Fathers Do Not Provoke Your Children

“And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord” ~ Ephesians 6:4

We hear about this concept all the time – what does it mean? If many fathers knew, they would likely find themselves in violation of this basic principle.

During the time of this writing, the world was a different cultural place. The family dynamics were different than they are today. Paul was writing to a primarily Greek audience. These were Greeks who were being converted to Christianity.

Once they became Christians, they did not cease to be Greeks. And as a result, they brought many of their culturally influenced behaviors with them into their new lifestyle.

One of these behaviors was the tendency of fathers to rule with an iron fist. While most people know that children, especially sons need discipline from their father, the iron fist is not a good way to govern a household.

Some men have observed that this type of authoritarian leadership would amplify the already naturally rebellious nature of sons. this is why the command is specifically to fathers and gives specific instruction about how sons are to be taught, not daughters. Most female children are inherently more agreeable than male children. They are much more likely to obey, even mindlessly obey, the commands of a father. This would be especially true 2,000 years ago.

Fathers

But sons are created to have a period of rebellion. This allows them to forge their own path and determine who they are. And more frighteningly, they will decide whether to keep or reject the various beliefs that have been instilled in them for their entire upbringing.

This natural period of rebellion is worsened by iron fist governing by fathers. Yet this is a behavior that you will still see in the church today.

Many fathers are so paranoid about losing control or losing their sons to the world that they overcompensate by attempting to control every facet of their son’s life. The sons experience no freedom, no ability to make any of their own decisions. This causes them to become angry. This resentment will build up over the years until they finally leave home and begin to make their own decisions.

Sometimes sons can become so resentful that they reject their faith and beliefs simply to spite their fathers. And the sad reality is that most fathers bring this on themselves.

By allowing no freedom, no exercise of autonomy or individual choice, they alienate their sons and push them to the extreme edge. This does not always happen, but it happens often enough to leave an impression on the mind.

The key then is to give your son enough freedom that he does not feel as though he is being suffocated by your control. He must be allowed to brush up against the guardrails of failure. Because at least when he fails, it will be because he made his own decisions. Of course, you do not want him to fail so badly that it damages his life and future, but he must be allowed to think for himself. Many parents spend all their time thinking for their kids and ar them surprised to find that their kids cannot think for themselves.

If you are a son with an overbearing father, be patient and do not allow resentment to build. You need to find an outlet. Train the body or war against something. Find a way to allow yourself to express the negative emotions in a controlled environment that will not cause you harm.

The observe fathers and sons around you who obey and violate this principle of Ephesians 6:4. Observe with a detached mind and take into consideration the consequences of each mode of thinking. The results may both frighten you and illuminate your mind. Use this as a chance to gain more knowledge about human nature. Through that knowledge, you can make better decisions in the future.

1 Verse a Day Beats 0 Verses a Day

There are a lot of Bible reading programs out there that want you to read several chapters of the Bible every day. I think that is awesome. It is noble and a good hard mental workout, so to speak.

The problem is that most people simply do not have the mental fitness to tolerate that kind of program yet. It would be great if they did, but it is simply too hard for them.

Most Christian are not reading their Bibles at all. So to go from zero verses a day to several hundred is a massive step.

Would you expect a person who has never worked out before to be able to start a professional-level training plan? They would kill themselves just attempting it. But even though we understand that you have to gradually build physical fitness, we forget that we have to do the same thing with mental fitness.

Sure, you could do that “all in” approach and make your training into a military boot camp. But most people will fail if they attempt to do that. It is just too much work. Even in military boot camp, the recruits sustain stress fractures because the workload is increased so dramatically compared to their baseline fitness that their bones do not have time to recover and adapt.

People start these Bible reading programs and almost instantly get stress fractures of the mind. The second they hit Leviticus, their motivation wanes and their new habit fails. This is because they did not have the habit built strongly enough to sustain that difficult section of reading.

Instead of slowly building up their ability to read and forming the habit of reading every day, they just right into a sprint.

Have you ever seen what happens when someone tries to jump on a treadmill that is already at top speed? The result is hilarious 100% of the time. Many people do the same thing with bible reading and have the exact same subsequent faceplant when it comes to their habits.

What is a man to do?

Here is a core principle for you to remember. 1 Verse per day is infinitely more than 0 verses per day. How much more work does the person who reads one verse per day complete compared to the person who reads zero verses? He does infinitely more work.

Reading just 1 verse per day already puts you ahead of 80% of the religious world.

Just 1 verse per day makes it easy and simple to get into the daily habit of reading your Bible.

Now is one verse anything to write home about? Not really. It is not impressive at all. But imagine that – doing something unimpressive already puts you in the 80th percentile. 15 seconds of work per day puts you ahead of 80% of Christians.

Of course, you do not want to indefinitely just read one verse per day. Once you firmly establish the habit and become the type of person who reads the Bible every day, you can start to increase your workload. And that is exactly what you are doing: you are becoming the type of person who reads the Bible every day. Get out of your mind the idea that you have to read massive amounts of scripture at once. You do not need to start out that way – but you do need to work up to it.

Start building the habit each and every day. There is no need to make a massive change. Make the smallest change that you can maintain with ease.
reading

Starting a habit should be easy. It should not stay easy, but it should certainly start easy. Starting easy allows you to build momentum and confidence. It ensures that you are not missing any of your daily repetitions. Repetition is the key to habit formation.

Once you have been able to string together at least one month of Bible reading without fail, then you can start to add volume to your reading. It will be challenging, but it will be much easier and more sustainable than if you had tried to add all the reading onto your plate at once.

I love any kind of habits that can put you above average with small amounts of startup cost. this is one of those habits that will pay dividends if you can learn to create it.

Stop making excusing and living as one of the 80%. Pick up your bible and start putting in one verse per day. Increase the reading volume after 1 month, and never look back.

Read on: Common Core of Religion

The Ark into battle – 1 Samuel 4

In 1 Samuel 4, the Israelites take the Ark of the covenant into battle against the Philistines. This is something they were not commanded to do. However, this is something that we read about other pagan nations doing with their gods. They would cart the gods into battle to hope for better fortune in the outcome. Of course, if two nations both did this there would be a predicament – one god would be captured by the other nation. Whoever had the best strategy or most power would gain the upper hand in the battle and capture the god of their enemy. In some cases, they would also melt down the enemy’s gods, in order to add insult to injury. Many nations could not rebuild their cities until they were able to reclaim their god from the enemy who took it.

So why did Israel bring the ark of God into the battle?

Because even before they demand a king in 1 Samuel 8, they were already mimicking the other pagan nations around them. They are already copying the other groups that they see in Canaan. 

