The Cure for Living in the Comfort of Your Own Delusions

As mentioned yesterday, primitive forms of thought are more concrete and less symbolic. While there are still symbols, they are understood concretely, which very much goes to Commandment #2 against idolatry, idolatry being the quintessence of what is called symbolic equation, that is, conflating the symbol with what it symbolizes, as if "this drawing really is Bob Dobbs."

As an aside, I think it is important to read the Commandments as going against human nature, otherwise why would they be necessary? Their existence seems to imply that there is a default setting in human nature that moves in the opposite direction: toward polytheism, idolatry, theft, murder, envy, etc. What I would say is that we have higher and lower natures (or vertical and horizontal), and that a central purpose of the Commandments is to tease the former from the latter.

I recently had a conversation with a friend about the question of freedom, specifically, whether human beings have an innate desire for it. Like most westerners, his appreciation of freedom is so fundamental that he had difficulty accepting my belief that freedom is not a universal value, for if it were, human history would appear very different than it does.

Rather, God has to first liberate a people and teach them to sanctify their liberty -- to never forget the God who brought them out of slavery. The good news is that roughly 30% of these people still remember, and have not succumbed to the ambient spiritual I-AMnesia.

We have already touched on some of the unappreciated blessings which Christianity brought into the world, but here is where it all starts, with the vertical ingression of the divine freedom on earth. After that it is just a question of widening it out. And obviously the struggle is ongoing. This morning I read that the Islamic slavers are holding people hostage in a Jewish market. What a diabolically appropriate metaphor of human history: the divine freedom vs. demonic slavery.

We have discussed in the past how freedom developed in the west, in particular, in America. The earliest Americans did not have an abstract notion of freedom which they set about applying to human relations. Rather, they first lived it, and only afterwards drew the abstract conclusions from the lived experience. You might say that freedom was first concretely embodied -- you know, incarnated -- before it was mentalized and eventually enshrined in the Declaration.

This is quite the opposite of the French Revolution, which began with the abstract ideology of pinhead philosophes, which it then attempted to force upon the populace in a top-down manner. (This is one of the themes of the excellent The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left.)

We see this same pattern in contemporary America, with tenured pinheads and political sociopaths using various groups as guinea pigs to live out their pet theories. Look what they did, for example, to the black family by interfering with its organic evolution. Although this has resulted in the destruction of millions of lives, the left will never be called to answer for the crime in this life or in this world.

Siedentop goes into how Christianity was first understood in rather concrete terms, at least among pagan peoples for whom there was a greater psychopneumatic developmental leap. For example, he notes that in the 6th century, the Mass "was assimilated to the immemorial habit of offering 'sacred' meals to ancestors." Thus, "Despite their new beliefs, Christians continued to feed the dead."

Which, I think, is preferable to the way of Islamists or tenured revolutionaries who simply hold a gun to your head or sword to your neck and invite you to accept their new abstraction.

Siedentop notes that "Only in the seventh century did the Eucharist -- the Mass -- lose this quality of a 'meal' relayed from the family to the dead." This is a fascinating observation, because it demonstrates how Christianity only gradually cured man of religion -- or of one of the default religions of mankind, ancestor worship.

As the more abstract understanding of the Eucharist is setting in, we see a parallel development, a "profound change" involving "a new fascination with the 'day of judgment,' the fate of the individual soul after death." People -- individuals -- increasingly worried "about sin and its consequences for the individual on that final day of reckoning."

You might say that this is the birth of anxiety as we have come to know it. Or, it is a redirection of whatever it is that preceded anxiety -- just fear of the external world, I guess -- toward the internal world.

So, "little wonder" that scholars such as Peter Brown "identify in this questioning a new depth of self-consciousness -- which is to say, a more individualized picture of the way things are."

