He is Risen

 Happy Easter everyone!

 

What Does God Do When You Pray For An Anonymized Patient By Bed Number?

Hospital bed. Image source.

I read this article from Rebecca Watson, Study: Prayer Doesn’t Cure COVID. Jury Still Out on “Thoughts”. Those of you who have read my blog for a long time may know that I am SO FASCINATED by questions like: How would it even work, if God really did act in response to prayer? What kind of data would we expect to see, if that were true? What would be the most effective way to harness this phenomenon in order to benefit society? (Some of the posts I have written on this: Prayer Rates Don't Correlate With Actual Risk, I Would Love to Know If God Intervened to Stop Covid From Spreading in Churches, On believing that "prayer works")

I very much do NOT believe that God acts in response to prayer- because if you actually spend any time thinking about the implications of it (or worse, if you're evangelical and you twist yourself in knots trying to make sure you're doing everything right so God will answer your prayers), it leads to a lot of very bad implications about God's nature.

I am a Christian though, so I'm coming at this from a different angle than Watson is; she is an atheist and is writing for an atheist audience, so she takes it as obvious that prayer doesn't cause "God" to do anything. For me, it wasn't obvious. I had to think through a lot of things. Most Christians do pray, and do believe "prayer works", but I don't.

Watson is discussing a study on "remote intercessory prayer" - researchers had participants pray for strangers in the hospital who had COVID.

The study was conducted in Brazil, with only 199 patients instead of 300, a few weeks’ duration instead of six months, the exact prayers weren’t specifically scripted out, and the protocols changed halfway through the study when data protection laws changed and the people who were praying could no longer know the initials of the people they were praying for, so they switched to bed numbers.

The result was still the same as every other halfway sane study on intercessory prayer: no difference between the control group and the people who were prayed for, in terms of death, ventilation, hospital time, or anything else. So what did we learn? Nothing. Nothing at all.

!!!! Oh man, that mention of patients' initials vs bed numbers is FASCINATING to me! Does God handle it differently depending on which way you anonymize the study? What if there are multiple patients with the same initials- would it be like, the researchers assign Prayer Volunteer 1 to pray for patient C. D., and there is another patient C. D. in the control group not getting prayed for (different person but same initials) and God uses Their omniscient knowledge of the researchers' methods to figure out which is which and make sure the prayers get allocated correctly? Or would the researchers need to add an additional indicator to pass along to the prayer volunteer, to pass along to God, to make sure God knew who they were talking about?

Or would God hear the prayer from Prayer Volunteer 1 and apply it to both patients with initials C. D.? Would the prayer then only be half as effective for each individual patient? What if there's another patient in the hospital also with initials C. D. but they aren't part of the study, does God allocate some of the prayer power (???) to them too?

Since the prayer volunteer doesn't know the patient personally anyway, how much does it matter who the specific patient is? Maybe God just averages their prayer out over all patients in a similar situation- which would be all patients in the study, including the control group- which would explain why the results found no difference between the control group and test group.

What if the researchers made a mistake, and got a patient's initials wrong? What if the researchers told a prayer volunteer to pray for patient C. B. but actually that's wrong and the patient's actual initials are C. D.? Would God be like "I have no idea who you're talking about" and just do nothing with that prayer? Would God check the researchers' notes and find out who the correct patient is? (What if the researchers told the prayer volunteer the correct initials, but the prayer volunteer is the one who made a mistake and prayed for the wrong initials- would God handle that differently than if it was the researchers' mistake? What if the prayer volunteer prays for the wrong initials on purpose???)

Do the researchers even need to tell the prayer volunteers any identifiers about the patients they are praying for? Surely the researchers can just write up a document on who is praying for whom, and then not show it to anybody, and the prayer volunteers can just pray "God please help whoever it is I'm assigned to pray for, I don't know who, but you know", that should work just the same as if they used initials or bed numbers, right? But what if there's a miscommunication between the researchers and actually 2 completely different versions of this document exist- which one does God use to look up whom your prayers are for?

Maybe they should do a study where they intentionally make 2 different versions of the who-is-praying-for-whom assignments, and the results from the study can be used to figure out which version God was working from!

All of this is, uh, ridiculous, and like I said, I don't believe prayer actually causes God to do anything. So I'm not asking these questions because I think there are actual answers- it's because I'm just so fascinated by imagining how this magical prayer system would even work. (Call it worldbuilding.)

But the biggest reason I don't believe "prayer works" is expressed very well in this bit of Watson's article:

Who will be convinced by this? No one. Every rational person on the planet who thinks about this issue for more than a few minutes already understands that if an omniscient, benevolent god exists, she’s not just watching a child die of leukemia because she’s waiting for you to ask her directly for her intervention.

YES! This! Exactly!