Everyone thinks that 1 Samuel 8 is the first time Israel caved to the pressure to be like the people around them, but they had already done it for generations. It is an illustration of the powerful urge that humans have to fit into the group. No one wants to be an outcast. Everyone wants to be “in” with the group and feel like they belong to something bigger than themselves. The nation of Israel gave in to the urge to be like the nations around them. 

This is just another example of the powerful pull of negative influence.

While most modern evangelist groups today talk about being a good influence, the rational man understands that it is not always possible to be a good influence. Especially when you are already resisting the incredibly powerful waves of negative influences. 

I do not even understand what most people mean by “be a good influence”. It is a vague generality that gives no direction to a man. Should I go into some ghetto and expect my supposed goodness to pass to the meth slingers by osmosis? Will people magically be drawn to my alleged righteousness by simply being in the presence of it?

the ark
Influence takes much more than just being in the presence of someone.

It requires that the person being influenced actually wants to be influenced. Without that urge to model the person doing the influencing, the person being influenced will never change. No one changes just by being in the presence of one good individual. The powers of positive influence are so weak that you need at least five good influences just to be making a good influence on a single evil person. 

The lesson of 1 Samuel 4 teaches us that when human beings are pressured, they will give into the most powerful influence around them. And that influence in this case was the evil influence of the Canaanite nations. 

Understand: evil is stronger than good for the time being. The power of a negative influence is several times stronger than the power of a positive influence. 

Do not overestimate the power of a positive influence, and do not underestimate the power of a negative one. This is what most people in the church do and it makes them look like fools.

Related: Split From the Pack

Why Christian Men Have Sex Before Marriage

Young men in the church hear thousands of times that they should wait for marriage to have sex. They generally hear zero explanations of why that wait is worth the sacrifice.

Sex is plentiful in the 21st-century church, except that it is not in the Christian marriages where it should be. This unfortunate fact has several root causes, the prime root being that no young man is going to listen to a “Christian” metrosexual-male lecture him about sex. What would an effeminate male know about sex in the first place? And the number of effeminate men in the church is growing as the weak, beta-male type of man is idealized as the “perfect Christian”. The man who is a soft, deferring, non-confrontational people pleaser is praised in word among religious groups. 

Many Christian men are similar to military veterans who never saw real combat but are nonetheless put in charge of combat training operations. How is a man with no practical battlefield experience going to prepare young men for war? Most Christian men have never been on the ground and seen the combat of sexual temptation, yet they still have the audacity to lecture young men about purity. Needless to say, these lectures are falling on deaf ears because young men see the discrepancy between the words they are hearing and the man they are seeing. If this is the man they will become by obeying the principles of abstinence, many young men will choose to run in the opposite direction. 

How are these beta-males created in the first place?

What usually happens is that the average beta-male gets married, lured in by the Christian woman’s promise of sensual delights only to realize that no woman wants to have regular sex with a beta. Her biological imperative quite literally causes her to be sexually repulsed by the beta male. A female was designed by God to look to the masculine for a leader to follow. They were also designed to be attracted to the man who has great personal, social and professional value. 

The average man does not realize that he is behaving in an effeminate manner, but he is certainly aware that the sexual frequency in his marriage is not exactly what he thought it would be. She may “throw him a bone” a few times per month, but it does not matter, her desire for him is not genuine. He is not masculine or excellent enough to generate genuine desire in his wife. So, he allows himself to get fat, stagnate in his career and then complain to the younger generations about the cons of marriage.

The irony of this whole situation is that the average married Christian man is sexually deprived and yet he still thinks he is qualified to instruct young men on the topic of sexual discipline.

Listen, even though I’ve only had sex twice this year, let me explain to you why it’s worth it to wait until marriage for those biannual encounters” ~ Average Married Christian Man

Beta-male behavior is the prime root of the problem, let us examine the branches of its effect.

Understand: This is how the young man rationalizes engaging in sex before marriage in his own mind; you may have juggled many of these thoughts yourself. That is not to say they are correct or rational in and of themselves, but this is the way the young man thinks. And without a hero of marriage to stand up and offer any real guidance in place of the emotion-saturated blithering of most married men, the young men will continue to entertain these thoughts and rationalize premarital intercourse. Let’s look at the reasons men fail to wait for marriage, and then what we can do about it.

Reason I: Men with Low/No Sexual Market Value are the Ones Advocating Sexual Discipline

The only men instructing the new generation on sexual discipline are the ones who have never had to struggle to be pure, at least not with real women. You can see plenty of evidence of this just by looking around you at church. Do you see a single man whom women are lined up waiting to have intercourse with like they do with celebrities?

Do you really think women want to get it on with Dr. James Dobson and his 80-year-old genitalia? Despite what he wrote in an article (which was an excerpt from his book “Complete Marriage and Family Home Reference Guide”) about being tempted to commit adultery, I seriously doubt that women are just pining over the “nice guy” beta-male that Dobson is. This is not an attack on his character, just an observation of his behavior and philosophies. I will briefly summarize the main point of Dobson’s article.

In response to the question, “Have you ever been tempted to commit adultery”, he writes that he once had a fight with his wife, following which he went out for a drive to cool his temper. While driving around the block, supposedly some woman was in a car in front of him, looked back, and smiled. Dobson would then suggest that this was her “inviting him to follow her” to have sex, and he attributed this encounter to the devil.

You can read the article for yourself to decide what you believe, but in my perspective, this is a highly circumstantial argument at best. This violates the basic religious teaching (and Dobson’s personal teaching) that women need emotional connectionbefore anything physical can happen” (which is not true – observe secular humans in their natural habitat and see how long it takes for “something to happen” sexually between a few of them). 

Furthermore, I really do not think that “looking back and smiling” equals “let’s have sex”. Maybe in the mind of a teenage boy, but not in the mind of a rational man. Women only behave that way with high-value, high success men (think celebrities, surgeons, music stars or moguls).

Now I admire Dr. Dobson and have read nearly a dozen of his works, but if he truly thinks that some random woman who saw his head in a car while driving about just magically wanted to have sex with him, he is irrational. That would be a stretch even for the depravity of the 2020s, much less several decades ago when this alleged event happened to him. That may be reflective of a Hollywood-esque movie sex scene, but it is not real life.

Source: Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk. “How to Stay Faithful to Your Spouse”. Web. Blog. – Or – Complete Marriage and Family Home Reference Guide

Continuing with the first point: Is any woman aching to have sex with your beta-male youth minister?

What about your overly emotional “worship leader”?
Are there truckloads of European women just itching to have sex with your emotionally vulnerable preacher?

I have extreme doubt that this is the case, yet these are the same men who are teaching purity and the value of sexual discipline to the younger generations. The same men who have never had much, if any, sexual opportunity with real women are the ones who are advocating sexual purity to young Christian men. They were sexually pure, but not by their own choice. 