And back to my own long cherished Pet Theory, we also see "the beginnings of a clearer separation of moral from physical phenomena," accompanied by an "all-important struggle within the self to create an upright will." In other words, man had to first discover the voluntary in order to perceive the involuntary. Which is maybe why Islamist slaves have no understanding or appreciation of freedom.

This developmental shift has other delightful ramifications, for example, a new distrust of merely deductive argument in favor of a more empirical approach -- you know, actually observing the world instead of simply accepting the axioms, principles, and models of authorities. People at the leading edge of cosmic evolution "began to strip intentionality from the physical world" -- i.e., disentangle world and psyche -- which is a prerequisite of the scientific method.

One has only to argue with a post-Christian liberal to appreciate how impossible it is to reason with people who have no clear distinction between the external world and the projected content of their own minds.

Are Islamic Terrorists Crazy, Evil, or Developmentally Arrested?

I know. Why pick one?

But is there a specific psychological mode or mechanism that provokes a man to murder because the victim drew a picture that offended the murderer? Yes, but psychological causation is complex and systemic, rarely linear, one-way, or fully intentional. When I say "intentional," I mean we often (thankfully!) do things without really knowing why, nor do we (or could we) calculate each and every consequence.

Many people correctly observe that yesterday's terror has something to do with Islam. Certainly the terrorists think so. It is only liberals who deny the connection, in a way that varies with their ignorance of the subject. For example, Howard Dean has obviously never q'racked a Q'ran:

"I stopped calling these people Muslim terrorists. They’re about as Muslim as I am. I mean, they have no respect for anybody else’s life, that’s not what the Koran says.... I think ISIS is a cult. Not an Islamic cult. I think it’s a cult."

Or Ezra Klein: the murders "can only be explained by the madness of the perpetrators, who did something horrible and evil that almost no human beings anywhere ever do, and the condemnation doesn’t need to be any more complex than saying unprovoked mass slaughter is wrong." Could his ignorance of man's bloody history be more complete?

Perhaps you've noticed that leftists either make an issue more simple or more tendentiously convoluted than it actually is. In this case, they take the simplistic path: Islamic terror has nothing to do with Islam. These men are cultists, Donny.

I think we can agree that Islam is not a sufficient cause of the terror, but nor is it a necessary cause. That is, there are obviously Muslims who are not terrorists, and terrorists who are not Muslim. But most terrorists at this time do happen to be Muslim, and the Koran contains ample justification for their crimes. Does that make the Koran a cause, or just a pretext?

Here I think we need to widen our lens and take into consideration the sorts of cultures that have been shaped by Islam. There are what, 49 Muslim majority countries, each one a shithole to varying degrees. Starting with the As, there are Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, and Azerbaijan, followed by Bangladesh, Brunei, and Burkina Faso. Given the choice, no one would freely choose to live in these places unless they already have no idea what freedom is. In other words, in order to choose those cultures, one has to have already assimilated the repressive culture and its illiberal values.

This subject is very much relevant to our discussion of Inventing the Individual, because the whole point of the book is that something occurred in the Christian west that did not occur anywhere else in the world. We can argue whether it was a good or a bad thing, but we cannot argue that it is a Muslim or Buddhist or American Indian thing. Rather, that is the essence of the nub of the gist: a "clash of civilizations" with entirely different value systems.

But "civilization" is an abstraction that tells us little about the individuals of which it is constituted. And since human beings develop in time, some civilizations are more developed than others. This is an example of a simple truth that the left has attempted to convolute over the past century, to the point that they can no longer see the obvious (or are not permitted to see it).

Howard Dean and Ezra Klein are far from the only ones who are auto-blinded by ideology. Here is a tweet yesterday from a NY Times bureau chief: "Some call for an extreme use of force to respond to Paris attacks, but school shootings in US have killed more and US leaders do nothing." This guy equates the Paris attacks with Jerry Falwell suing Hustler magazine for libel. Yes, those two things would be exactly the same if the terrorists had sued the magazine and Falwell had murdered Larry Flynt.

