This is really not their fault.
Yep, and add "Apocalypto" for a third civilization. Good level of accuracy and frankness about how alien and savage human nature uncomplicated by the Cross of Christ really is.
Shogun and The Northman are two honest portrayals of pre-Christian societies. They all have these things in common: human life isn’t valued, and forgiveness is a foreign concept. We take for granted how Christianity tuned the world upside down.
Of course, the fact that a poor quality image of a slurry of scrambled, bleached leftovers doesn't look much like a baby doesn't mean it isn't one. That's a deeply fallacious and philosophically ignorant argument that sidesteps embryology and metaphysics. 4/
College-educated men are now more likely than college-educated women to attend church--a major historical oddity.
The leftward, secular lurch we've seen among women in the last 15 yrs is tough to overstate. This has huge implications for ministry, dating, and more.
Whoa:
🚨Relationship between gender & religious attendance has flipped for (college-educated) men🚨
Used to be that women attended church more in general.
But now...
✔️ 32% of college-edu men attend weekly
VS
✔️ 27% of college-edu women
New research by
@ryanburge
:
Getting your moral reasoning straight on abortion early will really steady you through tough times for pro-lifers like the last 2 years. Call me an extremist, a zealot, advocate of a losing cause, whatever. I don't care. You simply don't kill babies. Public opinion is irrelevant.
Who do they imagine they're winning over with this stuff? Democrats? It's like an intentional campaign of self-sabotage. Just ruthlessly suppressing their own base right before the election, spouting Planned Parenthood slogans.
I think even religious conservatives underestimate the extent to which current sexual and gender insanity + the mental health crisis are the fallout of several decades of divorce culture and "kids are resilient" thinking.
I saw this video a while back about how bizarre it is that we all just accepted the transition into being perpetually "on call" and expected to answer text messages and emails right away, and how no humans have ever been subjected to that kind of demand. I think about it a lot.
Adding girls to The Lost Boys subverts the deeper meaning of the story in a way I doubt they realize. Wendy is a symbolic civilizing influence *because* she's the first girl, whom they label their "mother."
Par for the course in 2023, I'm afraid.
The point, of course, was to suggest that what comes out of a woman after an abortion doesn't look as disturbingly much like a baby as the images those nasty pro-lifers show you would seem to suggest. It actually looks a bit like semen or mucus! Whew! 3/
If men initiated 70% of divorces, the condemnation would be unequivocal and incurious, and the assumed motives would be the worst possible. But inform people that, in fact, women initiate 70% of divorces, and watch the immediate squirming and contorting to justify or explain it.
I've pointed this out often. There is a radical failure of charity at the heart of most "purity culture" critiques--a refusal to represent the intentions of pastors, parents, & authors of last generation, who were fighting fierce cultural headwinds, in a way they would recognize.
@mbird12
@GShaneMorris
I was a youth minister in the 90’s. I never said, “sex is dirty.” I said sex is awesome but is a gift reserved for marriage by God.
Fantastic atmosphere at last night’s Silent Disco! 🎧💃🕺 Thanks to everyone who joined us.
We’re looking forward to welcoming everyone this evening!
We'll be sharing more pictures later 📷
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that something was really off in the culture of Contemporary Christian Music from the beginning. Lots of it has blessed me, including Caedmon's Call. But man, this is a dark ending.
The agreed-upon social censures for publicly appearing with more than the trendy number of kids always make me laugh: "You know what causes that?" "You guys are done, right?" "Are you Catholic?"
It's robotic. "Deviation from norm detected. Passive aggressive obloquy activated."