This should be obvious, right? It makes no sense that God, who is apparently all-loving and wants to heal people, refuses to intervene unless someone prays in a very specific, correct way. I say it should be obvious, but when I was evangelical, that's literally what I believed. I believed God was so powerful, God was so near, God could do anything, God could immediately heal any sickness or solve any problem, God could do it and it wouldn't be difficult at all- but *I* was the problem because I wasn't praying in the right way. Yes, when prayer doesn't "work", Christians have all sorts of reasons to explain why it's because you didn't pray correctly. Maybe you didn't have enough faith. Maybe you prayed for the wrong reasons. Maybe you have some sin in your life that you need to repent of, before God will listen to your prayers. Maybe you prayed for something that wasn't "in God's will."

It's ridiculous, the belief that God has all this incredible power, and They love people SO MUCH and They want to help SO MUCH, but They're being held back by these little technicalities. They're being held back because even though I tried as hard as I could to pray in the exact right way, with the right motives, trusting God, and so on, somehow I still got it slightly wrong, and therefore God just does nothing.

(Maybe Christians shouldn't say "prayer works" if what they actually mean is "prayer works if you do it in the exact correct way, which the vast majority of people aren't able to do, the vast majority of the time, so basically how it shakes out is that prayer overwhelmingly doesn't do anything at all.")

And, related to that, Watson lists these possible explanations that religious people might give, to explain why a study found no evidence that prayer made a difference:

My deity doesn’t like to be tested and so he purposely did nothing, because proving He exists makes faith pointless

My deity will only listen if the plea is made by someone who knows and loves the patient, not from a stranger hoping to prove something to scientists

Protestant?? PROTESTANT???? You’re lucky my Catholic god didn’t smite everyone in the treatment group. He’s like that, you know.

It’s part of god’s plan for the people in that treatment group to die.

What exact words were in the prayers? My deity needs certain magic words, like “in the name of the father,” “amen,” and also “please.”

Her wording here is kinda snarky, but these are actually very real... like, people will really legitimately give reasons just like these to explain why prayer didn't "work."

And this has me thinking about back when I believed that "prayer works," and I read articles about studies which found no difference in outcomes for people who were prayed for or not prayed for. How did I explain that to myself, back then?

Well, basically, I believed there were a whole lot of conditions that you needed to satisfy, in order for your prayers to "work." You had to be a Christian- and not just that, but a real Christian- because evangelicals totally believe that most people who "claim" to be Christian aren't "real" Christians. You had to pray with the right faith and the right motives. And, honestly, these criteria were impossible to fully define- honestly, I would have given anything to know what the exact criteria were, because I prayed desperately for SO MANY things, and I wanted so bad to know what I needed to do to get my prayers to "work." *I* don't even know how to get my prayers to work- the idea that researchers can simply set up an experimental group of people who are praying "correctly" was unbelievable to me.

So when I heard about studies that found that prayer made no difference, I imagined it went something like this: In the test group (the group of patients who are being prayed for by the prayer volunteers) most of the prayers are worthless because the prayer volunteers aren't the correct kind of Christian, or don't have the right motivations or trust in God when they are praying. And, on top of that, let's talk about the control group- the patients who are not being prayed for. How do we know they're not being prayed for? We just know that the participants in the study are not praying for them- but it's likely that other people are praying for them. Maybe their relatives, maybe some random overeager college student who's like "God, please help everyone who's in the hospital" and God takes that to mean all patients in all hospitals in the entire world. The amount of *noise* that's constantly occurring on communication channels between humans and God... It's likely that the amount of *effective* (however that's defined) prayer received by the control group is not meaningfully different from the amount of effective prayer received by the treatment group. And that's why the results of the study don't show a difference.

(Okay now I'm fascinated by that too- if that is the reason that studies on prayer don't find any difference, then how would one go about designing a study which would avoid those problems? Maybe the control group could only consist of patients who did not tell any of their family/friends they were sick? And maybe they have such an obscure problem that no random stranger in the world is going to accidentally say a prayer that includes them? [I guess it shouldn't be about praying for them to be healed from sickness, then- it should be something much more unusual than that.] Any more suggestions? Leave them in the comments section!)

For what it's worth, the explanation that says a study didn't find any difference because "you're not supposed to test God" never made any sense to me, even when I was evangelical. It assumes there's a very clear distinction between situations where we can collect data that we can analyze with statistics, and situations where we can't- and that God behaves differently in these 2 different types of situations- and I just could not believe that it was possible to really make such a distinction. Christians would say we "know" prayer works because we've experienced it (and I also believed that, back then) but apparently we can only "know" it in a vibes-based way, not from actual data. This makes no sense; if the phenomenon is real and we're really experiencing it all the time, then surely there must be plenty of cases where someone can easily come in after the fact and do some investigating and write down some concrete numbers which can then be analyzed. Even if it wasn't a formal study being done in real time, the data exists and there must be cases where somebody can do some investigative work and get that data.