I have seen some Charlie Hedbo material that has all the refined taste and sparkling wit of Hustler. There's nothing wrong with being offensive, so long as you are actually funny. Otherwise, it's just ignorant and boorish, like this sub-juvenile rendering:

However, it would never occur to anyone in the Christianized west that an absence of taste merits the death penalty. But the post-Christian west is indeed coming back around to the pre-Christian point of view. They don't necessarily murder, but political correctness has destroyed innumerable lives, careers, and reputations.

The world into which Christianity inserted itself was every bit as violent as the one inhabited by contemporary terrorists: after the fall of Rome, "Habits of violence, lack of foresight and the ingrained pleasure of leading an unregulated life meant that betrayal and murder were commonplace in the ruling families of the new kingdoms" (Siedentop). But ever so slowly, "Christian insistence on the equality of souls" began to nurture "a new image of reality."

Interestingly -- and this goes to the question asked in the second paragraph of this post -- it took quite a while for a more abstract understanding of Christianity to emerge from the concrete. This is a critically important idea, because this "entry" into a more abstract world is a stage in human psychological development. Nowadays we take it for granted, but for most of human history man has been more like a child in the concrete operational stage of cognitive development.

I look at it from a slightly different theoretical perspective than Piaget. I've discussed in the past the difference between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, the latter being more mature than the former. Back to the news of the day, what happens if a Muslim person in the paranoid-schizoid (PS) position is confronted with a cartoon that offends him?

First, let's discuss some of the characteristics of the PS position, courtesy psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden. These ideas are quite relevant to the Invention of the Individual; for example, chapter three is called The Depressive Position and the Birth of the Historical Subject.

In short, it seems to me that Ogden is discussing on a personal/individual basis what once occurred on a historical/collective basis. Without a change in the culture, there would have been no network of developmental support -- no matrix -- for the development of the individual. This is an idea I have been unable to eliminate from my head for at least 25 years, but for some reason no one else puts these two together, i.e., the individual and the historical.

Some of this is a little technical, but consider the following: PS "is a phase of development wherein the self exists primarily as object." Such a person is concretely "lived by his experience" in such a way that "thoughts and feelings happen" rather than "being thought or felt."

It's a subtle difference, and no one is entirely free from PS thinking. Rather, in the healthy person there is a dialectic between PS and D, through which we are able to reflect on the content of experience and distance ourselves from it, and thus live in a "freer" space -- free, for example, of simply acting on our impulses or emotions without insight or reflection.

A key point in living this way (in PS) is that it creates historical discontinuity. Or, to be more precise, the attainment of historical continuity is a developmental achievement that is impossible in PS. It is impossible because there is no autonomous "self" (or a very weak one) above the impulses and emotions. What we are really talking about is two different ways of organizing the content of experience, one more passive (which goes to modern victimology as well), the other more active and volitional.

I recall that Theodore Dalyrmple describes the identical pattern in his Life at the Bottom. For the developmentally stunted people he encountered in prisons, experience simply happened to them. It is as if they are bystanders to their own lives, like "I don't know what happened, Doc. The gun just went off and then she had a hole in her chest."

Likewise, Ogden writes of how, in the PS state of being, "things simply happen." Which, when you think about it, goes directly to Muslim theology, doesn't it? For occasionalism is a theory whereby Allah is the direct and unmediated cause of everything, to which we are simply passive witnesses. Which is why Islam means surrender. Might as well, since you have no choice anyway.

And as to why someone would commit murder over a cartoon, consider the following: "In the PS position, the predominant mode of symbolization is one in which the symbol and symbolized are emotionally indistinguishable since there is no interpreting self to mediate between symbol and symbolized. There is no sense that one attributes meaning to one's perception; events are what they are, and interpretation and perception are treated as identical processes."