Involuntary sexual purity does not equal sexual discipline.

Those “pure” men are not virtuous for their purity, though they think they are. You are not sexually pure if that purity was involuntary. You are not pure if you simply had no access to women.

Think about it, boasting about being sexually pure when you have no opportunity for sex with women is the equivalent of boasting about not being a drunkard while living in a dry county.

No temptation equals no virtue, because virtue is created by resisting a highly desirable and available sin. The reason these men were “pure” is that they never had an opportunity to be impure. There was no freely available sexual opportunity for them. The term for this type of man is “Incel”, which means “Involuntarily Celibate”. Celibate not because of their admirable self-control, but because they are simply not attractive to women. 

 “Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.”

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Average religious men have low sexual market value. By this, I mean that they are not masculine, successful, powerful, attractive, or even physically fit, which is the simplest personal attribute a man can control. In fact, the majority of men who actually were/are highly tempted and sexually desired by women are the ones who failed to wait for marriage. Because biology beats purity unless a man has monumental motivation to overcome his drives. This is why preparing for sexual temptation years in advance is imperative, especially as a man becomes more masculine, successful and inevitably attracts more women.

Sure, most men might have one or two opportunities for premarital sex in their young days but overcoming one or two temptations is not sexual purity.

When boys and girls are young, attraction is much more primal. Not evolutionarily primal – primal meaning that attraction will be driven primarily by biology for these kids. Teenage girls will be attracted to whoever can exhibit the most masculine or “alpha” traits at the time, who is the most physically attractive, or who has the highest perceived value in the social group.

Sexual discipline must be instructed by men who have had countless opportunities to be impure yet chose to be pure, nonetheless. All other men have no business opening their submissive, effeminate mouths about sexual purity. If 90% of men in the religious world looked between their legs, they would find female genitals. As such they have no business speaking about the strategy of managing male genitals.

Reason II: Inconsistency of Teaching

Religious men are inconsistent with their agreement and disagreement with the people of the world with regard to sexual temptation and purity. They decide when to agree with worldly people based strictly on what suits their narrative, much like the leftist mainstream news media. There is no better example of this than their sexual purity “motivation” – or the ways they attempt to “inspire the troops” about sexual discipline.

On one hand, they say, “The world is wrong about premarital sex! Worldly people say it is good, but they are lying! It is not good and is out of context! The world does not have the right to make those kinds of statements about premarital sex! You should listen to me instead, since I, your born-again virgin youth minister, am an expert about this sex stuff”.

Notice that in this instance they disagree with worldly people because the message of the world opposes their own. However, look at what they immediately do when the world agrees with them about sex.

A random worldly person makes the following statement: “Wow, these extramarital/one-night stand types of sexual encounters are really meaningless and unfulfilling. I wish I had waited for marriage instead”. The very nano-second a person of the world makes a statement like this, religious beta-males jump on it. “Look! This worldly person says that extramarital sex is unfulfilling! See, we tried to tell you. I knew we were right. If people of the world say it, it must be true”.

[Also please note that these statements are almost universally made by women. Very few men regret any type of sex because it fulfills their basic biological imperative which is to spread their genetic material as far and as wide as possible. Without morality and God, this is how men behave. The few men who do regret it are usually men who grew up in a religious sphere and were molded into emotional balls of regret and shame. The only time a man regrets a sexual encounter is if it costs him something (STD/pregnancy/locked ina  relationship with a crazy woman etc.)].


Do you see the inconsistency here? On one hand, we cannot listen to the world about sex because they disagree with our position, on the other hand, we totally agree with the world about sex because they agree with our position. Which is it? Do we listen to the world or do we not? Oh, I see, the world should not be listened to when they disagree with us, but they should be listened to when they do agree with us. Seems logical.

Young men see this inconsistency in religious betas and reject purity as a result.

Reason III: Observational Evidence – Marital Misery and Intramarital Celibacy

Contrary to what religious leaders believe, young men in the church have the ability to use their eyeballs and look around at the weak men in the surrounding pews. What the young men are doing is judging the quality of the betas sex life based on how happy or unhappy he looks. This may come as a shock, but most men in the church look miserable. They are fat, unhappy, and spun up tighter than a drum as a result of being denied sex for the past six weeks.

Now judging by the looks of men alone is not enough evidence for young men, so they listen to the words of the beta-male as well. And what do they hear from married men? Marriage jokes. And more than half of all marriage jokes revolve around sex or sexual frequency (or rather, the lack thereof). Men commonly make jokes about how little they have sex as compared to their earlier marriage years. While sex is not the only subject matter for marriage jokes, it is the one that garners the most attention for obvious reasons.

These jokes are not funny to the young men who are sharp enough to realize that every joke is rooted in truth. The grain of truth is what makes jokes relatable and funny. But sex jokes are certainly not funny to young men who see them as a reflection of reality.

Look into the eyes of the average recently married man or even a man who has been married for a decent amount of time. The soul that once filled his eyes is gone. The fire that used to be in his eyes has been extinguished. He has died inside, and young men can smell the rot. He is drenched in misery, he has been transformed into a beta because he married for the wrong reasons. And he is now a married celibate and every other man knows it.

It is so incredibly obvious when a married man has a great sex life because you can see it radiating through everything he does in his life. He has greater success, is happier, and also is more sociable. I can pinpoint every man in my church who has a great sex life just by looking at them, and you can too. Find the men who are energetic, masculine, pursuing excellence in their lives and you will find men who cannot help but have fulfilling sex lives.

Intramarital celibacy is not a desirable state for any man, much less a young man with more testosterone than he knows what to do with. Young men see what marriage does to married men and decide to reject marriage and purity altogether. Why save yourself for something that would make you so incredibly miserable? Why save yourself for sex if you are going to get the same amount of sex you are getting now as an unmarried man, aka zero? The answer for most men is the following: do not get married in the first place.

Reason IV: Men in Religion are Predominantly Beta-Males

Observationally, 1-2% of the population of men should be Alpha male leader types, but this stat does not apply to religion simply for the reason that it is more difficult for an Alpha to be religious compared to a man who is more submissive by nature.

It is difficult, but still possible, for a highly masculine man to submit himself to a higher power and give up on focusing completely on the earthly benefits of being masculine (extreme success/abundance of women/self-interested lifestyle).

High levels of testosterone are a hallmark of a masculine leader. The abundance of this hormone makes him highly aggressive (not socially, but mentally), extremely sexual, and generally very successful, items which are not congruent with what betas think religion should be.

The few times you come across an Alpha in the church he will be active military, retired military, police, or something along those lines. Inherent in the military man is loyalty, a trait that allows this Alpha to assume religiosity while also subjecting himself to a divine commander. But the majority of the time, religious males are beta.

