The violence inside

If you are afraid to get married , you may well have reason to be .
But often not good enough reasons . Since anger has been banished from the lexicon of acceptable behaviors in the West westerners are afraid of anger -- and aren't able to deal with it . See previous posts on anger and depression ( the two conditions can be related)
Take smacking a child . Lions and mature cubs do it to young cubs so why are post Christian humans in the West ( Muslims have no problem with teaching restraint )  suddenly afraid to send quick pain messages to their children.smack the limb before it gets burned !Understand that the yell and the growl can be linked to pain .
    
The answer is that post Christian people have an incomplete and blinkered understanding of the place of anger and the idea of other drivers and dangers.,Its almost as though only adrenalin, physiology and DNA matters - they even talk as if everything in the mind is just a construct ( to be ridiculed )
: Evil , according to the recent illusion , is from external sources and therefore the behaviour of others is in focus  ."DNA rules and your mind is irrelevant ". A more complete view of drivers and responses in nature is needed.
The fear seems to stem from the failure of a rational argument on ONE driver to solve the complex problem of many interrelated drivers . For a scientist or a big thinker this is reasonable . The problem is how do any of us do it without getting a headache?
 

Christians reject the common, popular but shallow idea that we are driven by natural drivers ,( eg seeing violence means we will act violent)  ; we say its more complex than that ; there is a violence inside and it's up to us to exercise control over the internal drivers. Christians believe in facing the drivers and dealing with them ; training and teaching your body and mind require strong resistance- the word restraint is not in vogue amongst the modern rebels  even though its always needed to live in the world .

This is not an ideal world , but it is far far better caring parents teach restraint to the will from their parents than from those who don't care when they are teenagers or older. 

This is what we do to teach children about the real world outside .Children are not in charge and they will not always get what they want .The more you restrain unreasonable rebellion early, the less you have to do it later.  Its a parents choice to decide WHEN in love they HAVE to do it - Its not a choice if you and the nannies insist it is not a choice .

Yes there is a risk that we go too far - anger is normal and right is also normal ; Avoiding risk,  like avoiding admission of righteous anger doesn't make it go away . see earlier posts on anger and how to deal with it . 

It's only being realistic to face the restraint of the will early .

As Dr Phyl identifies each day - is the problem due to external factors or internal ones?  

Stalking the Virgin

The idea that all men are bastards is not new .  It wasn't Germaine Greers idea either .

It wasn't even Shakespeare's where in Cymbeline the thought is well captivated in a moment of despair by a good man tutoring and disciplining himself like no other .
The book of Genesis and the Old testament is full of stories about sex mad people.
Such tough truth talk is all means to an end though in the Bible .
 "You are a rotten lot but I still love you"is its terrifying and troubling  testimony, Yet men still choose to stay condemned -its a form of insanity and blind addiction ,
The Bible , unlike our present pornoaccepto age,  shows their actions to be vain destructive and deadly ."Neighbours:" and "Home and Away" TV  are all good friends and somehow week to week the belief is that "it will all work out ". Strung out and strung along,,,,,,,,, but people watch .

The Bible and Shakespeare call such a hope , nonsense in the extreme -they beg to differ .There is no hope there if you really are there in the midst of that mess .It was true thenand its true TODAY ,
U
The B&S team say it  will only work out if you / we change our mind about whats right here . And work its magic - yes it can!   Cymbeline ends with this

"never was a war did cease. 

Ere bloody hands were wash'd

With such a peace " 

Unlike the friendly sensible gods who watch Imogen and co  , the gods of our age just smile and say nothing while the families disintegrate and are never put back together again
.Stone cold stunned and silent Buddhas in the garden and back at the studio.

Noone watching the jealous and pathetic IACHIMO  could not see the schoolyard antics of the current school yard stud seeking out the isolated virgin to devour . He will do just as the Italian does and worse - with the tacit approval of the crowd...  God will and must judge .

The deperate sexmad are not satified and they are not satisfied still
This is not how nature intended us to rest and enjoy the company of others .
What decent man can keep his mouth shut while ALL our daughters are at such high risk ; while the prowlers are given no censure or condemnation and the victims no way forward.   

Strength to Love

Martin luther King wrote a book about it . This is a modern excerpt https://www.facebook.com/morgan.rod?fref=ts#

Beyond the shallow fanaticism of feminism

In a strange paradox , most thinking men can see the problem of misprojection, but many women can't , Both GB Shaw ( A hero of many feminists) and GK Chesterton had to duck and weave to avoid the careless lobs of unhappy women who,  seeing well the fractured frustrations of their parents, blame only the other party ---half the story.