In such a situation, a person who experiences rage upon exposure to a cartoon is unable to distinguish the rage from the object or its author. And this experience will be equated with "truth." Then, "the present is projected backward and forward, thus creating a static, eternal, nonreflective present." Which might go to why the Islamic world has been in a kind of static and unevolving present for the past 800 years or so. Which only makes them angrier.

Discovering New Worlds within Worlds

"Every set of beliefs," writes Siedentop, "introduces its own logic and its own constraints."

Secular types imagine this doesn't apply to them -- as if it is possible to approach the world without any beliefs, assumptions, or principles whatsoever -- but this is analogous to a computer with no program, or a game with no rules. Furthermore, many of our deepest assumptions are innate and inbuilt, even limiting ourselves to the horizontal. Call it the "wisdom of the species," if you like.

Come to think of it, we have in the past discussed those four annoying limitations or infirmities that constrain every man, every time, here for example:

First, we are "creature, not Creator, manifestation and not Principle" (Schuon). Second, we are not angels; we are neither at the top nor the bottom of the vertical hierarchy, but somewhere in the middle -- which, of course, goes to the issue of free will, as we are suspended halfway between our better and worse selves, between the saints and the Sharptons. Third, as unique individuals we have essential differences that are not accidental or contingent. This is not a matter of "ego" but of self, i.e., our divine clueprint.

The fourth infirmity touches on what we usually think of as sin, since these are the differences that are accidental or contingent, not essential. More often than not they are a result of mind parasites of varying degrees of virulence, but sometimes they are simply a result of inertia, convenience, dullness, conformity, credulousness, absence of curiosity, or tenure (i.e., all of the above). (More fine insultainment here.)

At any rate, a primary difference between Christians and secularists is that we are candid in announcing our metaphysical assumptions up front, while they either pretend they don't have any, or else lack the cognitive sophistication to understand what they are.

For example, the most dense among them -- e.g., what's his name, the glorified planetarium gift shop manager -- unwittingly deny all of man's intrinsic infirmities, which is why they can be such inappropriately confident yahoos. But even denying infirmity #1 lands us in all sorts of trouble. To quote myself:

"The first is the Biggest, which is why it is enshrined in the First Commandment: sorry, but you are not God. You are 'creature, not Creator, manifestation and not Principle or Being.' In fact, only the godless can be unaware of the fact that they are not God, which is probably the greatest source of their political mischief. As Obama might say, if I had a God, he'd look like me."

Back to the new logic and constraints brought into the world by Christianity. These two are different but equally important.

With regard to logic, Christianity furnishes certain premises which man must work out on his own. With regard to the constraints, certain avenues of thought become either unthinkable or, more to the point, unworthy of thought: they are cognitive nul de slacks. At the same time, certain behaviors are off limits, say, cutting open a live human being in order to see what's going on inside. For now man is aware of "a 'moral' law distinct from custom or human command."

As it so happens, my fourth grade son is being forced to read a nauseatingly politically correct book about the Indians. For the sake of equal time, I pulled out my copy of D'Souza's America, which has a chapter on the Indians. At the beginning he addresses the objection that Columbus couldn't have "discovered" America, being that there were already people here. But this ignores the deeper point, that it was a European who landed in America, not a native American who landed in Europe. There are important reasons why the latter was impossible.

One central reason is that the discovery of this new material world followed on the heals of the prior discovery of another new world: the human interior. I hope I'm not beating a dead hobby horse, but one of the reasons I am so drawn to this book is that Siedentop shares many of my ideas about the emergence -- or discovery -- of this new interior world.

For example, "The sharp edge of the moral sword wielded by churchmen cut through to -- and exposed -- an 'awareness of self'.... in its essentials, the realm the clergy claimed for themselves and sought to defend was unseen. It was within." He quotes one representative churchman, who said that God "resides in us like the soul in our body... Ever must we cling to God, the deep, vast, hidden, lofty and almighty God."