When a man is young, he is also producing large volumes of testosterone which gives the illusion of Alpha masculinity when he may, in fact, be a beta-in-waiting. During the period of adolescence, young men are more likely to personally identify with worldly types of men who manifest Alpha traits, the most noticeable of these traits being an abundance of sexual partners. This appeals to young men no matter how much religious betas try to deny it. It is no surprise why the age of adolescence and early adulthood is when many young men tend to sow their wild oats. 

Alphas get multiple women; betas cannot even get the one woman they are married to.

Young men do not want to listen to beta-males in religion, they want to listen to Alphas. If you want to increase the odds of men being sexually pure in your church, they need to be taught about purity from an alpha male who was sexually disciplined even though he had and has access to multiple women. 

Reason V: Modern Marriage is Feminine Centric

This is not a popular position to take, especially in the church, but marriage is designed by God to benefit and protect women. Over time this protection has become less necessary, and marriage has evolved into a female-centric institution where poor behavior on the female side is actually encouraged by the state – alimony, child support, and custody rulings all favor women.

Source: “Women More Likely than Men to Initiate Divorces, but Not Non-Marital Breakups.” American Sociological Association, 18 Sept. 2015

The feminine centricity of marriage is based on one primary fact, and aside from this fact, everything else is minutiae: Men have a biological need for sex, and women have and generally control sexual access. Men have the demand; women have the supply and women can manipulate it in any way they want.

A man’s need for sex is extremely powerful. God gave man this a massive sex drive because without it he would not commit to women, as unsavory and politically incorrect as that may seem. At the risk of appearing misogynistic, a women’s main bargaining chip in marriage is her sexual availability/attractiveness, and it is a rapidly depreciating asset; this is especially true of worldly, secular women who have put little time into developing virtues compared to religious women.

This is why women have to overplay how interested they are in sex before marriage so that they can lure a moderate to high-value male into a marital commitment from which he can never escape. Once committed, a woman has little need to fulfill her “end of the bargain”, especially in a Christian marriage where divorce is highly discouraged and genuinely thought to be the fault of the male, and the majority of divorces are initiated by women. 

This is Key: Without his sex drive, a man does not usually seek out a relationship with a woman. For what could a woman provide a man that could not be obtained from platonic relationships with other men or women? As offensive and as this may seem, it is true.

Modern marriage is centered around women. A man growing up in the church is told that his purpose is to work and provide for his family. While this sounds noble, it is a recipe for the creation of an unsatisfied man. This “provide for others at the expense of yourself” mentality seems to be more the result of convention and conditioning rather than truth.

A man must take self-interested action and provide for himself first. He must create his own world and then invite another woman into it. This is something the Jews were right about in the 1st Century when they required a man to be well established in a tradesman career before taking on a wife.

The prime reason for man’s existence is not to earn money so his wife can exist.

Even most Christians have to admit this when pressed because that ideology would place marriage and women above God. A man’s primary responsibility is to his God, his secondary responsibility is to himself through work, and his last responsibilities are to others.

Now we command you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you keep away from any brother who is walking in idleness and not in accord with the tradition that you received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us, because we were not idle when we were with you, nor did we eat anyone’s bread without paying for it, but with toil and labor we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you.

It was not because we do not have that right, but to give you in ourselves an example to imitate. For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. For we hear that some among you walk in idleness, not busy at work, but busybodies. Now such persons we command and encourage in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living. As for you, brothers, do not grow weary in doing good. If anyone does not obey what we say in this letter, take note of that person, and have nothing to do with him, that he may be ashamed. Do not regard him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother.”

2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
A man in the church is conditioned from birth to believe that he should get married and provide for a wife. While that is a good and noble ideal, it is not the only ideal that exists.

With the ready availability of sex and the waking realization that marriage could, in fact, provide no benefits to a man because women reserve the right to refuse sex while still maintaining financial support, men are deciding to reject marriage instead, and just get the sex that the secular world so freely offers.

There is an old proverb that says, “Why buy a cow when you can get milk for free?” You can get the milk for free in the secular, godless world, which is where a frighteningly large number of young religious men are going.

Final Note: For a man, emotions come after sexual attraction, never before. A man will not bother to even talk to a woman unless he finds her or one of her friends sexually attractive. 

Understand: This is the thought process a young man uses to rationalize having sex before marriage. It does not matter if it is “good” or true because it is the subjective perspective of the young man, which to him matters more than objective truth. You can argue against these principles all day, but young men will still be making decisions based on them. Who do you think young men are going to trust, what you say with your mouth or what they see with their eyes?

Reason VI: Men Are Becoming Less Delusional and Emotional about Modern Marriage

A worldly man, unless he is deluded by his emotional feelings toward a woman, will never commit to an institution like modern marriage. It poses the ultimate threat to his career, finances, and personal wellbeing. Yet for some reason, even worldly men continue to get married. Why is this? If these men are getting the sex they want in a dating/casual sex relationship, then why would they ever voluntarily take on the risks involved with marriage.

They are getting everything they want from the relationship without marriage, nothing logical pressures them towards marriage. But social propriety and emotional delusion cause man to embark on marriage which fails more than half of the time and leaves men with nothing to their names, and sometimes leaves them without a name (reputation).

However, in the secular world men are beginning to wake up to reality. The existence of groups like Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), other Men’s Rights Activists, Pick Up Artists (PUAs – Men who focus exclusively on landing one-night stands, spinning plates, and avoiding monogamous relationships at all costs) and the Red Pill are all evidence of this. Men are skipping out on the risk and commitment of marriage and skipping straight to casual sex, the only thing of value most worldly, godless women can provide.

Emotions are no longer infiltrating and clogging the minds of young men. They can see everything they need to see with their own rationality, including the following critical points:
  1. Most married men are miserable and effeminate.
  2. Marriage poses the ultimate threat to finances, career, happiness, and most importantly, to personal freedom.
  3. The vast majority of women (80-95%), even religious women, cannot offer anything more than sexual access, and for most of those women that access is used as temporary bait to trap a high-value man.

Even most Christian women have little to offer a marriage because they are not being trained to offer anything to the man! The man is raised and trained to make his world revolve around women while the woman is taught that she is the prize, the princess waiting for the knight in shining armor. Is it a shock that many women develop solipsistic, id-like personality disorder?

Besides, the man generally does all or most of the providing in Christian marriages. Why should women be required to bring anything of value to the table? They are women after all and women are born with value while men must create their own value from scratch.

 However, Christian women have a sexual advantage over worldly women as far as the “alluring effect” of their sexuality is concerned. The mystery of sex and the cloud of mist surrounding the Christian woman’s sexuality lures in Christian men. “Wow, if we have to wait our whole lives to experience sex with just one woman, it must be epic!” is what these men think, so they decide to wait for marriage since they do not have any other sexual options.

