Apparently MGTOW is a religion now. At least according to one MGTOW Redditor, who suggests that the scriptures of this new religion consist of all the whiny posts about the evils of women that are regularly posted to assorted MGTOW forums.
Let’s let the good Reverend Roflcopt0rz_returns MGTOWsplain it all to us:
Wow, I thought you guys were just whiny woman-haters who couldn’t shut up. I had no idea you were doing the Lord’s work.
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Christian “i read the bible and listen to scripter to help me through when life gets tough and my faith gets shaken, like when I lost my job, got a bad health diagnoses, or lost a love one suddenly. It helps me process my emotions and gives me hope to keep going forward even when my darkest day arrive”
mgtow * “I read made up hate speech so I don’t develop empathy for a woman and remind myself to hate them even when I want to put my penis in them.”
I mean, yeah. Your goal is to hate women. You write down a bunch of stuff about how much you hate women, and you refer to it to remember to hate women some more. We all understand that. The constant whining about women is brought up when MGTOWs try to pretend like you have goals beyond hating women, which you do not. If you’re just admitting that hating women is your whole deal, well then we agree on that (and nothing else).
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
I don’t even disagree with you, about the Bible or any other scripture. I only disagree with the original highlighting the bathwater and not the baby. Such highlighting from national sources is the reason I cannot say, “Allahu Akbar”, a sentiment which the majority of Americans of all parties agree with according to Pew Research, without some serious blowback from I’m going to go with anecdotal experience of “way, way too many people”. 70% of Democrats rising to 85% of Republicans have a fairly certain to absolute faith in God, so why could this statement be so offensive? Because of negative religious stereotyping.
I appreciate your clarification in dialogue though. 🙂
This is a problem with regressives of all creeds, including those of secular creeds only. It’s how eugenics and evo psych came about, the desire to justify what a person already wanted to believe. It is the duty of those within a creed who are not regressive to fight to reform it, and this does and is happening in all major creeds, including religions. The regressives always shout loudly before they go down.
I don’t go around religioning on the kafir mulhids and telling them they’re going to hell (probably partly because I don’t believe that), and I do tell off people for doing that. There’s nothing more irritating than a religious bigot.
I’ve met some Christians (fundie variety) who can quote Bible verses … that they memorized off a card or a bookmark or something else distributed by their church leaders. They can give you the chapter and verse, and bask in the glow of their own righteousness, but they can’t talk about the verse in context because they don’t see the verses as part of a larger work. It’s a nifty way to feel good about yourself and your faith without actually testing it. Or, as Milton once put it:
ETA: Incels and MGTOWs seem to have a lot of fugitive and cloistered virtues.
@VP
That’s because fundies are ALWAYS the same. Don’t matter what they’re fundieing on about at all – they all behave in exactly the same way.
Evangelicals absolutely do read the Bible quite a bit. It is common for evangelical children to play the “verse lookup” game, where you give book chapter & verse and the first child to find it and read it out wins. Using obscure books for this game teaches children what order the books are in (quick! find the book of Obadiah). It’s not uncommon at all for a really fundamentalist evangelical to do a daily Bible reading, although it’s rarely at random.
When I was a fundamentalist, I read the Bible from front to back as though it were a novel, and while I can’t remember where the book of Obadiah is in order, or what it talks about, let’s not claim that nobody ever reads the context.
@Moggie
That reminds me a bit of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. One of the characters is illiterate and chooses names for his children by picking random words from the Bible, which results in him naming his daughter after Pontius Pilate.
There are sites which will send you a random Bible verse daily. I would imagine those are probably filtered, though, so that people don’t just receive a list of which birds not to eat.
And there’s also plenty of christian fundies that either don’t read the bible or don’t know the context at all. It don’t take much knowledge of it to stump a lot of them.
Since there isn’t a ton of evangelical near where I am, maybe evangelical specifically know their topics. Alternatively, maybe a fraction of fundies know the bible well, because reading it entirely and knowing the context is a lot of work and not everyone have the focus or will to do that, especially when their “faith” is just a pretext for hate.
I think it depends. The more hardcore/fundamentalist Christians probably do read the Bible a lot, and maybe evangelical families running for multiple generations do as well, but as far as I know, most people who go to evangelical churches aren’t that hardcore about it. It’s one thing to instill Bible-reading habits to a child, and another to try figure out whether or not the average person at an adult congregation knows who John the Baptist is.
In 2010, Pew Research did a survey of religious knowledge among Americans of all faiths (and none). Old Pharyngula hands may remember the buzz about this: there was a lot of preening about atheists scoring well. They repeated the exercise in 2019. As far as I recall from 2010 (I didn’t take notice of the 2019 survey), evangelical Protestants scored quite highly compared to other Christians, but still not so great. For example:
So, a lot of those people pushing for the ten commandments to be displayed at courthouses etc apparently don’t know what they are, even though there are only ten of them.