This is one of those notions that now seems second nature to us, but it was a radically new conception at the time. I don't have sufficient time to be systematic here, so I'll just cite some additional examples from Siedentop. He references the historian Guizot, who claims that "If the Christian Church had not existed, the... world must have been abandoned to purely material force." The Church "spread abroad the idea of a rule, of a law superior to all human laws."

Although modern secularists may regard this as some sort of "oppression," it was in fact a liberation, part of the truth that sets us free. And as we have been acknowledging all along, it took many centuries for the message to sink in and change man from the inside out. But change it did. There is a reason why even (most) secular westerners cannot conceive of, say, murdering a writer who pokes fun at the messiah while screaming obamahu ackbar! Rather, they just hack your computer.

The discovery of this new interior world contributes to a growing awareness of the distinction between power and authority, or force and right, or spiritual and temporal power:

"The separation of temporal and spiritual power is based upon the idea that physical force has neither right nor influence over souls, over conviction, over truth. It flows from the distinction established between the world of thought and the world of action, between the world of internal and that of external facts" (ibid., emphasis mine).

Siedentop continues: "Distinguishing spiritual from temporal power rests on the premise of individual conscience," for "there must be a sphere within," a God-given "area of choice, governed by conscience." Or just say horizontal freedom guided by vertical constraint -- constraints which must equally apply to terrestrial rulers (the "rule of law").

Today's bottom line: "Increasingly, acknowledging that subjects had souls was making a difference to the question of what constituted proper governance. It was another step in inventing the individual."

Conservative Progress and Progressive Decay

Yesterday we had just begun discussing how our basic assumptions open or close certain avenues of thought, before being hijacked by that lonely feminist who aspires to be an ex-wife from hell without undergoing the formality of ever being married. She is what we ironically call a "progressive," ironic because progress itself is one of those avenues of thought that is closed off if we begin with progressive assumptions.

Remind us, Bob, how that works.

Well, the self-styled progressive left begins with materialist assumptions, which means that they rule out transcendence from the get go. As a result, they can have no intelligible definition of progress, which requires a transcendent standard. Therefore, progress is tautologically defined as "what progressives want," or even "whatever progressives do," regardless of how retrogressive (see Obama for details).

And since what progressives want is by definition "progressive," then any idea, person, or institution that stands in their way is an enemy of progress. This becomes their "moral" standard, since again, in the absence of transcendence there can be no real moral telos -- i.e., no contact with the world of virtue as such.

For the same reason, truth is off the menu, so rational persuasion is devalued in favor of force, i.e., raw power. When the leftist says that politics is "all about power," believe him.

For these reasons, secular thought, left to its own devices, eventually becomes self-beclowning. Yesterday we saw a beautifully schadenbonerian example of this, with the Harvard faculty learning that ObamaCare would actually apply to them and not just the peasantry.

This is not supposed to happen! Leftist ideas are metaphysical abstractions to be imposed on third parties: they are a result of A and B getting together to forcibly diminish liberty and extract cash from C. They are not supposed to do this to A and B. The outrage!

Or, look at Cuba. If we're nice to them, they'll be nice to us, right? Which is why the spokesditz at the state department can’t explain why Cuba isn’t fulfilling promises made in the Obama deal. It just makes no sense! Consider too the leftist theories of law enforcement playing out in New York. How's that working out?

Anyway, back to actual progress, which is a Judeo-Christian principle, not a pagan or secular neo-pagan one: as Siedentop suggests, we should not be surprised that "a religion which postulated the incarnation -- a God who is 'with us' -- would change the understanding of time itself, holding out a hope that undermined older beliefs in a relentless cycle of growth and decay."

For the ancient mind, there was either stasis or decay. The purpose of religious ritual, for example, was to pull the world back toward its divine archetype and thereby counteract entropy: time is entropic whereas religion is negentropic.

But with the widespread acceptance of Judeo-Christian metaphysics, time becomes negentropic; or, to be precise, time has elements within it of both entropy (decay) and growth. And the growth is again inconceivable in the absence of the divine attractor, proximity to which is the real measure of "progress," both individually and collectively.