The promise and potential of sex in a Christian marriage are never realized until a man is permanently locked into a long-term monogamous relationship.

Therefore, a woman is free to feign sexual desire only to lock down the first sucker who proposes to her. Once married, she is financially supported (acquiring security: one major female priority) and could reject sex and the man can do nothing about it, especially a Christian man who cannot leave the relationship.

Are you beginning to see how absurd modern marriage looks for the modern man? You might label this perspective as cynical, but it is not. A man must be aware of the potential consequences of marriage. Who would argue against the Biblical principle of “Counting the Cost” (Luke 14:28)? 

Christian men are also waking up to the growing costs and consequences of modern marriage. They are beginning to reject marriage because no vagina is worth that much life sacrifice. And can you blame them? This is not a diatribe against marriage, but rather what marriage has become in the modern age. Modern marriage has devolved into something God never intended for it to be. A man has no choice but to act as if every woman is looking to lock him down just to secure long-term provisioning until it can be proven otherwise.

Reason VII: Abundance of Knowledge Calls into Question the Credibility of Modern Advice

Before the internet and readily available instantaneous information, young men were at the mercy of their parent’s and other adults’ personal knowledge. Whatever the adults said was the gospel and kids had to listen, since there was no other source of information. As the 20th century began to close, the internet began its ascent, eventually culminating in what we have today: limitless information delivered to our palms in milliseconds. 

As a result of all this information, something new emerged for the first time in human history: The ability to instantly fact-check what parents and other men were saying seconds after they said it. With this new information, it became clear almost instantly that many parents and the previous generations knew almost nothing. Most of their statements, beliefs, and opinions were made up. The majority of their threats were empty. If they did not know the answer to a young man’s question, they made one up.

Fact checks have allowed for the truth to come to the surface. For thousands of years young men have thought their parents knew nothing, but now they have the empirical evidence necessary to prove it, at least to themselves.

With this new information, the overall credibility of adults was called into question. If they are wrong about so many things, who is to say that they are not wrong about marriage too? Why should young men be lectured on lifetime commitment by a group of people who are chronically incorrect and misinformed?

Adults have begun to be ignored on matters of life, and now they are ignored on matters of marriage because it is obvious, they know little and falsify everything they can in order to protect their own ego and ego-investments (i.e., marriage).

They are ego-invested because they have spent so much time and resources on marriage that they would never say something bad about it. This is especially true of husbands who could lose access to sex for six weeks if they decide to drop a negative comment about marriage.

Beware: if you interact with a man constantly talking negatively about marriage, it is because he has nothing to lose. The only men chronically making negative comments about marriage are ancient, and this is because they are not having sex anyways due to age.

Young men are looking up the facts and data about marriage. They are researching the stories of men who have been burned in relationships or taken through the human woodchipper of the divorce court and are deciding that their parents know nothing and that there is no reason to maintain sexual discipline.

Reason VIII: The Majority of Modern Arguments in Support of Marriage are Weak

What do married males in religion commonly have to say in defense of marriage? That it brings happiness? Even that is an argument you do not hear much anymore unless you attend an extremely liberal, emotional church. Is it true happiness that you have found? Or has marriage brought sufficient distraction to allow you to avoid sitting alone and quietly pondering your own death?

Marriage does not, in and of itself, generate happiness and goodness, it merely allows man to be distracted from all that is evil, at least for a moment. It is the distraction that you mistake for happiness because the two are closely related, just as men mistake their sexual urge for love.

It may seem strange, but not all men are interested in happiness. Many of them want success, glory, and sexual access. Perhaps in a way, they think that will bring them happiness. But to suggest that the road to happiness is through extensive personal sacrifice a lifetime commitment that is expensive in every sense of the word is a hard sell. 

What other arguments are there from the proponents of marriage? There are arguments that suggest that marriage is God-designed and that therefore it is automatically great (See below for a refutation of that statement).

Men need a woman”. That is a common one. 

Tell that to the apostle Paul.
Tell it to Tesla.
Then tell it to Beethoven, Da Vinci, Pascal, Newton, or Al Pacino.

The only people who say that “a man needs a woman” are women or husbands who are desperately trying to get in the good graces of their wives so they can have sex for the first time in the calendar year. Any married man who dares to say that men do not need women will not see his marriage bed for six months, so no man dares to take that risk.

Perhaps that man should go into the attic and find where his wife made him store his testicles, take them out, dust them off and use them for once in his life.

I am not saying men do not need women, but that fact alone is hardly an argument in favor of marriage. It is not enough to tip the scales back from the weight of all the costs marriage imposes on men.

Reason IX: Purity is a “Non-masculine” Term because of the Beta-Male Definition

The symbols associated with traditional sexual purity are womanly and soft, and men want no part of this. Every time men hear the word “purity”, it is automatically associated with a dove or swan or a white dress or sheep.

What 17-year-old male do you know who wants to pursue a virtue that has weakness and femininity for mascots? Perhaps the married man whose genitals have disintegrated from lack of use would accept it. 

You cannot sell purity to young men using these symbols and terms for purity. That is like trying to sell barbies to boys. No, you sell barbies to girls and trucks and army men to boys, because you understand the fact that boys have the need to both build and destroy. Unless you are some obese, physically repulsive, empty-headed feminist psychologist with hair shorter than military regulation requires, a masculine marketing strategy for purity should make sense to you.

Men need sexual discipline (purity) to be more masculine and aggressive. There is more to purity than doves and white gowns. Iron can be pure, and it can be fashioned into weaponry. Titanium can be pure. Fire can be both pure and a purifier. These are masculine symbols of war that can be used to represent masculine purity in a way that is actually marketable to young men. 

Unlike most married men in religion, young men do not want to play with dolls, they want to make war and fight for something. Give them something to fight against. Give men the Iron Purity of sexual discipline.

Reason X: Virginity is Prized over Chastity

People in the church wrongfully bow down to worship at the altar of virginity rather than promoting the idea of chastity.

Key Principle: There are unchaste virgins and chaste non-virgins. 

Virginity does not automatically confer chastity, spending two seconds in any youth group will make you aware of that fact. And just because an unmarried individual is not a virgin does not mean that they are not chaste. There is more to chastity than avoiding intercourse before marriage.

There are scores of “technical” virgins who are anything but chaste. And there are also dozens of individuals who were converted from a worldly life into the church and who are not virgins as a result of their former lifestyle, but who are extremely chaste and dedicated to Iron Purity. Chastity is the important virtue that the church should be focusing on, not virginity. If you concentrate on chastity, virginity takes care of itself.