2010 survey
2019 survey
Moggie: I guess that explains why they think the 10 commandments need to be posted. You don’t need to put up reminders of things you already know, after all!
@ moggie
Arguably there could be thirteen or more depending on whether you spilt up ‘I am your god‘/’no other gods‘, as some religions do; and whether you parse all the ‘do not covet‘s separately.
Admittedly the idea of a Decalogue started early; but Exodus doesn’t actually state a number; and different churches break them up different ways.
Actually, it was fifteen.
@ moggie
Oh great, now you’ve got me watching History of the World clips. Still, makes a change from my usual Youtube fodder of ‘animals bouncing on things’.
Just to be nerdy, there’s some interesting commentary from Jewish lawyers as to whether it’s all the commandments over two tablets; or all the commandments on one tablet, with a copy. I love the idea that god made a counterpart. Still, you’d expect someone omnipotent to have a decent filing system.
There was a clever study done not long ago which examined religious knowledge vs. support for religious aggression and violence amongst Christians. The survey measured knowledge by listing a bunch of “bible stories” of which 13 were convincing-sounding fakes, and asked respondents how familiar they were with the stories on the list. Someone who really knows their stuff would be familiar with the real stories and unfamiliar with the fakes, and someone who was inflating their knowledge would claim to be equally familiar with the fakes. It turned out that people who have more knowledge of the Bible are less likely to support religious violence.
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/06/09/believers-who-overestimate-their-religious-knowledge-like-violence-the-most/
@ POM
Sort of related; but this reminds me of Trump’s cognitive ability test.
I’ve mentioned in the past that I did a course where we took some of the tests used in court proceedings. That’s the occasion I scored 68 on the WAIS-III IQ test.
But anyway, I did a cognitive ability one too. Some of the questions seemed pretty easy. But afterwards it was explained to us that those questions are put in to spot fakers.
People will sometimes attempt to score badly so as to be found not competent to stand trial or get out of contracts through lack of capacity. So they put in questions that even someone with severe brain damage would still get right.
I can’t help but think of that when Trump was bragging about how well he’d done.
Ask Trump some Bible trivia, like “What was the name of the father of Jacob’s twelve sons?”
@Alan Robertshaw
FWIW, most of the depictions I’ve seen in Jewish religious contexts (i.e. artwork, synagogues, etc) show it as two tablets. But you know what they say about Jewish law: put two rabbis on a desert island and you’ll get three different interpretations.
I think the main thing Moses should have been glad about is that God didn’t give him all 613 laws at once. That would have been a lot of tablets to carry. And of course I must resurrect the old joke: Moses gets down from Mt Sinai and tells the people “the good news is I got him down to 10. The bad news is, adultery is still in.”
Re: The Golden Rule
What I would imagine fewer would have known is that the original phrasing (and that which I’ve mostly heard in Jewish contexts) is the inverse of the more common phrasing. It seems to originally have been “do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you.” I personally prefer that version, but that might just be because I’ve seen it more.
@Lumipuna
My favorite Bible trivia question is to ask someone to answer as quickly as they can, “how many animals did Moses bring on the ark?”
@ naglfar
To quote Hillel when he was asked to teach someone the Torah:
“That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow. This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary.“
@Naglfar: Hillel said that which is hateful to you, do not do to others, but Akiva (I think) said love your neighbor as yourself.
My point being that we Jews come up with both positive and negative formulations.
@Alan Robertshaw
And the last bit “go now and learn” (or study).
Point being that even if the injunction is apparently simple, you have to figure out what it means. (An odd example: I don’t like sweets. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t offer dessert to guests. Thus it’s important that I figure out hospitality rather than assuming everyone has my tastes. That’s studying the commentary. )
I’m trying to imagine commentary on MGTOW scripture. There really aren’t a lot of different ways to interpret “behold my undercooked chicken, seasoned with the tears of harpies.”
@Alan Robertshaw
Hillel also had sandwich recipes.
@Mrs Morley
I’ve seen it both ways as well, I’m just more familiar with Hillel’s version, of which I’ve seen varying translations. And Hillel precedes Akiva.
@Buttercup
Probably various commentators arguing about whether it’s okay to be married as an MGTOW or which chicken recipe to use to make dry chicken while arguing with women online. In other words, a Reddit comments section.
@ naglfar
I always feel a bit guilty when I eat passover matzah crackers just as ordinary crackers; like I’m being sacrilegious or something. But I just really like the Rakusen ones. And they’re vegan and made in Yorkshire.
@ mrs morley
Yeah. I love when there’s something really simple to live by; but also has the potential for a lifetime of study. I find it very Zen.
@Moggie
Protestants get a wee bit peeved (some, anyways) that we Catholics have a different set of Commandments from them. Had one guy calling me a heretic over that … 😛