Do you even read here?

Bob obviously hasn’t been paying attention:

And this is why Vox Day can’t be honest about his beliefs concerning the conflict between evolution and the Bible. He can say he’s an evolution skeptic, because people are willing to put up with a certain amount of cognitive dissonance, but if he was consistent and said he was also skeptical about the truth of the Bible, which teaches that there wasn’t death before the creation of man, it would adversely affect how his core audience viewed him.

Right, I’m so concerned about how my core audience views me and I stick so closely to conventional Christian interpretation of the Bible that I had to INVENT A WORD just to clarify my point criticizing a belief that many of them hold. I’m not at all skeptical about the truth of the Bible, neither do I consider it to be word-for-word the inerrant and literal Divine Word of God.

I speak three languages, more or less, and have studied a fourth. I therefore am more aware than most of the dangers inherent in translation; Umberto Eco’s book Mouse or Rat is a very entertaining and illuminating look at them. For example, Italian has one word where English has three, hence the need for all the gesticulating and repeating everything three times so that the listener can identify your meaning by triangulation. Even a simple praise song will often have a slight contextual variation that only someone reasonably comfortable in both languages is likely to detect.

Being translated from other languages, the English Bible is obviously an imperfect translation, just as the original manuscripts Man’s imperfect translations of the literal Word of God. And yet, none of that matters. Being human, fallen and seeing through a glass darkly, we are incapable of distinguishing between that which has perfectly translated from divine to mortal and that which has been imperfectly translated. Thus, minor errors in translation and petty inconsistencies don’t concern me in the slightest, for I see the Bible’s divine inspiration in the way that its words, however flawed we might perceive them to be, are still wiser than the best that humanity alone can devise with the benefit of two millenia to its advantage.

I don’t merely believe in the truth of the Bible, I believe in its metatruth.

Posted by Vox Day.

Mailvox: Erroneous!

Daniel raises a mild objection:

That having been said, the statistics you quote on divorce are too incomplete to draw good references from. They don’t seem to address people who remarry. Comparing 26.4 percent of divorced atheists to 15.7 of Baptists, is all well and good if you marry once and either stay married or divorce and stay divorced forever, but, given Baptists marry more often, it seems reasonable to also presume they remarry more often.

A larger percentage of divorced baptists who remarried would mean that you were missing more divorces that you should have counted in the Baptist group than in the Atheist.

Barna informs us that 18 percent of all those who have ever divorced have been divorced multiple times. So, the impact of remarriage on the divorce rate here is limited to 2.8 percent of Baptists and 4.8 percent of atheists. Even if we eliminate the maximum number of potential multiple divorces from the divorce percentage, that still leaves a divorce rate of 21.6 percent for atheists and 12.9 percent for Baptists, reducing the divorce delta between atheists and Baptists from 68.2 percent to 67.4 percent, a massive reduction of 4/5ths of one percent.

Nor is there any evidence to suggest that Baptists are actually under more pressure than atheists to remarry, especially considering the Baptist teaching that remarriage after divorce is tantamount to adultery. One could also point to the example of leading atheists such as Bertrand Russell (4 wives) and Richard Dawkins (3 wives).

Therefore, the conclusion stands.

Posted by Vox Day.

On women leaders

Dr. Helen points out a contradiction in two media reports:

If these articles were trying to make a case against female leadership, they could not have done a better job–the stereotypes of women as demanding nags who are described as “queens” at home without any authority in the public sphere are hardly a ringing endorsement for female leadership.

The reason most women can’t lead effectively is that they are intellectually crippled by a lifetime of using their ability to grant or deny sex to the men who pursue them. This is why middle-aged women complain about suddenly becoming invisible and socially impotent, they are bankrupt in the only currency they have ever possessed. It is dangerous to expect to find much philosophical truth in pop songs, but Good Charlotte summed it all up in a nutshell when they sang “boys will laugh at girls when they’re not funny”.

Women tend to have different talents and preferences than men. They generally prefer multi-tasking, micromanagement and an emphasis on personal relations, combined with a desire to avoid responsibility, accountability and criticism. Therefore, we can reasonably conclude that they’re likely to succeed in leadership positions that don’t require focus, delegation, objective metrics, responsibility, accountability or flexibility.

But the biggest flaw I’ve seen in the business environment is female managers who attempt to treat their employees like children. Even worse is when they attempt to get a leg up on their peers or even superiors by doing so.

On a tangential note, one of Dr. Helen’s commenters cuts right to the heart of what every man despises about far too many women: “One thing that drives me bonkers are women who complain about how much they have to do when most of what they are complaining about IS VOLUNTARY.”

There’s nothing like sitting at a coffee shop and trying to write while being forced to listen to a group of overstuffed 50-somethings with androgynous haircuts spending the entire afternoon taking turns complaining about how busy they all are and what a bunch of useless husbands they all possess. Listening to five minutes of that irrational garbage is enough to convince anyone that the next growth market will be for a combined package of divorce plus an Eastern European trophy wife.

I don’t know why it is so hard for these supposedly intelligent women to learn that the more you complain, the less anyone listens to you. Economists call it the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility. If you don’t get it, consider this blog and how often I upset someone enough to make them fling an insult in my direction. Now, how could I possibly care about receiving one more insult? What is that one additional insult going to do that the previous one thousand didn’t?

Posted by Vox Day.

Atheist or Jew

Christian or Hindu. It doesn’t matter. All parents delude themselves alike:

I should note that I doubt very seriously that the “Hey-let’s-have-a-makeover-and-subsume-ourselves-to-men!” subliminal message of the Bratz is going to get much traction with Athena; for as much as she likes to torture me with the Bratz, I think she gets what my opposition to them is, and between me and Krissy, she gets enough counterprogramming to make their impact negligible.

Alas, if only the parents of stoners, hookers and lawyers had thought to let their children know of their disapproval, so many bad life choices would have been averted!

I wish John the best of fortune in keeping his daughter off the pole, but I couldn’t help smiling about the paternal optimism he expresses. It rather tends to reminds one of the Christian parents who send their daughter off to pursue a degree in Women’s Studies, confident that they’ve let her know what they think about feminism.

My advice is that if you think it’s mentally poisonous junk, don’t tolerate it. You cannot control all of the intellectual inputs into a child’s mind, but you can certainly control those you permit entry in your house.

Posted by Vox Day.