The problem with the common religious strategy of marketing purity is the “all or none” approach it takes. If you are not a virgin until marriage, you have ruined your life, and you will never be the same. Should a religious man fail to wait for marriage, he thinks, “Well screw it, I’ve already failed, why stop having sex now?” This is the result of a “virginity over chastity” approach to teaching purity, and it does nothing but drive more and more young men into chronic sexual sin.

Reason XI: 80% of Purity ‘Motivation’ is Fear Mongering Scare Tactics

From the Virginity-Over-Chastity approach stems the fear-mongering tactics that are so popular among religious people. It seems that the only way people in the church can “motivate” young men to wait for marriage is to threaten them with all of the horrible things that will happen to them if they have sex before marriage, and the reasons become more ridiculous over time.

“You will ruin your life forever if you don’t wait!”

“Marriage will never be as good as it could have been!”

“You will fail out of college, never get a good job and develop all kinds of warts if you so much as even think about having sex before marriage!”

“The regret will crush your soul for the rest of your life!”

“A space alien will eat your brain if you have sex before marriage!”

Guess what happens when stupid reasons like those mentioned above are the only tools used to motivate the young? One young man will say, “Well that’s a load of nonsense” or his biology will be so strong that it outweighs all those alleged consequences, and he will have sex anyways.

After that first sexual encounter, he realizes that precisely zero of the threats from old women in the church were real, and so he will tell all his friends the truth.

Word gets around the church that the older generations are using scare tactics and empty threats on the youth in order to keep them enclosed in a purity society. It is the religious version of The Village. Men find out that nothing truly negative happens to them when they have sex outside of marriage most of the time. These men do not experience regret, because biology will outweigh regret, especially when men are disenchanted with the church or if they are angry at being lied to about sex for years.

These men do not fail college. They get good jobs or are accepted into graduate programs, they rarely pick up any STDs, as the statistical likelihood of that is somewhat lower than is advertised by the church. They come to the realization that the older generations have nothing but empty threats and scare tactics on their side.

While all of the above is true, it is also true that the fear-mongering tactics do have some degree of efficacy. If they did not, the tactics would die out. It is understandable why these tactics are used as well. 

When you are unable to articulate with clarity the benefits of waiting for marriage, you have no choice but to accentuate the consequences of not waiting for marriage. 

Reason XII: The State Incentivizes Divorce and Single Motherhood

The most fundamental principle of human nature is that human beings respond to incentives. Those incentives can be pain or pleasure; benefit, or consequence. Everything we do as individuals stems from our desire to gain pleasure or avoid pain in some way or another. When culture or society decides to incentivize a specific behavior, the prevalence of that behavior will increase. Unfortunately, this also applies to marriage.

In the 21st century, society has incentivized divorce for women, another factor contributing to why women initiate divorce more than men. If you look at divorce you will see that the odds are slighted in favor of women. They are the ones who get to keep the kids most of the time. They can claim the majority of a man’s possessions. Women can sustain their long-term provisioning in the form of alimony or child support without ever having to provide something in return.

Modern men are realizing these facts and opting to avoid marriage in favor of casual sexual encounters. While they are ostracized by women and society for this behavior, you cannot debate the rationality of these men’s decisions. Even for the Christian man, marriage is Russian Roulette for their career and finances.

sex

Reason XIII: Culture Negatively Affects the Perception of Marriage 

The church could do a substantially better job of defending its positions from popular culture which constantly attacks them for their “old-fashioned” beliefs. Sadly, marriage has also come under attack by culture. At the risk of sounding 1,000 years old, television, movies, celebrities, and society have each decided that marriage is not important, that it should not be valued, and that it actually limits people’s happiness. When an idea is barraged constantly and at every angle, even the proponents of that idea will begin to question it simply out of weariness. If men in the church cannot uncover their latent warlike nature and strike culture back, then marriage rates will continue to decline.  

One of my frequent criticisms of Christian education is the lack of pre-marital training. If marriage is truly the “second most important decision you will ever make”, why do you only hear about it once a year on “Family Sunday”? The church complains about divorce stats in the church though they never provide any form of marriage training for individuals! Sure, you have premarital counseling, but it seems unlikely that 24 cumulative hours of training in the final 6 months leading up to marriage would be adequate for people preparing to make a lifelong commitment.

Premarital counseling should start as soon as children become school-aged. They should be prepared to be the type of people who are ready to marry and who understand the costs along with the benefits of marriage. The secular world throws people into marriages and hopes they can learn how to swim; the church should try to better prepare their people for a permanent commitment.

Reason XIV: Many Wives Do Not Respect Their Husbands

It is natural for wives to struggle with submitting to the leadership of and respecting their husbands; this is why the Bible commands them to do so. Any time there is a commandment in the Bible, it exists because we as humans want to do the opposite. Just like loving one’s wife is not intuitive and must be commanded, so also it is counterintuitive for a wife to want to respect her husband.

We are constantly at war with our human nature in trying to obey God. But somewhere along the way, many women have excused themselves from the command of respecting their husbands. This certainly does not apply to all wives, but it happens often enough to be noticeable by young men, even in the church setting.

Young men observe the ways that wives treat husbands, and they also observe the way husbands allow themselves to be treated.

When a wife is disrespectful to her husband publicly, it is extremely damaging to a young man’s perception of marriage. It also does not take many instances of this marital disrespect for a young man to develop the impression that the majority of women do not respect their own husbands. Even if this is not statistically true, you must remember that one negative interaction is worth four positive negative interactions (see The Negativity effect).

Source: Brett. “Podcast #574: The Power of Bad — Overcoming the Negativity Effect.” The Art of Manliness, 8 Jan. 2020

Once young men have the idea that marriage means they will be disrespected and their authority regularly usurped, they avoid marriage or retaliate against women with so-called misogyny.

The problem is made worse by the fact that most men are such beta-males that they cannot assert any authority without losing access to their sexual cistern until they are willing to grovel back to their wives and beg for forgiveness for their sins. This fear to assert authority even extends to the pulpit where preachers teach an improper model of marriage.

Many preachers will teach a 50/50 model of marriage where authority is shared equally but the man makes the final decision. Is that the biblical model of headship or is it the model that is progressive and feminist enough for men to preserve their meager sex supply by not agitating their wives? The true biblical headship model is found in Ephesians where marriage is compared to Christ and the church.

Answer me this, is there a 50/50 share of authority between Christ and His church?

Do we “share power” with God but He makes the final call? Or does Christ have 100% authority and we follow Him no matter what? A non-progressive and anti-feminist as that idea is, it is the biblical model of headship in marriage, and it is the model that is not taught in the church because men do not have the gonads necessary to assert themselves. I am not advocating for men to be jerks or authoritarians, but they must be the leader of the home, it is their responsibility, and they will be held to account for failure in this respect.

