The female humblebrag

ClarkHat comments on a female scientist wanting to make sure that everyone knows she is married and her colleagues find her attractive:

Tuuli Lappalainen @tuuliel
Dear fellow scientists. The next time you’re going to google for info of the husband or wedding of a female colleague, think again.

Welcome to the Oort‏ @ClarkHat
A woman humble-bragging about how people wonder if she's single is female intrasexual competition.

It's the more sophisticated "feminist" version of the 22yo posting on facebook "why do all these guys at the club stare at me?"

So the hilarious thing is that a thread NOMINALLY about feminists and against evolved heterosexual and status oriented behaviors...

Is in fact an EXAMPLE of that very thing: a high status woman letting medium and low status woman know that she has tits AND brains.

What's moderately amusing is the fact that these women seem to think no one understands what they're doing or why they're doing it... despite the fact that so many of them do it at every given opportunity.

Lean in... but don't hire women

For all their preaching about the need for diversity, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg can't be bothered to actually, you know, hire women.

Like other major tech companies, including Google parent Alphabet Inc. and Apple Inc., Facebook has struggled to increase the share of women and underrepresented minorities in its ranks. The absence of women is particularly felt in engineering, which from college classrooms to the workplace has been seen as a man’s field. Women account for 17% of technical roles at Facebook, according to its latest diversity report.

Do as they say, not as they do. I wonder what it is that they know that they're not telling anyone?

Real pushback

The shitlords are entering the work force. The office may never be the same:

Encouraging field report from the pozzland of higher ed (grad level), had to attend an extra class about inclusion blah blah, it was 2 female execs trying to guide the class through a discussion about a fictional business scenario where a woman gets overlooked for promotion and ignored in meetings cuz she’s a woman. It didn’t go smoothly as they planned because several of the young white men kept politely but insistently questioning the underlying premises. For example, “How do we know she wasn’t just a poor communicator of her ideas?” The white men in the room were saying in as many words, “We’re not going to put up with your ‘white men are always at fault’ agenda.” It was glorious. I kept my mouth shut cuz I knew I’d get in trouble if I opened it, but I heartily enjoyed watching these young shitlords cause the 2 lady execs to stumble and mumble around. Everybody in the room knew exactly what was happening: REAL PUSHBACK.

This is good. This is right. Don't back down. Constant retreat is the path to certain defeat.

Sexting is for suckers

One shouldn't have to spell this out, but do not EVER engage in sexting of any kind, because you might as well go directly to pursuing employment as a camboy. At least that way, you get paid for it rather than paying for the privilege:

The alleged boss of a blackmail 'Sextortion' gang has revealed how she tricks 'stupid' men into stripping off via webcam - and revealed the vile secrets of her trade.

'Queen of Sextortion' Maria Caparas-Regalachuelo, who is accused of using girls as young as 13, boasted that it takes just 30 minutes to trick western men into getting naked then performing a sex act via Skype. Her gang is blamed for the suicide of 17-year-old Daniel Perry who leapt to his death in Scotland in August 2013 after being told by his online tormentors he would be 'better off dead'.

Speaking in a squalid Philippines prison cell, Caparas revealed that her gang of 'chatters' trawl Facebook for victims, sending men flirtatious messages before asking them to go 'somewhere private'. They show the men a pre-recorded video of an Asian woman performing a striptease and then send them a stream of filthy text messages.

'We tease them to get them comfortable and we work to a prepared text. It only takes about 30 minutes of chat before they are persuaded to do things in front of camera. They nearly always pay up after we put the video on YouTube.'

The 'chatter' then captures the victim performing a sex act on camera and uploads the video to an unlisted YouTube page. The chatter's boss then gets in touch with the victim and threatens to send the link to the video to family and friends via Facebook if they do not pay blackmail demands.

If it's too good to be true, it always is. Don't be a moron.

Divorce and social disruption

The pernicious effects of divorce on demand aren't limited to the parents and children:

Up to three in ten pensioners are refusing to leave everything to their children when they die over fears it will either be squandered or lost in divorce, a survey shows. Instead, many are leaving assets to grandchildren or handing them down to their offspring in smaller packages over the years so it does not go all at once.

