Young Australian Skeptics

…or in my case, some interested clicking. I was planning through all of today to write about one of these two articles (thanks to The Barefoot Bum for leading me to them), but some interested clicking on the site found me something much more entertaining to write about.
“Cut Off the Competitive Edge” — an article on what to do about competition between partners.

Rodney Wilson, our unfortunate author of the day, does not get off to an auspicious start…

“In high school I dated a girl for a year. She would always ask the most curious question: “If we were married, would it bother you if I made more money than you?””

“Haha, oh dear. Don’t be silly, honey, of course I wouldn’t. Besides, ‘housewife’ isn’t a salaried job!”

“I cannot recall how I responded, but her question spoke volumes. There was a competitive edge to her inquiry. I came to realize that it would bother her a great deal if she didn’t make more money than her husband. That competitive edge told me to keep my distance.”

Because the last thing anybody wants is a motivated, successful partner. I mean, seriously — do you think that maybe you’re over-​​analysing the situation a little bit? Or maybe, just maybe, the culture that was around when you were in high school was one where it was common for husbands to feel inferior if they earned less than their wives (an attitude that I suspect is probably still alive and well today in certain parts of the Western world) — thus making her question perfectly reasonable?

He then goes on to list certain areas of competition between spouses that he claims are unhealthy, and shockingly I find myself in partial agreement with him. After all, if a couple really is engaged in competition over who gets to spend more time with the kids, they’ve likely got some issues to work out. Of course, Rodney dives head first into the deep end of an empty pool when he tries to identify why such competition is unhealthy:

“Any marriage team that finds itself with this type of competitive edge becomes less functional and susceptible to the real opponent — Satan.”

Oddly enough, he doesn’t spell out exactly what it is Satan is going to do to the married couple. I mean…what? Does he split them apart? Hide the shed keys under freshly folded laundry? Possess the kids and introduce them to drugs? That last one would be a great excuse for the kid, mind you — “Yes dad, I was smoking weed…but I was possessed by Satan, and it’s all your fault!”

The rest of the article is more of the same crap, with additional fun bible references. Yeah, it may well be the case that,

“Jesus said, “What God has joined together, man must not separate” (Matt. 19:6, HCSB)”

But don’t forget that straight after that he said,

“Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.”

So even according to Jesus, you can divorce your wife provided that she cheated on you. Oddly (or not, really) that rule doesn’t seem to apply in reverse — yet more of that wonderful biblical sexism. For more of the same, he refers to Ephesians 5, which tells women,

“Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.”

Well, shit. And what is it that the husband has to do? Love the wife. That’s it. While god has commanded the wife to be little more than a doting slave to her husband, the husband gets off with the commandment to love his wife. Now, I’m no marriage counsellor, but I’m pretty sure that if you don’t love the person you’re married to, that’s a big ol’ warning sign that you should probably not be married to them anyway!

Hell, you might as well command them to eat their dinner and breath air.

Finally, he tells us that,

“The ultimate purpose of marriage is to glorify God.”

If that’s the case, I call shenanigans on the whole damn business of disallowing gay marriage. I submit this video as conclusive proof for my position, and with that, the prosta…er prosecution rests!

(A warning — that video is most definitely NSFW!)

Tags: lifeway, marriage, morons with bibles, Richard Hughes, sexism

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 9:25 am and is filed under Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.