One of the problems with the patriarchal manosphere is that it often cannot handle figures of speech. This is similar to how Roman Catholics can’t understand how Jesus could have been speaking metaphorically regarding the bread and wine and his flesh and blood. There is a certain kind of person who “autistically” views everything in a rigid literalistic way, lacking nuance (If you are INTJ, you probably know what I’m talking about!).

This is no less true in the following patriarchal passage:

I’ve seen numerous comments saying that “everything means EVERYTHING” as if that ends the discussion:

This is not a new phenomenon. I was recently reminded of another example of this contained in my article “James Attebury: Theologian, Censor, Judge.” In one of his article, James Attebury uncritically accepted the “scholarship” that the Paulicians were heretics and not true Christians:

This is precisely what scholars accuse the Paulicians of believing. The problem? It isn’t true.

I cited this PDF of a latin translation of Photius. There we read in Chapter VII, paragraph 1:

…which in English is…

That sounds pretty damning, wouldn’t you say? Those evil Paulicians reject the Old Testament! The problem (for the Roman Catholic) is that the Paulicians were simply repeating scripture:

It turns out the the words of the Paulicians in Photius’ original Greek letter (“…whom they call thieves and robbers…”) is exactly the same as the words of the original Greek of John 10:8 (“…before me are thieves and robbers,…”). The Paulicians were just repeating the words of Jesus! The Roman Catholics, slaves to dogmatic literalism, thought that the Paulicians were saying that literally every last person who came before Jesus was a thief and robber, including the prophets. Unable to see the the scripture reference (due to their lack of familiarity with the Word of God) and the (rather obvious) figure-of-speech hyperbole, the Roman Catholics condemned the Paulicians as heretics. Later “scholars” just repeated the slanderous claims of the Paulicians’ enemies as if they were true.

The Patriarchal Manosphere insists that because scripture says “submit in everything” that this means literally everything, even though the word “everything” is frequently used in scripture in highly qualified contexts, even though it is qualified in that same verse (“…as the church submits to Christ”)!

This wouldn’t be so bad if it was just people being wrong. But the people who do this are often highly judgmental. See how the Roman Catholics and subsequent scholars were willing to slander an entire group of Christians as heretics doomed to Hell based on their own dogmatic misunderstanding? So too have I been called some pretty terrible things—including being portrayed as an agent of Satan and an idolatrous worshiper of women—because I refuse to read qualified words and phrases in an unqualified, slavishly literalistic way.

One particularly judgmental commenter on this blog got quite angry at me as I refused to back down in the face of such spurious judgment. Unsurprisingly, they don’t comment here anymore. Censorship, whether self-censorship or the censorship of others, is the hallmark of the judgmental and self-righteous.^[1]

If only they’d stick to the ideas and leave off the ad hominem. Oh, well. A man can dream, can’t he?

Footnotes

^[1] By “self-righteous” I mean believing that you personally have the sole right and responsibility to sit in judgment over another man and to determine his sin and guilt, without respect to the commandments found in the New Testament, such as the Matthew 18 Protocol and the commands to only judge sin in the church among fellow brothers. In other words, by yourself you are completely right to judge.