 It found 30 per cent of parents are unwilling to leave money to their married children, mainly through fears half of it would be lost in divorce.

It is ridiculous that inheritance money is included in the pool of marital assets that are split. One certain way of protecting it is to keep it out of the hands of the child about to get married.

There is always a "them"

Rational Male observes how feminists are dependent upon cutting off young women from the herd using a largely imaginary revisionist history:

In femopshere there will always be an ‘us’. As I’ve outline in many prior essays, the Sisterhood will always take precedence above religion, politics, personal conviction and even family affiliations for women. Largely this is due to women’s evolved propensity for collectivism among their own sex. In our hunter gatherer beginnings women had an interdependent need for collective support for keeping tribal cohesion as well as child rearing.

This intrasexual collective support has carried over into what’s become the Sisterhood today. If you look at the interactions of young girls and their social group interdependence you begin to see that nascent tribal collectivism naturally come through. In terms of larger societal scope this collectivity becomes about acknowledging a shared experience of an imagined oppression by men. Between all women there is a gestalt understanding of “the plight of women” and a presumption of an endemic sexism no matter how culturally or socioeconomically dissimilar those women are.

The best way to attack this is not to surrender and abandon all women as the MGTOW do, but rather, to attack the feminist paradigms, deconstruct their propaganda, and save young women from it. Yes, there is risk in this, but there is absolute and certain defeat in "going your own way" to the grave as an evolutionary and civilizational dead end.

There will always be a "them". It is up to men to ensure young women that there will always be an "us" that is a more powerful and meaningful and attractive bond.

A hint for the holidays

Sarah-Jane Cunningham knew that her Facebook posts about the election were rubbing her family the wrong way, but she didn’t realize the posts would get her uninvited from Thanksgiving dinner.
The 19-year-old said her mother called a week before Thanksgiving and confronted her about the Facebook posts regarding President-elect Donald Trump.

“She asked me if I was going to be disrespectful to my family, and I told her that it could work either way, Cunningham said. "If the things I am saying are disrespectful to Trump supporters, the things they are saying are also disrespectful to me.”

Cunningham's response got her uninvited to her family’s Thanksgiving dinner in Maine. She said that while her mom later called and tried to make things right, it was too late and she plans to hang out with her two cats in Boston on Thanksgiving.

And she won’t be the only one whose political views earned them the a spot on the uninvited list at family Thanksgiving.

Look, this isn't that hard.

1. If you're a woman, don't be a bitch about the election. For once in your life, stow it. Yes, you're unhappy about it. That doesn't mean everyone is.
2. If you're a man, spare everyone the lectures. Don't bring up politics. Talk football. Talk family. Go watch the game if you must.
3. If you bring it up, deal with it. The first person to bring up the subject is the very last one who should get upset over it.
4. If you're the host and you know someone is likely to be a problem, shut them down fast and hard, whether they are just baiting someone else or are inclined to be aggressive.
5. If necessary, promise everyone that they can have an active discussion of it after dessert. By then, everyone will be too stuffed to really care.

SSH in the workplace

I'd posted this at VP, but it occurred to me that it belonged here, for the record. SSH = Socio-Sexual Hierarchy.

One of the challenges of running any organization, be it professional or volunteer, is dealing with the quirks of its various members, most of which are based on their socio-sexual status. Alphas are going to have inappropriate affairs, Betas are going to get promoted over their heads, Lambdas are going to talk relentlessly, and inappropriately, about their personal predilections and social lives, Gammas are going to preen, posture, pout, and occasionally sabotage projects and people, Sigmas are going to create the occasional intra-organizational upheaval, for good or ill, and Omegas are going to get themselves accused of sexual harassment.

That's all normal. You have to expect it as long as you're going to work with human beings. The key is learning to anticipate the problems and head them off at the pass.

Don't let the Alpha hire a hot secretary, or at the very least, be sure she isn't a married woman. Keep the Beta in a well-paid supporting position and give him a young subordinate Alpha to help him make decisions and don't promote him over his head.

Put the Lambda near the women where he'll entertain them. Try to steer the Sigma's idiosyncracies in a direction where he'll help the organization rather than harm it; they make great leaders of skunk works and horrendously bad middle managers. Give the Gammas tasks that flatter their egos, shield them from any criticism that isn't absolutely necessary, and keep them far away from any managerial responsibilities. Stash the Omegas where they can't creep out the women.

Most importantly, keep everyone out of the way of the Deltas who actually do most of the meaningful work. Remember, if they're not actively assisting the Deltas, they're obstructing them. This goes for the women too.

Hmmmm

I'm not saying that the latest "Hillary Clinton" appearance was a body double, but something looks a bit different about the miraculously recovered version. And frankly, it's going to be a big disappointment to everyone if it turns out that the first fembots to reach the market were constructed on the model of Hillary Clinton rather than Liz Hurley, as we'd all anticipated.

To be honest, something about the shape of the woman's body immediately struck me as "off". Precisely what, I don't know, but my immediate subconscious reaction was "who is that?" She's a little too structurally squatty, as opposed to merely overweight like Hillary.

Talking around

Harry Cassandra thought he was being "casually witty" when he suggested "nibbles" to a woman. (The fact that he shouldn't have been pursuing her in the first place is not relevant to this analysis.)

Haus Frau explains the effect that being "casually witty" has on women:

Cutesy crap and try-hard witty snark are both kryptonite. Cutesy is far less tolerable between the two. My husband used to baby talk to me when teasing. As in I would be playing with one of the kids or mention something they did and he would go into the baby talk voice "aaaw momma loves the little babies..." and this would just go on.

I quietly told him more than once to stop doing that habit but it just didn't seem to register with him that I really meant it. One evening after he indulged in a few drinks he kept doing the baby talk thing and I basically verbally snapped his head off. He was hurt. I felt bad and apologized. It was bad. He really didn't get how white hot pissed that habit made me.......the moral of the long-winded anecdote being that repeated cutesy shit like using the word "nibbles" for snacks creates such a level of seething irritation that you might as well have sewn up her vagina with a bear trap.

The reason is pretty simple. Men use "casual wit" in order to verbally sidle up to women. They do so in order to talk around their intentions and thereby avoid risking the sting of rejection that being straightforward entails. It's all very cowardly and feminine, which is precisely why it arouses such contempt in a woman.

All men are capable of making this mistake, but Gammas are particularly prone to it because they live in a near-constant state of delusion concerning their ability to fool everyone about their real feelings and intentions. What they don't realize is that they pull their slick moves off about as convincingly as the bug wearing the skin of a man in Men in Black managed to mimic normal human behavior. It doesn't matter if you were "playing a role" or not, she still rejected YOU. Yes, you. Deal with it.

Women are extraordinarily sensitive to male cowardice, risk avoidance, and fear of rejection. They even subject men they have already accepted to regular tests in order to smoke it out. They sniff out male weakness and insecurity like a shark scents blood in the water. So, as a general rule, if you think you're being cleverly casual, know that it's not hiding anything. It's better to just be succinct and straightforward, and accept her response with taciturn grace no matter what it is.

They want you to give up

What MGTOW and PUAs have in common is that both paths are surrenders to the dyscivilizationists. Both paths are the result of literal demoralization, the MGTOW in the emotional sense, the PUA in the spiritual sense.

While the Red Pill is necessary for any Man of the West, there is only one effective way to fight for civilization, and that is to marry a white woman, have children with her, and raise those children to value and defend the West.

Does that mean taking risks? Absolutely. But so must any man who fights to defend anything. This is a long war, an intergenerational war, and the future will be won by whoever shows up for it.

Take the risks. Don't give into the despair of the MGTOW or the nihilism of the PUA. Understand that both paths are the paths those seeking to destroy you, and to destroy the West, want you to take! Take the hard road, take the dangerous road, not the safe and easy way.