In the absence of the divine attractor, time, whether we like it or not, reverts to entropy. This is why it is such a vivid example of the Butterfield Effect to wonder at the paradox of why culture is decaying despite the dominance of the left. Rather, it must decay under the influence of leftist assumptions.

Equally ironic, in light of yesterday's post, is that no force in history has been more liberating of women than Christianity. Here again, writes Siedentop, we should not be surprised to see new "declarations of independence by women" as a consequence of "Christian belief in the equality of souls." In particular, more affluent women began taking "on new roles. They became patronesses, disciples and travelers. They prized associations with leading Christian intellectuals. They used associations with such men to further their education."

Did this take time? Of course! Time is progressive, remember? In particular, it took centuries for the Christian message to undo the programming of culture. The world has always been multicultural, only worse. It is one of the main things from which the universal message of Christianity is supposed to save us. Thus, it would be another instance of the Butterfield Effect to wonder why there is so much more racial tension these days despite all this wonderful multiculturalism.

By way of contrast, even a genius such as Aristotle affirmed that "some are free men and others slaves by nature" (in Siedentop). This is no doubt true if you look at it from a certain angle, e.g., Harvard professors are better than the rest of us, while untenured white men bottom out the scale.

But this is not the angle through which Christianity looks. Rather, from the God's-eye perspective we are equally worthy, at least until we misuse our God-given free will. Then God sorts the wolves from the sheep, the flowers from the weeds, the wheat from the chaff.

Well, that's about it for today. Backed up with my work.

The Feminist Dilemma: How to Find a Wet Noodle in a Stack of Brown Bananas

"Any set of basic assumptions opens up some avenues for thought, while closing down others" (Siedentop). Although Christianity provides just such a set of basic assumptions, it required centuries for the implications of these "to be drawn out and clarified -- and even more time would pass before long-established social practices or institutions were reshaped by these implications."

This was a conservative revolution -- the only kind of revolution that actually succeeds -- because it started with the way the world actually is, instead of imposing an abstract ideal on it, which always ends in violence and regression, since it unleashes the worst in man under the guise of the best. See Islam and leftism for abundant examples.

Those twin malignancies close off the pragmatic past in the name of an impossible future, while Christianity tries to open the present to the influence of a higher mode of being, resulting in change that is both organic and rooted, thus more robust (plus in accord with human nature).

Which is why Obama is always urging us to yield to the FIERCE URGENCY OF THE NOW!, so we don't notice what he's really up to. Or in other words, "Time is running out to do something stupid and irreversible. Act now!" (Williamson).

Yes, “'Now!' is a rhetorical short circuit, a way to preempt anyone’s thinking too deeply about a proposition." It is "is the eternal cry of the infantile -- 'What does baby want? Diaper change! When does baby want it? Now!'" (ibid.).

In contrast, positive change preserves continuity, which is a central point of the Incarnation, since it serves to bridge the otherwise unbridgeable gap between man and God. In short, we get the benefits of heaven with all the conveniences of our own embodiment.

But again, it takes awhile for that to sink in and up.

For example, think of how the Islamists impatiently blew up those ancient Buddhist statues, or how the left has been busy blowing up western civilization for the past 50 years or more.

But Christianity planted itself within the existing paganism, and simply Christianized its sentiments, gods, and rituals. Aligning the birth of Christ with the winter solstice "is only the most obvious example" of appropriating "the advantages both of change and continuity."

Doing so was analogous to plugging an existing wire into a higher source of energy. Once plugged in, the energy began reshaping practices, beliefs, and institutions, nowhere more dramatically than in the family. Frankly, it "destroyed the ancient family as a cult or religious association" (Siedentop).