Thankfully our forebears have fought this fight before us and won through. How,  you may well ask, when all in so many families can seem hopeless.
Our fortebears won  on the wonders of the deeper  case-- being more thorough and more scientific for a start   . Not by seeing and directing , monitoring and wrecking   but by resurrecting the old subject and stories of grace and forgiveness for all.

I pray you all revisit the strong men and women of Shakespeare. Let noone say no more that the Victorian age was full of fainting and fawning maids .The Queen( Merchant of Venice ) ,who in her own right, , has supreme power , calls for only an equal share in the life of a weak man and proves herself in that role to be much more than worthy of the partnership in the defence of both right ,love and mercy. The deep paradox of the servant heart is demonstrated there .
How can I deny the wonder of this night , that I should choose to watch ,for the first time ever , dear Portia follow her father' s wishes and trust her fate to faith-to not just any man, but a man with a passion to work hard at love . Its not by chance that I watched "The Merchant of Venice "tonight . He might be dumb BUT he managed to chose lead--- not gold and all that glitters ( and distracts) .
This punchy romance ends with the weak men being twisted around the fingers of the women - these are strong wise women and their partners in men and women are made stronger by the fight and the long wait for grace to appear .

Like · Reply · 55 mins · Edited

Warren Mitchell is brilliant shining darkly bright as the justice focused Jew,.Susan Jameson ( Known to us as Polkinghorne 's long suffering wife in New Tricks ) is full of beautiful exquisite eye contact as the Queen's best friend.( Blue BBC series 1980 - a must have )

Like · Reply · 1 hr · Edited

 I TRUST  That Many of you women will know/ do know  the blessing of having a true friend of the same sex to help you through the ravages of war , loneliness and neglect
.Nerissa(Susan Jameson) is that person in the play and don't those two girls have fun, finally ending the play on a woman's only high note -of having put one huge one over the boys . Get this --even the beautiful queen doesn't get much of a choice out of all the suitors in the world - eh girls ! Between a rock and a hard place there is a mere man and.. much grace, should you go looking 4 it.

Friends on the journey -- Portia and Nerissa

If you ever doubt that God is with you on the journey, stop and look around you . Do you have at least one friend - is that not enough ?
And if not enough for this moment,  look at those in the gallery before you . The moving pictures of people long dead or only really alive on film . Men and women who gave their lives and words to make the fantasy real for this present moment , Such are the gospels , the men and women of Israel, (Women of Israel- a great book of that name)
Such is the work of Shakespeare and Chesterton and Dickens and .......study Portia and Nerissa in the Merchant of V  Susan jameson plays the powerful friend beautifully

enice

Waiting for Love

We are given drivers like testosterone and adrenalin  to make us come alive , Our job is not as the simpletons suggest , to give into them but to deal wit them . To do as many do in our age and say" do what your feel like ' is not only to condemn young people to a life of no tension but much trouble as they get tossed and drowned in  sea of determinism .

Ours is a stupid age - when we we have everything we want but know not what we want . Tis not for having no eyes to see or ears to hear but a failure to hear the cry of wonder and grace from the gospels .

Men and women have to often wait long for grace but as its God's gift it will come  . Love is foremost patient . Study patient love even in Shakespeare and in Queen Portia and her waiting Maid Nerissa.

Takes one to know one - when the fight gets personal

Don't you hate it when a discussion turns personal . It happens even in the best regulated families, including my own... where I sometimes start  it . 
Confession time. 
What do you do when it happens to you? - well IMO there is not much you can do when it happens to you because there is often too much anger in the room. Adrenalin takes over and real sins get confused with real risks. ( such as physical violence ) Anger itself is not necessarily a sin and can be the adrenalin means to force resolution - if we let it.
The wonderful thing is we can and should learn to deal with it - and the dealing with it is best done later,, though not as long as in the play mentioned below . The good book says "do it "and "do it" before the day ends . Its that simple and it works ! "Do what ?"you might be sayin -- watch the play!

The really wonderful thing is that we can learn to deal with terribly scary things like anger and learn to love again; to find a way forward and not be overcome by fear in family and political life .