Sociosexuality and the workplace

One of the things we often discuss here is intersexual implications of sociosexuality, but there are also a tremendous number of intrasexual implications as well. Case in point: a man's rank in the hierarchy will have a tremendous effect on his behavior in the workplace. Consider the likely problems caused by each social rank:

• Alpha: He will only accept a subordinate position if he is under another alpha. Otherwise, he will incessantly challenge for leadership. In leadership, he'll be prone to having inappropriate affairs with attractive female subordinates. He will take risks, but they will not always be intelligent risks with a requisite prospective reward.
• Beta: He will often be called upon to succeed the alpha he served. He will be completely unable to do more than continue what the previous alpha started. A caretaker.
• Delta: He will tend to let women run roughshod over him and try to push their responsibilities onto the men under him. In disciplinary situations he will always excuse the women and blame the men, regardless of who is at fault.
• Gamma: He will inject unnecessary drama into situations, refuse to back down when he is wrong, and sacrifice the company's interests to his own feelings. If he finds himself in a position of power, he will become paranoid and dictatoria.
• Omega: He will creep out the women. If anyone is going to shoot up the office, it will be him.
• Sigma: He will quit and go off and do his own thing without warning. He'll probably have an inappropriate affair or two as well, but no one will know about it until he's gone. If given management or executive responsibilities, won't play well with the other managers. Best in a semi-autonomous "skunk works" capacity.

All of these problem tendencies can be successfully addressed, but only if they are anticipated. So, if you've got people working for you, be aware of their tendencies and compensate accordingly.

The Caitlyns do Rio

One way to get to the Olympics is to bend your gender:

Two British athletes born male are on the verge of making history by competing in women’s events at next month’s Olympic Games. If selected, the unnamed pair will become the world’s first transgender Olympians at Rio.

But worryingly for British sports fans, they have revealed they are so fearful of being exposed and ridiculed under the Olympic spotlight, they would ‘probably drop back’ if they found themselves in a medal-winning position.

Their inclusion in Team GB will be hailed as a remarkable human rights victory – but it will also ignite controversy, with critics arguing that male-to-female competitors have an unfair biological advantage in terms of size, muscle mass and lung capacity.

Delia Johnston, an adviser to several sporting bodies on transgender issues, said the pair have already represented Britain at ‘a European championship sporting event’.

I always wondered about that Jessica Ennis....

Game is the entry point to the #AltRight

A commenter at Rod Dreher's site observes the process of intellectual development:

The connection between the Alt-Right and the various masculinity movements deserves some elaboration. As many have mentioned, the demographics of the Alt-Right are young and male, and the role of young male frustration (sexual or otherwise) cannot be overstated.

As Dreher adequately documents, the hegemonic narrative regarding gender is clearly insane. And while the level of insanity has climbed exponentially in the past decade, virtually everyone under-30 (my generation) has been marinated in relentless gender-equivalence propaganda since kindergarden. But, as the male cohort grows older, the distance between the experienced reality of of the dating market and the official dogma becomes unsustainable. The cognitive dissonance is simply too great, and boys are driven to seek answers elsewhere. And those answers come, with varying degrees of accuracy and crudity, from the PUA/Game/MRA/RedPill blogs.

Whatever their faults, they all have one redeeming quality – they are manifestly not insane. This comes as a great shock and relief to boys. A shock because they realize the magnitude of the deception they have experienced, and a relief because they realize they are not the crazy ones.

Hence the tagline to this blog: saving Western civilization. Game is only the starting point.

Defeating the Female Imperative

More and more of the Game theorists are moving on from individual Game to its societal implications. Rollo has some suggestions for how men can break the chains that the Sisterhood attempts to impose upon men's groups in defense of the Female Imperative:

What then is to be done about this conditioning? For all the efforts to destroy or regulate male tribalism, the Feminine Imperative still runs up against men’s evolved predispositions to interact with the outside world instead of fixating on the inside world of women. Below I’ve pieced together some actionable ideas that might help men come to a better, unitary way of fostering the male tribalism the Feminine Imperative would see destroyed or used as a tool of soci0-sexual control:

• While it is vitally important to maintain a male-specific mental point of origin, together men need a center point of action. Women talk, men do. Men need a common purpose in which the tribe can focus its efforts on. Men need to build, coordinate, win, compete and problem solve amongst themselves. The ‘purpose’ of a tribe can’t simply be one of getting together as like-minded men; in fact, groups with such a declared purpose are often designed to be the most conciliatory and accommodating of the Feminine Imperative. Men require a common, passionate purpose to unite for.
• Understand and accept that men will naturally form male hierarchies in virtually every context if that tribe is truly male-exclusive. There will be a reflexive resistance to this, but understand that the discomfort in acknowledging male hierarchies stems from the Feminine Imperative’s want to make any male authority a toxic form of masculinity. Contrary to feminine conditioning male hierarchies are not necessarily based on Dark Triad manipulations. That is the ‘fem-think’ – any male created hierarchy of authority is by definition evil Patriarchy.
• Recognize existing male sub-tribes for what they are, but do so without labeling them as such. Don’t talk about Fight Club, do Fight Club. As with most other aspects of Red Pill aware Game, it is always better to demonstrate rather than explicate. There will always be an observer effect in place when you call a male group a “male group”. That tribe must exist for a passionate reason other than the express idea that it exists to be about men meeting up. Every sub-tribe I belong to, every collective interest I share with other men, even the instantly forming ones that arise from an immediate common need or function, all exist apart from “being” about men coming together.Worldwide “tribe” day failed much for the same reasons an organization like the Good Men Project fails – they are publicized as a gathering of men just “being” men.
• Push back on the invasion of male space by being uncompromising in what you do and organize with passion. Make no concessions for women in any all-male space you create or join. There will always be a want to accommodate women and/or the fears of not being accommodating of feminine-primary mindsets within that all-male purview. Often this will come in subtle forms of anonymous White Knighting or reservations about a particular passion due to other men’s Blue Pill conditioning to always consider the feminine before considerations of themselves or the tribe. It is vitally important to the tribe to quash those sympathies and compromising attitudes as these are exactly the designs of the Feminine Imperative to destroy a tribe from within.Make no concessions for competency of women within the tribe if you find yourself in a unisex tribal situation. Even the U.S. military is guilty of reducing combat service requirements for women as recently as this month. If you are a father or you find yourself in a role of mentoring boys or young men it is imperative that you instill this no-compromise attitude in them and the organizations that they create themselves.

I'll add one more suggestion. Expel from the group any man who attempts to argue for including women in it. This is usually a Gamma or low Delta who is only hoping to improve his chance to meet women, or worse, is submissively doing the bidding of a woman seeking entry into the group. In doing so, he reveals that his priority is his own thirst, not the well-being of the group, and thereby demonstrates his unworthiness to be a part of it.

There is nothing wrong with groups that include women; I don't limit female participation in Brainstorm or in DevGame in any way. But those groups exist for specific purposes and there is no way for sexual politics to interfere with their activities.

The decline of America is not an accident

It was planned. The plan was executed. We are living the result:

It was 1969. Kate invited me to join her for a gathering at the home of her friend, Lila Karp. They called the assemblage a "consciousness-raising-group," a typical communist exercise, something practiced in Maoist China.  We gathered at a large table as the chairperson opened the meeting with a back-and-forth recitation, like a Litany, a type of prayer done in Catholic Church. But now it was Marxism, the Church of the Left, mimicking religious practice:

"Why are we here today?" she asked.
"To make revolution," they answered.
"What kind of revolution?" she replied.
"The Cultural Revolution," they chanted.
“And how do we make Cultural Revolution?" she demanded.
"By destroying the American family!" they answered.
"How do we destroy the family?" she came back.
"By destroying the American Patriarch," they cried exuberantly.
"And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?” she replied.
"By taking away his power!"
"How do we do that?"
"By destroying monogamy!" they shouted.
"How can we destroy monogamy?"

Their answer left me dumbstruck, breathless, disbelieving my ears.  Was I on planet earth?  Who were these people?

"By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution and homosexuality!" they resounded.

Of course, that failed. We haven’t seen any increase in any of those things…

How do we defeat them?

1. Embrace monogamy
2. Support and sustain power of the American Patriarch
3. Embrace the role of the American Patriarch
4. Rebuild the family
5. Restore the culture

Supplication: the failed seduction strategy

An engineering student at university publicly abases himself in print:

When I experience success the assumption of others will be that I earned it. So, you and I cannot be equal. You have already conquered far more to be in this field that I will ever face.

Translation: To the women in my engineering classes. Please to have sex with me. I will say and do and be anything you want. 

Live to avoid "the look"

Mike Cernovich writes one of his most important posts ever. You simply must read it if you want to have a fulfilling and successful life:

I learned how to tell if a man was dead by looking in his eyes. When living in Thailand and Vietnam, you learn how to spot the look.

The look is what an old man gives when a short-haired harpy leads him down the streets of Vietnam. The man glances around to see smiling, feminine women everywhere. He may even see an older man with one of those smiling women.

“What’s taking you so long,” he hears from her shrill voice.

Slowly a realization hits. A man has wasted his life serving an ungrateful nag. He could have had so much more. His soul leaves him.

Men over 40 were lied to. The rest of us have no excuse. Before the Internet, men didn’t know any better. They did what worked for their parents generation – meet a nice girl who will become a great wife and mom, get a job, work hard.

Men borrowed money for college, married well before they hit their prime, went deep into debt to buy a home to please the Mrs., and allowed an entitled woman to dominate his life. If he was lucky, she wouldn’t divorce him and kidnap his children. What he did was never good enough.

Those of you under 30 do not understand what a gift the Internet is.

Before the web young men had no idea what society had planned for them.

Young men had no idea that they’d spend most of the rest of their lives as dead men.

This is the key statement: 90% of men are miserable. 99% of women are miserable.

If you are a man who is part of the 90 percent, work to get yourself in the 10 percent. And then, and only then, should you look to find a woman who is in the one percent.

It's not impossible. There are 35 million women who are not miserable out there. Find one, and don't settle for less.

And if you are one of those 35 million, stop trying to fix the miserable men. Find a man from the 10 percent, and instead of trying to fix him, follow his lead.

Alpha Mail: a malicious woman

GC asks how to counteract one:

I think the sister had it in for me because of all my past transgressions, and honestly, I think [ex-girlfriend] was just waiting until gala season is over to dump me because we were scheduled to go to a number of balls. Well, I told her that we're done and that we're not going to those events together, even though she suggested amicably attending these together as a goodbye to our relationship. But she's making it a point to go anyways, and she's already recruiting our mutual friends from the arts to be on her side. Yesterday she was having drinks with prominent figures in the arts world. Today she's scheduled to have dinner with a gay couple that also run an arts organization here.

At one point yesterday, while I was in my Italian language class, she texted me saying that she was going to all those events and that none of our acquaintances like me and that they won't talk to me. I'm currently part of a pilot program to get younger people on boards, and I'm worried that her contacts will block me when the time comes to nominate members.

None of this is the end of the world, I know. I'm a man, an engineer in the oil and gas industry, and something tells me that I shouldn't stress so much over all this foo foo stuff, but she can potentially derail everything that I've worked for over the past year simply because she's a scorned woman. And this means less business and social connections and less access to quality women.

Vox, you are a master of human dynamics and I think you are a sort of authority on military tactics. I thoroughly enjoy the way you tear apart every GamerGate and Pink Shirt SJW that even looks in your direction. I'm sure that you can give me some insight into my situation and I respectfully ask for your advice. What sort of social jujitsu can I use to counter an actively malicious person?

The best thing to do initially is to ignore them. When women say things like "nobody likes you" they are simply trying to get a rise out of you. Don't give it to them. Now, since GC wanted to go to the foo-foo events, he should have simply said "sure" when she suggested attending as mutual armpieces; that was his first mistake because he needlessly turned the ex-girlfriend into an opponent in addition to the sister.

So, what I would recommend is taking her out to dinner, offering an olive branch, and saying that he's thought it over and is happy to take her to the various events as a couple. If she rejects the idea, fine, he's no worse off than he was.

What so many men like GC don't understand is the whole "I've got my pride" thing is actually a display of weakness. It means you care. If you don't care, then you do what you want no matter what the other person does or says. All that "if you do x then that means y" is the way women and gammas. It's literally meaningless.

So, the first thing you do is turn those who don't really want to be enemies into allies, or at least neutrals. The persistently malicious, like the sister, you simply treat with cold contempt, and press their buttons without making a big deal of it. If you really want to set a woman off, let her go through her whole nasty spiel, then raise an eyebrow and comment that she looks like she's gained weight. Another tactic is to give her an unflattering nickname that plays off her size, appearance, or behavior, then use it when talking to her friends when they mention her. "Oh, so how is the Viper?"

Women are very, very sensitive about their weight, more so than men can really grasp, and you easily can send them into a week-long spiral with nothing more than a casual comment. But because of that, it's not a tactic you should use unless the woman is openly malicious, if she's merely being vicious because she's mad or her feelings are hurt, it's overkill.

Graduating Gamma 2

Step Two: Spiritual

For many in the modern times the Spiritual is something to be cast off, as it only interferes with desires or perhaps even knowledge. I believe this is a mistake, especially for the Gamma who needs a firm foundation to escape his prison of dishonesty. For the secularists who are about to stop reading don’t, this isn’t a polemic against atheism or a Christian apologetic work but rather an exhortation to find one’s roots and deals with personal ethics.

I’ll lay my cards on the table and explain my position which is a very standard, Protestant, Evangelical, and orthodox one. I’m Protestant by agreeing with the Solas from the Reformation and orthodox by accepting the ancient Christian creeds, Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian.

Know what you believe and why you believe it.

The most common error I see Gammas make in regards to spiritual and ethical matters is treating it like a game of witty comments, snark, and playing at the edges of important matters without skin in the game. The second mistake is thinking width of knowledge of spiritual matters is more important than depth. This flows directly from the Gamma’s ever-present and crippling fear of being wrong somewhere and somehow. The Gamma does not understand the deep matters behind what is going on in his own beliefs, which is ironic since most Gammas vastly overestimate their knowledge and ability in most everything.

The first step is to go deep in your current beliefs, back to the foundational documents to study and know them very well. Find the founding documents of your closest beliefs and read through them carefully. For the religious this is of course their holy book, but do you not identify in some way with a denomination, or at least a philosophy of your religion? Don’t concentrate on just the latest popular Christian book if you are Christian or Dawkins latest book if you are an atheist, go to the catechism if you are Roman Catholic, the Confessions if your denomination if you are Protestant, church history if you home church, and ancient atheist philosophy if you are completely secular just to start. People lived and died by these beliefs, find out why.

If you ascribe to their beliefs you honor the ones who came before you if you read their works carefully. Don’t skim, but rather drink in with full appreciation of their insights and the flaws. Almost certainly you are going to be surprised by some of the things you find. During this process take stock of your family’s beliefs; the faith of your parents particularly if you currently reject it. Give their beliefs a fair chance, read through those documents and not how badly your parents lived up to those ideals. This discovery can be challenging as the language can be archaic, but it’s well worth the effort.

It’s important to read the original documents and not the most recent interpretation of those documents even if they are by a favorite author. I’ve found that writers I respect a great deal can be sloppy at times or interject their own pet theories into a system, and then claim that’s what the system is all about. If you claim to believe in something, or follow an idea, you need to read the original for yourself.

If you are religious pray a great deal about what you find in humility and ask for forgiveness in being arrogant and obnoxious about your beliefs. Pray for wisdom and insight. Pray for a peaceful soul when finding troubling new truths. If you are secular dwell and contemplate what you have read. Realize you are probably not nearly as smart as you’d like to think and you need to change when the truth leads you to an inevitable conclusion.

You do this because you need depth on your beliefs, not width. You don’t need to know everything about everyone else’s beliefs; you need to know yours very well and how to defend them.