If the church wants more young men to marry and save themselves for marriage, they need to increase the net benefits that marriage offers to men. Because in the minds of most young men, marriage offers no lasting benefits.

Reason XV: Men Want to Experience “Fun” Women Before They Marry a Woman Whom the “Fun” Has Had Every Semblance of Fun Educated Out of Her

The Christian marriage bed is commonly perceived as the most boring, unpassionate place to be on the entire face of the earth. Young Christian and secular men simply do not think that married people have sex, and no one in the church tells them otherwise.

You might ask, “Where did they get that idea?” They got the idea from the world, and there was no masculine man there to tell them otherwise. 

Christian women have been taught to be reserved, quiet and gentle, all of which are extremely good. Sometimes they are even taught to dress modestly. Most of all, young Christian men and women are taught that sex is bad, evil, dirty, and only for marriage. Those who reject this reject their faith and enter the secular world. Not only does this teaching lead to an extremely difficult first few months of marriage, but it also leads young men to believe that the marriage bed simply will not be fun. Who wants to marry a Christian woman who turns gray at the very mention of the word “sex”?

So prevalent is this view of marriage that the world has seen fit to dub it “Old Church Lady Syndrome”, which we will call OCLS for short. OCLS is a disease where young women have been repeatedly taught that sex is dirty and sinful and they respond by losing all interest in sex and become sexually frigid (incapable of orgasm or penetration [medically: vaginismus] due to psychological barriers). In addition to being a mental disease that sets many marriages off to a bad start, OCLS simply is not a good look for a church that is trying to encourage young men to get married.

In response to OCLS, young men think, “Well, before I commit to one of these boring Christian marriages, I might as well have some fun with worldly women who actually think sex is a good thing”. Imagine that, young Christian men think they have to go into the world to find people who think sex is actually a good thing. What they do not know is that many in the church actually do believe sex is good, they just never had the guts to talk about it publicly.

What Men Need: A Masculine Man with High Sexual Market Value Who Advocates for Sexual Discipline

The Lord was with Joseph, and he was a successful man; and he was in the house of his master the Egyptian. And his master saw that the Lord was with him and that the Lord made all he did to prosper in his hand. So Joseph found favor in his sight, and served him. Then he made him overseer of his house, and all that he had he put under his authority. So it was, from the time that he had made him overseer of his house and all that he had, that the Lord blessed the Egyptian’s house for Joseph’s sake; and the blessing of the Lord was on all that he had in the house and in the field.  Thus he left all that he had in Joseph’s hand, and he did not know what he had except for the bread which he ate.

 Now Joseph was handsome in form and appearance.

 And it came to pass after these things that his master’s wife cast longing eyes on Joseph, and she said, “Lie with me.” But he refused and said to his master’s wife, “Look, my master does not know what is with me in the house, and he has committed all that he has to my hand. There is no one greater in this house than I, nor has he kept back anything from me but you, because you are his wife. How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” ~ Genesis 39:2-9

There are very few men in the church who could be described as sexually marketable. If they were, they would attract better-looking women.

This is not insensitive; it is a fact. Since we have practically no modern examples of sexually marketable men, and you certainly will not find any in your church, we can turn to the Bible. Recall the story of Joseph while he was in Potiphar’s house. Joseph is a man with a high sexual market value. Genesis 39:2 tells us that Joseph was a very successful man. This alone makes him attractive to women who see success as a strong ability to provide. Go observe people in the world and you will find that more successful men have more attractive wives or sexual partners. A successful man can provide security which makes him attractive to women. The icing on the cake for women is if the man is physically attractive and physically fit.

We see from Genesis 39:7 that Joseph was physically attractive. The combination of success, ambition/power, and attractiveness is the recipe for a male with a high sexual market value. You can easily observe this with celebrities. Men are attracted to female celebrities just because they are attractive. Women are attracted to male celebrities because they are incredibly successful and attractive. It is the combination of attractiveness and success that makes these men highly sexually marketable and is also the prime reason behind why almost no male celebrity can have a successful long-term marriage.

Even though Joseph was highly marketable to women, he still maintained his sexual discipline. How is this possible? No one knows because almost no Christian men with high sexual market value have successfully maintained Iron Purity.

Modern Christian men need another Joseph who can share strategies and philosophies to wage war on impurity. 

Joseph’s Strategy of War I: Be Aware of the Laws of God

Joseph’s first line of defense against Potiphar’s wife was to invoke his God. Unfortunately, this strategy is so frequently cited that it has become cliche to men. No one wants to hear: “Just pray, have faith, and remember God as reasons for you to be sexually disciplined”. Most men who hear this immediately tune out. That statement is the mindless parroting of a castrated progressive, not an Alpha male with high sexual market value. Joseph had excellent spiritual development, so this strategy worked for him, at least in the first days of Potiphar’s Wife’s siege.

Joseph was also acutely aware of the various practical consequences that could ensue if he gave in to this sin. As much as we should try to avoid fearmongering as the primary strategy for sexual discipline, we do need to be aware of the potential consequences of sexual promiscuity. And we also have to note that the consequences are indeed just “potential” while we are on earth. There is no guarantee that something bad will happen to you the instant you have extramarital sex. If the consequences were immediate, no one would ever give in to sexual sin. 

You will not always be motivated to do what is right, but you will still be motivated to avoid the pain and consequences of poor choices. Do not make fear your primary motivator if possible, but still stockpile reasons to avoid extramarital sex.

Joseph’s Strategy of War II: Run for your Life

Potiphar’s wife started to wear down Joseph over time, as the Scripture says she bothered him day by day (Gen 39:10). Understand: It IS impossible for a man to resist this type of sexual temptation indefinitely without physically removing himself far, far away from the situation.

Potiphar, being extremely high up on the chain of command in Egypt, would have had his pick from the women of the land. Do you think Potiphar picked some bulldog-faced feminist to marry? No, he would have picked the most attractive woman he could find, likely ignoring her character. Because a woman’s character does not matter to a secular man as long as the woman is extremely attractive.

Therefore, we likely have an extremely attractive woman constantly tempting Joseph with the most desirable delicacy known to man. It is a testament to the strength of his character that he endured more than one day of that nonsense.

Young men find themselves faced with sexual temptation because women their age are highly hormonal and will trade sex for attention. Young men get young women because young women are insecure, not because young men are Alpha. It is vital for the young man to run, to actively get away from these women. The Biblical Principle of “Severing the Hand” applies here (Matthew 5:30). Cut it off and cast it from you. Eliminate all contact with these types of women, they do not have your interest at heart. Stop talking to them, it is a waste of time. 

Men and women cannot be friends.

A woman wanting to just be friends with a man is the equivalent of a man wanting to be “friends with benefits with a woman”. In the “Let’s just be friends” (LJBF) model, a woman gets everything she wants from the man (Attention: the female currency, emotional support, and, in extreme cases, financial support), he becomes her beta-male lap dog and she never has to reciprocate with the intimacy that he wants.

 He continues to be her friend in the hopes that one day maybe, just maybe, he can prove that he is a “good boy” and deserves a little treat for his loyalty. Women keep men trapped for years in this prison.

 In the “Friends with Benefits” (FWB) model, a man gets all the sexual intimacy with a woman and does not have to be there for any of her emotional needs. LJBF is a con, but it is not treated with the same social scorn as FWB because the woman is benefited from the LJBF model. 

When a woman benefits at the expense of a man, she gets a “You go girl” and is a “strong, independent woman”. When a man benefits at the expense of a woman, he is a parasite, a dog, and social shaming can begin.

Again, after reading each of these reasons that explain why Christian men have sex before marriage, I want to remind you that I am not arguing for their rationality or trying to defend young men who use these reasons as justification for promiscuity. The point is that you need to understand the common reasons that men decide to have sex outside of marriage so you can start to build your own counter reasons for sexual discipline. 

You need to be able to war with your own mind and refute its arguments because these are likely things you have thought before in your own mind. Unfortunately, many of these reasons are very strong and it can be difficult to find the motivation to force yourself into Iron Sexual Discipline, but it can be done.

 In conclusion, let us look at a quick common quibble that many religious people may have with some of the previous statements.

 Common Quibble: “But marriage is designed by God. How dare you speak of it in this derogatory manner?” 

That is a strictly beta-male response when someone cannot logically argue on behalf of their position. This tactic is popular with many religious people: take your personal opinion, season lightly with dilute Christianity and viola`!  You have supposedly created an impregnable position. People cloak their beliefs in just enough Jesus so that they can suggest any attack on their personal position is an attack on Christ.

This is a logical fallacy because it suggests that if I can somehow correlate my position with God, no matter how infinitesimal that correlation might be, my position is right. People who use this tactic do not have a good, logical argument, all they can do is use Christ as a shield and suggest that attacking their position is to attack Christ. It is a modified argument from authority. It is the “racist card” of Christianity. People align their opinions somewhat with Christ and somehow their opinions obtain credibility by osmosis. In order to argue properly, every position must be founded in logic.

Before engaging in any discussion, you must always give the opening line, “Let us argue our points rationally without using God as a shield for our position. If we cannot make a rational argument without bringing God into the discussion, we  do not have a rational position. Not that we leave God out of the discussion, but we first discuss positions rationally before we discuss them morally”.

Now let us get to the root of this argument. 

Key: Just because something is designed by God does not mean that man will not find a way to screw it up. In fact, that is how nearly everything has worked from the dawn of time.

God gave man perfection in the garden and he ruined it with sin.

He gave man religion and he ruined it with idols and unauthorized additions.

God gave man His perfect Son and they killed him within 35 years.

Every time God has given man a well-designed blessing, man ruins it in due time. Why would marriage be any different? In fact, God gave man marriage and man quickly ruined it with polygamy, intramarital and premarital sex and homosexuality.

Marriage is a good idea, but when placed in the hands of imperfect men and women, marriage is quickly ruined. We wrestle against human nature because it corrupts everything when left undirected. Marriage itself has been corrupted over time, despite being designed by God. Modern marriage has but the flecks of its former design and has been replaced by the perverse doctrine of feminism.

Be Willing to Be Alone

Being together with other people is great. It is a great tool. It can be encouraging and refresh us from the fatigue of the world. But it is not always enough. Sometimes it is important to be alone. 

In religion, the idea of togetherness is promoted so often that it actually becomes a detriment to individual growth. Too much connectivity drains people. It makes us tired of them to the point that we can actually start to dislike them.

I think this is partially due to social media, as I have mentioned before. When we are far too connected, we cannot appreciate the time we are together. And the more time we are artificially together through social media, the greater the possibility that we say something that angers someone else, or vice versa. Ask any married couple – being together 24/7 is not always an advantage.

There are many times when we need to take time to be on our own.

This is critical for us to recover our mental and emotional states. Being with other people can be exhausting, and it is useful and necessary to take a break from them if possible.

I’m certainly not suggesting a break from church. That is never a good idea. But I am suggesting that you minimize the time you spend with people periodically. This would be a great advantage for you if you were able to do so. 

When reading the New Testament, you quickly see that even Christ took time away from people to rejuvenate Himself.

Perhaps we do not have the same need to escape that He did, since He spent the vast majority of His waking hours with other people, teaching and helping them. 

But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.

Luke 5:16

After he had dismissed them, he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray. Later that night, he was there alone,

Matthew 14:23

One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God.

Luke 6:12

But even so, we still have the same need to get away from people, take a break from work, and refresh our minds and emotional states. We need to be comfortable with this because it is a critical tool for us. For some reason, religion has the idea that if we are apart for more than a millisecond, our faith will crumble. Not only is this untrue, but it is insulting. It suggests that we do not have enough faith or individual strength to stand on our own legs. This cannot and must not be the case. We must be willing to develop strength alone, split from the pack and be our own man. 

There is no need to spend endless hours with others, especially when they are likely to be very poor influences, poor role models, and mediocre in life in general.

Many people have used their religion to justify a mediocre existence. They also try to justify a lackluster effort in their careers and personal development, all the while calling themselves “spiritual”. 

If we spend time around too many mediocre people, we will become mediocre ourselves. And unfortunately, many people in the church have labeled their mediocrity “spiritualism”. I cannot say this enough if someone is living a mediocre life and justifying it by calling themselves “religious” he/she is a person you want to avoid at all costs.

Alone

We need to be comfortable being alone.

We need to learn to savor it and use it to strengthen us. You cannot always rely on others to be the strength for us. At some point, we have to learn how to stand on our own feet. Your peers may not want you to learn how to stand on your own feet because then they will have to do the same. And standing with their own faith is something that takes work, tenacity, and willingness to fail. How many Christians have that? How many Christians are successful? Not enough to justify modeling their behavior in your own life.

If you model the actions of a failure, you will become a failure. If you model the actions of a masculine success, that s what you will become. You need to take advantage of good influences and good role models while avoiding the incredibly detrimental effects of the negative influences. This involves going it alone for a while. You have to be willing to do this.

Take time for yourself. A few days in the mountains detached from everything and everyone else. You need that time to refresh yourself so you can come back to your work with newfound excitement. Also so you can come back to the church with newfound energy to tolerate your less than perfect peers and develop the self-awareness to know that they are tolerating you as well.

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