US Authoritarianism

Who says violence isn't good? How is "good" even defined?

When I got married, my wife really wanted her hometown pastor to do the religious stuff because it was important to her family. She warned me that I wouldn’t like it, but he literally included “submitting” in our vows.

Now nothing of the sort has or will happen, because her free will matters to me…. But in many religious communities this is normalized.

That's the beauty of Christianity. The Bible is so contradictory and vague that it becomes Choose-Your-Own-Adventure.

Ephesians 5:22-33

Wives, be submissive to your own husbands as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, just as Christ is the head and Savior of the church, which is His body. But as the church submits to Christ, so also let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.

Highly variable. My church growing up was chill. We learned to play dreidel and talked about Acts. Very little memorization.

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Then I went to Awanas with a friend. Pre internet times. Holy hell, that was rough. Station to station with rote memorization tasks followed by a serman wherein we were all told if our names were not already in The Book of Life we were all going straight to Hell and there was nothing we could do about it. That was a first and last Awanas for me as a kid.

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Highly variable. Like you, I heard nothing of submission from my childhood church. But that preacher at Awanas? Wouldn’t surprise me.

A woman needs to marry young so he husband can guide her and be to her like god is to man. She is to submit to him like man to god.

That's paraphrasing speeches I've heard at many old school christian weddings, and still hear today.

I've been a Presbyterian/Episcopalian most of my adult life. Most Mainline Protestant churches allow women to serve in all capacities.

But, I was raised Baptist and even the suggestion that a woman could teach an adult Sunday school class would be enough to make their heads explode.

People need to be taught that killing people is wrong. The natural instinct can be to use this permanent solution to a problem.

This is debatable I think. The vast, vast, vast majority of humans have never killed anyone, and a huge number of those who did were forced to in some way. Time and again we get combat reports that most people will simply not fire at anyone, regardless of the scenario.

It was in the sixth chapter of Men Against Fire that (Col. Samuel Lyman) Marshall made his assertions about what he called the ratio of fire. He was quite explicit: “a commander of infantry will be well advised to believe that when he engages the enemy not more than one quarter of his men will ever strike a real blow. …”

“The 25 percent estimate stands even for well-trained and campaign-seasoned troops. I mean that 75 per cent will not fire or will not persist in firing against the enemy and his works. These men may face danger but they will not fight.”

With repetition, the assertion became stronger, and nonfiring edged up to 85 percent: “we found that on average not more than 15 per cent of the men had actually fired at enemy positions or at personnel with rifles, carbines, grenades, bazookas, BARs, or machine guns during the course of an entire engagement. … The best showing that could be made by the most spirited and aggressive companies was that one man in four had made at least some use of his fire power.”

War isn't Murder

Give it a listen, a return to true country right here.

Remember kids: it's not political violence if some suit sends the police to do the violence for them.