The positive side of focusing on what is sin is and why its serious and subtle stuff
 It used to be taught ( 8th commandment ) that attacking the person rather than the argument was wrong . Our defamation laws and many principals build on that one principle were held in clear focus until recently .
Like so many important distinctions in accusation law - its somewhat lost to the poorly educated in our community .i have to bite my tongue too cause I break the law too . so iIts easy to get confused / self defensive - esp when you are angry . You may not even admit to yourself you are angry .Esp if you think its always a sin , To see anger as always a sin is to be superficial .  To see anger as always a sin is to sit on To see anger as always a sin is to be superficial .  something you probably need to deal with openly . To see anger as always a sin is  to join the bubbling under the surface  majority in maintaining a superficial goodness when a bomb is about to explode  .  

Its acceptable then under OUR law to attack the sin but NOT the sinner . It is equally WRONG under OUR LAW to give the permanent status of sinner to anyone, as many of us still believe strongly in hoping for a change of attitude.

This positive attitude to problem solving should be a point of celebration for us as it has been for our forefathers for thousands of years. .Many lazy thinking moderns are too keen to lock people up forever -- we would all be in there if they had their way 



Even  you yourself are not real mad at this moment ( which is likely) let  suggest you get into practice for dealing with the next moment you are by watching Shakespeare's brilliant testimony  in "A Winters Tale " ( currently a big hit in London ) Just what the good Doctor ordered.

One of Shakespeare's last plays
 -A Winters Tale (a hit in London right now) makes this point extremely well.

Note that the trigger for the Kings sin is fear and not only that - unfounded fear --The real problem is his problem, not the person he accuses !
There is a lot of fear, projection and unworkable reconciliation effort around -
If we are going to target someone, we are often best to consider the old aussie accusation /question " takes one to know one": and really move on.  

Why do young people get so easily tricked ? , The TV sells them rubbish and they buy it

Success in Marriage .
Lots of marriages fail
Is the answer to live with someone before you buy in ?" Rules of Engagement" TV series  seems to test the water on this .My generation thought you didn't need rules -- you just got 'married " Strangely the program is good in name only like so much TV - talks but does not deliver . No rules , no engagements but lots of testing and little discussion of consequences ( like "walk of shame" )You get to see what happens but ad infintum and with no real understanding to lift the situation

I feel for young people because their parents don't even know why their faith in marriage and happiness didn't work . The sixth commandment says how it works and so does experience .  Is marriage the problem or their understanding of it the problem ?Infidelity breaks it for one .
Does shacking up with someone help you decide? Not if baby boomers experience is evidence - many tried -few succeeded in that . If you are going to share house share it with lots of people and not your bed .  Extra people in marriage will threaten  the sense of security in both parties whether its before  the event or after.
To make a good decision in marriage you need to practice observation NOT participation cause the person  you choose will be for life .You are  studying to make the BEST decision of your life ---takes time wisdom and self control.You don't learn that in the pressure cooker .

Its also not a new idea . It happened to Boomers  . Many got married because they thought happiness was automatically connected to the institution .Clearly it is NOT.
With so many marriage failures around them young people are still not so sure how to proceed  - fair enough. but
Is the answer to live with someone before you buy in ? How can anyone be clear when marriage is still the objective for most but known infidelity is the way to kill it . The baby is in their somewhere,and commitment to one person and self restraint are absolutely necessary. You don't learn restraint shacking up with someone.
While it is nothing new , shacking up together is still seen as the new and better way ---as they say ?
 That too has been well tried by baby boomers and the rate of failure and damage there is very high .Don't just watch the TV,  watch real people.
Anyway here it comes again from one young person . you be the judge.


Me

Thanks for sharing young ones but I would not recommend the practice esp if the ten good reasons you give are the best you can find - IMO you shouldn't even live with someone alone if you can't work that out from observing ( participants cannot be objective). Groups ( shared house ) are better than one to one . 

No one in favor of the idea seems to want to talk about "the walk of shame" that many women feel when they don't wait for commitment. The TV talks about it all the time but NEVER resolves it . It entertains ,but never really explains.
These are small things too because, if God is real, he either meant for you to show restraint or not - far more imp than your 10 ?
Stats are the terribly dumb toys of reactionaries and many of my now old school mates live in expectation of an insight when they have missed most,; because of their growing cynicism about how things work ( stats prove nothing much)-- you can spend you life just "testing the water "and they have ,
MI Stats give little insight to you personally , Don't try to evolve your life -, Take the true biblical frame as a given and prove it is the road to a confident well tested proactive lifestyle choice that your parents, gp ggp etc etc took .

Like · Reply · 10 hrs · Edited

Young Lady 1  Ummm but you're not a woman... So you have no idea what you're talking about re 'walk of shame'. It's actually none of your business what other people do, especially in their private space. Next you'll be telling us what we can and can't do with our bodies... This all fits within the misogynistic male frame of mind.

Like · Reply · 1 hr

Young person 2 These ongoing comments are a legitimate "opinion", but none of them address the original post, which is erroneous. It states that living together does not lead to marriage. We all know ppl who ARE married, who have once lived with each other. Therefore the premise is wrong. Nothing else about morals or opinions should therefore be discussed in relation to this post. People with opinions or ideas about telling other people what to do or not to do could open their own post on a different theme. The original article contains errors of FACT, it is therefore not relevant to continue about morality themes.

Like · Reply · 1 · 1 hr

yp2 . and it is of no bearing to "this" argument proposed originally by Mark if some relationships don't work. Some marriages don't work either (up to 30% of them) .... the ONLY argument proposed here is that living together won't lead to marriage, and t...See More

Like · Reply · Just now

You don't want to talk about it Diedre Emilia .Well that is your choice, but please always be open to the possibility that you can learn and should be open to others about CONSEQUENCES rather than SPECULATION , IMO how you enjoy your life is dependant on moral choices not statistical ones , 

Study the programs on TV and tell me that "Rules of engagement" provides you with some answers . Is it not like so many other programs just an endless stream of entertaining encounters where people just keep falling of the edge? - if they live like that .

Write a comment...

A worthy Womans hero

As  a long time single bloke, I used to love listening to the "Coming out" show on the ABC . Most men do like a feisty woman . I waited a long time to find one . Better to know she 's one before you marry her than find out about it later .We all have wills - best we know them clearly at the start!

Dickens ,like many of us when we are young,  chose the beautiful one and came to realize his mistake quite soon .  We best marry the tough one,  so we can make our war on ourselves and the world work ,
Dickens  realization that he had made a mistake didn't stop him loving her and learning to grow his love . This is the wonder of reading Dickens. There is hope if you go looking and loving and you are willing to change your mind about what you see. ( I am reading Chesterton on Dickens at the moment - exquisite )

Dickens Aunt is a classic . The ultimate man hater she would beat any of the modern feminists to the table of ritual dissection of a mans faults. Most amazing of all,  this obnoxious woman ends up being the real hero of the life story of Dickens- endearing us to his generation and in a  concrete way to all generations . We can love again if we take our eyes off our hurt and disappointment .God gives us what he gives us -make the most of it and prove its all grace in the end my friend !  ( a word from my father)

Like so many of our precious daughters Aunt Copperfield was deeply hurt by a man , perhaps many men including perhaps her father or uncles or teachers . Only takes one ? On the surface it could seem like there was no end to this cruelty .As a man its true ,  testosterone speaks to you all the time - potentially  leading us to crime . But nature is our sister not our master ,or indeed our mother .
The new generation must learn to resist temptation - not call it, as the devil would -heaven on hold .

Dickens ,would of course not be able to drag us back to love and loving if it wasn't for his own experience of deep deprivation . He would not be silly or shallow enough to fall for the gushing talk of our failed motherhoods in Parliament - who only see disadvantage and a supply of cushions from our vast store of stupid but toxic sentiment ( a dangerous post Christian heresy and legacy of simpleminded secularism )
The damned list of bad doers goes on forever,  just like the hole you can dig for yourself into if you want to go the blame game route.  It's never been easier to blame nature because it absolves everyone in the audience but noone in particular. Nature as a object of worship is not without its own teeth and tearing claws  O hole is a hole and  there is only one way out .


Yes , Aunt Copperfield is my hero for the moment:  Deeply hurt ,  flawed with a careless tongue ( like all of us) Aware finally of her mistake in blaming she' s helped out of the hole by Grace and her own honesty , humility and desire to do right ,  She is then , instead of chasing donkeys , able to love  and feel forgiveness and becomes  a  renewed source of the deepest  love  for so many of us .   

A reformed feminist has recently put this victimization "poor me " trap and disease into context.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jUnAF1InVR4  The factual feminist Prof Christina Hoff Sommers


A word from my mother --"Women of Israel"