You might say that before there could be a separation of church and state, there first had to be a separation of church and family, and in particular, God and father. The family was still sanctified, of course, but as an icon of God, not the thing itself. Now the terrestrial father had to answer to a higher image.

As a hopefully brief asnide, I wonder how someone ends up being as deeply confused as this toothache with a vagina, who asks -- or tells -- us How to Find a Feminist Boyfriend.

The first thought that occurs to me is to simply find a toothache without a penis, which shouldn't be hard to do, last time I checked dailykos.

But let's be quasi-serious for a moment: the same energy that causes those Muslims to deface works of art is what motivates the left to blow up our own beautiful traditions, marriage being just one of them.

The difference, however, is that the left has been deeply conditioned by the Christian message, where Muslims haven't. Therefore, we see in the left a perversion of Christian principles, or a neopagan rebarbarism of that from which Christianity is supposed to save us, now promiscuously fertilized by faux-Christian principles.

This is analogous to how Islamists use the highest technology for the lowest ends. In other words, they adopt a technology that they themselves could never gave invented -- because they are so primitive -- for the most primitive purposes.

In the case of the left, they take a morality that they lack the principles to invent (let alone discover) -- say, marriage -- and twist it to their own base ends. Leftists, of course, believe in "homosexual marriage." But why? How did they come up with this notion of marriage? That's right: they just stole it. However, being that they are mixing the Christian higher and pagan-lower, they can have no principled objection to polygamy, or inter-species marriage, or sibling marriage, or any kind of arrangement you like, all pseudo-sanctified by that same purloined word.

"How do you spot a male feminist if he’s not at an abortion rights rally wearing a 'This Is What a Feminist Looks Like' T-shirt?"

He's the one not shuddering at that sentence. He's the one in whom your prose doesn't trigger the gag reflex.

"Few guys will proudly say no when asked if they’re feminists."

True, so true. Only 62% of white males didn't support President Unicorn in the last election, so there's still a very large pool of castrati from which to draw.

And if you can read the next sentence without cringing, you are on the shortlist: "feminist daters -- male or female, gay or straight -- aren’t constrained by gender roles." Who knew Angelina Jolie had so many children?

For the feminist, gender is everything, but for the purpose of being nothing. It is nihilism masquerading as gender, for to be a feminist is to treat femininity with the subtlety of an Islamist art critic.

"A true male feminist is supportive of, interested in and enthusiastic about his partner’s career."

There are not many men whose careers interest me. Why should I care what a women does, unless it's something intrinsically interesting, like raising children? (Show me the man who is attracted to a woman because of her job, and I'll show you a pole dancer. --Cousin Dupree)

Did you know that homosexuals aren't perfect? I've never heard a leftist acknowledge this before. For example, there are "gay couples who are so rigid in their gender division" that "one man doesn’t want his partner to work, wants him to stay home with the kids.”

That makes their other problems sound trivial, like shorter lifespans, higher incidence of mental illness and other diseases, inability to sustain monogamy, increased substance abuse, etc. Well. Those are just because mother nature is a homophobic bitch.

"If you’re a woman who wants a man to grab you and kiss you because that’s what sweeps you off your feet, realistically, a feminist man is not going to do that."

No, a feminist man will require you to fill out a signed affidavit in triplicate in the presence of a notary public. And any sweeping will be done with a proper broom and apron, thank you.

You know, "I might be cool with casual sex, but that doesn’t necessarily make me this ‘cool girl’ who’s detached from emotion."

No, in my experience it makes you a conflicted little girl who is using sex to fulfill other forbidden needs that shall not be named. We used to call them "sluts," because their desperation is so close to the surface and they are so easily manipulated by men who have a complementary sexual agenda.

There is no doubt that throughout history there have been women who, for whatever reason, have been conflicted about being one. But only in the modern world do they have so many options to act out their conflict without insight and therefore without hope of change. That's what you call progress.

Is it any wonder Christian women have better sex lives? It makes things so simple when men aren't women and women aren't this: