RE: "Nice Guy" Jesus: Is the Love of the Biblical God Really Unconditional?
I'm borderline obsessed with the /r/niceguys subreddit. It's a familiar experience being on the receiving end of Nice Guy nonsense and it's nice to actually be able to laugh about it and flip the script. These days, I don't get it with the same frequency, but I've still had a few gems in the past year. It's definitely not a new phenomenon; just one that has come out of the shadows now that our culture is cool with actually talking about abuse and harassment toward women without like, blaming us for it.
This is a major problem that I have with Christianity as well. As I'm sure you know by now, I'm not religious, but if I were to be religious, I don't see how any loving god would condemn people for not believing in them when they're giving us zero actual evidence that they exist. The Jewish version of God is pretty sadistic, though, which makes him pretty hard to love. And I mean, isn't it all kind of arrogant? Does God really have such low self esteem that s/he has to be validated like that?
Indeed, though it makes perfect sense if the real point of such teachings is to make members afraid to doubt. Heaven and Hell is the ultimate expression of the carrot and stick, good cop/bad cop method of persuasion. There doesn't even have to be a real carrot and stick, you're just psyching 'em out.
You might get a kick out of these:
Don't Get Tricked, Bro: How to Recognize a Cult
Diagram of a Memetic Virus
Jesus Predicted a First Century Return Which Did Not Occur
Evolution, Creationism and Flat Earth Cosmology
Is Evolution Really Compatible With Christianity?
To Christians Who Accept Evolution: Is Nature Obviously the Work of an Intelligent Designer? The Authors of the Bible Apparently Thought So.
What the Heck are 'Abiogenesis' and 'Prebiotic Evolution'? How Much is Known About the Origins of Life?
What Even is Evolution by Natural Selection, Anyway? A Beginner's Guide
Substance Dualism: The Creationism of the 21st Century
Indeed. As you know I'm not an atheist, strictly speaking, but find it absurd that the supreme being would be male, one of the human sexes. Are there no aliens? Or are they all male and female, like humans? Does Yahweh have a penis? Y chromosome?
Why does a dispassionate cosmic entity enjoy the aroma of burnt animal offerings? Or revile women on their period, homosexuality, etc.? Why would it command slaves to obey their masters, children to obey their fathers under penalty of death, and women to remain silent and obedient?
These sound pretty suspiciously like what fathers living in that time period liked and disliked. Like Yahweh is a big scary puppet they invented to terrify everybody else into living in a way they found pleasing.
It's very convenient, isn't it, that God's laws would all serve to disproportionately benefit men by making everyone else subservient to them?
On the note about sadistic godly behavior, I went to synagogue with my mother a couple weekends ago, and I was making good use of my boredom by practicing reading Hebrew, as I haven't done in years, and taking a look at those hymns' translations. It was all like, I WILL GIVE ALL OF YOU TO YOUR ENEMIES IF YOU DISOBEY ME [INSERT GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION OF YOUR PERSONAL RUIN] interspersed with little stanzas about loving your God as your eternal father blah blah blah. And I'm like, really? I find it damn near impossible to love a god that would torture me for eating shrimp or breaking any other of the 600+ mostly arbitrary and ridiculous rules that make up the Torah (which super religious people enforce in part and then ignore when convenient for them). At least Judaism isn't big on damning people to hell; God is more into making your current life hell.
Also, as for the whole male supremacy/Judeo-Christian religion thing, it also seems pretty typical to me that men would create a god who seems to be easily enraged and irrational, and flips out over basically nothing in what appears to be a testosterone-induced rage. If women had created Judaism and Christianity, God wouldn't act like such a Nice Guy and would be way more loving and chill about things. But, you know, in our culture, women are the irrational ones.
Maybe, maybe not.
I haven't delved into /r/nicegirls too much because I assumed the comments would make me want to lobotomize myself, because it would probably just be ammunition for the incels to show everyone how women are even more abusive than men (or something). But reading the sidebar it looks like the mods ain't about that BS.
Is /r/niceguys not also ammunition for a certain crowd?
Without stepping too deeply into debates about misogyny and the concept of misandry and how much that's a problem, I'd say it's akin to the question of whether or not "reverse racism" exists.
Sexual and physical violence against women and verbal abuse are problems that almost all women experience at some point, and being berated for politely turning down someone's sexual advances, which is obviously a human right, is a common experience. It helps a lot to be able to laugh at it and share it rather than just cower in fear that someone you know at work or at school is going to come after you for having threatened their masculinity. Many incels literally believe in condemning women to sexual slavery and punishing women who are not monogamous because they think it is a grave injustice to them that women are permitted to reject them sexually. The fact that there are some women out there who act irrationally in that /r/nicegirls kinda way is a good way to bolster that myth that all women are monsters who deserve to be sexually abused. I know that there are women who hit their partners or pressure their partners to have sex, and there are some who act badly (or even horrifically) if they are turned down, and those things are all wrong that certainly deserve to be addressed. Is it a universally experienced phenomenon that men suffer? Are there an enormous amount of men out there who fear that their partner or their stalker will one day kill them? Are these big societal issues that have to be faced head on for everyone to see so people will finally stop doubting the victims of it? I don't think Incels and feminists who take things farther than I agree with are at all two sides of the same coin.
Indeed. Racism is racism. There is no special category of it. Likewise, there are people who misbehave when rejected from all walks of life, men and women.
Yes. Probably this surprises you, but you're not a man. You don't experience what women can be like to men when they feel rejected.
Likewise it was difficult for me to understand the frequency with which women experience it until browsing /r/niceguys because as a man, I don't see/experience that behavior from other men like women do.
Then you have a very slanted perspective on this issue, which your post reads like an elaborate justification for. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
My "without stepping too deeply into" disclaimer in my previous comment was written precisely to avoid this tone, though I'm not sure whether or not you mean for this to have a tone (the shrug emoji tells me yes, but I could be wrong). From your last comment, I also gather that you didn't really read or consider what I said in any serious way, if all you got out of it was that it was an "elaborate justification" for my "slanted perspective." Feminism is an important topic to me, as I'm sure you've noticed, but when I brush up against people who seem hostile to it I take one of three approaches, all in acknowledgement that minds are seldom changed on this topic: a. just don't respond; b. respond with a "I suppose we'll agree to disagree"; c. write back a measured and thoughtful response that addresses their perspective while also offering my own, preferably with as much data as possible. 90% of the time, I choose option "b;" about 5% of the time, I go with "a," (in the case of men who--on this topic--seem scary and threatening to me); but then there's the 5% of the time that I engage, which I save for those I believe possess exceptional critical thinking skills, of which I very much consider you one of them. So with that in mind, I say the following:
That is a self evident truth, and obviously one that could be argued for yourself.
It is true that I do not experience rejection from the male perspective, but I think it's a common experience among all humans to experience rejection in some form at some point in their life. It's true that it's hurtful, and it sucks to experience it. But it's a false equivalency to say that the pain of romantic rejection and the fear that comes with being physically and sexually threatened by men who are larger and more powerful than you are two sides of the same coin, not just in terms of severity, but in terms of frequency.
Here's some data to back that up:
-The data is much more limited for male victims of partner homicide for obvious reasons, but I did find one statistic that placed it at 29%.
From this I would conclude that sexual and physical violence against women, and the not-at-all-uncommon male tendency to threaten it when rejected (a la Nice Guys), is an issue which desperately needs our continued attention. Men feeling pained by rejection or feeling that they are not sexually gratified are not at risk of imminent physical harm because of that pain. Therefore, the feminist movement and the incel movement are not at all fighting equivalent battles and the reasons for their anger are very different.