Anyway. I just want to know how it would even work, if it's true that "God answers prayer." If you're praying for someone you don't even know personally, how does God handle that? (This happens when participating in research studies on prayer, but there are plenty of other situations where it happens too. Christians who have a relative who is sick, and they share this prayer request with as many other Christians as possible- so you end up with a lot of people praying for something even though they know very few actual details about the situation.) How does God determine the specific person that your prayers should be applied to? Or do They kind of average the prayers out over every person who generally fits the description you gave in your prayer? What if your prayer request is based on misinformation- does God make corrections to it Themself so They can interpret your prayer in a way that would make sense? What if you pray for something that's not even wrong? How does it work? I mean, I don't believe any of this, but these are the things I think about.

---

The questions in this post are mainly about the little logistical details about prayer- it's hypothetically possible that there are answers to all of these questions, and God *does* have a system that's fair and logical for prayer. (Romans 8:26 comes to mind- we may not know how to pray for things that actually make sense, but God interprets our prayers in a way that makes sense.) My other posts on prayer, though, are more serious and ask much more uncomfortable questions about prayer, which don't go anywhere good no matter how you answer them...

Related:

Prayer Rates Don't Correlate With Actual Risk

I Would Love to Know If God Intervened to Stop Covid From Spreading in Churches

On believing that "prayer works"

I'm SO HAPPY I Won't Be Praying During Childbirth 

An Invisible Virus and an Omniscient God 

Also I've linked to this study before, but here it is again, because the questions it asks in the "Discussion" section are THE BEST questions, like, these are the things we really need to know, if it's true that "prayer works": Prayer and healing: A medical and scientific perspective on randomized controlled trials

Blogaround

1. A branch of the flu family tree has died and won't be included in future US vaccines (March 7, via) "A type of flu virus that used to sicken people every year hasn't been spotted anywhere on Earth since March 2020. As such, experts have advised that the apparently extinct viruses be removed from next year's flu vaccines." Cool!

2. Users ditch Glassdoor, stunned by site adding real names without consent (March 20, via) "Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews of employers, has recently begun adding real names to user profiles without users' consent, a Glassdoor user named Monica was shocked to discover last week."

3. Therapist Reacts to THE LION KING (2023) "When adults tell us things when we're children, and we internalize those messages, and we have a hard time challenging them once we're adults." (28-minute video from Cinema Therapy)

4. What Biden Would Do if He Were Serious About Ending the War in Gaza (March 19, via) "This was about as weak of a position as could be imagined: The President had definitely thought about maybe doing something."

5. Is It Possible To Solve This? (March 22) 1-hour-2-minute sudoku solve video. I like this one because you have to spend a lot of time thinking through the overall nature of the puzzle first, before you can even begin to think about which digit can go in which cell.

6. Omelas, Je T'Aime (2022, via) "Confronted with the choice to give up your entire way of life or allow someone else to suffer, what do you do? Do you stay and enjoy the fruits of their pain? Or do you reject this devil’s compromise at your own expense, even knowing that it may not even help? And through implication, we are then forced to consider whether we are—at this very moment!—already in exactly this situation."

7. “What Can I Even Say Without Having to Go to Jail?” (February 22, via) "Across the country, domestic and sexual violence treatment and prevention programs are run by state-led, federally funded coalitions tasked with overseeing organizations in their state. These groups, in theory, should be grappling with how to incorporate information about state abortion bans into advocates’ daily work."

8. Apple Jing’an now open in Shanghai (March 21) Tim Cook came to Shanghai for the opening of Asia's biggest Apple store.

9. Trump is selling ‘God Bless the USA’ Bibles for $59.99 as he faces mounting legal bills (March 27) "Besides a King James Version translation, it includes copies of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence and the Pledge of Allegiance, as well as a handwritten chorus of the famous Greenwood song." Eww, gross, how will I explain this to my children? This reads like he's viewing the bible as a symbol of being a good American, instead of actually understanding anything about what the bible is. 

Tell me you've never read the bible without telling me.

The Great Sex Rescue: Marital Rape

The topic of this post is not happy, so I'll give you this photo of a cute bunny. Image source.

Links to all posts in this series can be found here: Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"

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[content note: marital rape]

We are now in chapter 10 of The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You've Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended [affiliate link]. This post will cover the first part, pages 179-187.

This section was hard to read, because a lot of the anecdotes in it are horrifying. It's about husbands who rape their wives, and claim that it's right for them to do so, because of the bible or whatever. It's about Christian marriage books that teach that all men are like that, and don't mention that marital rape is A REAL THING- so the women in these situations don't even know that what's happening to them is rape and it's wrong.

The authors of "The Great Sex Rescue" take a stand here and say that rape is wrong, that consent is important, that just because you're married doesn't mean you can do whatever sexual things you want to your spouse. And, yeah, it's horrible that we actually need to say that. It should be obvious. But yes, it really really does need to be said, because popular Christian marriage books say the exact opposite.

(Also, usually sex ed resources about consent don't mention marriage specifically- when I started reading stuff like that, good healthy advice about consent, I kind of assumed it only applied to unmarried people, and marriage worked differently. So maybe there needs to be more discussion about rape and consent in the context of marriage. Glad to see "The Great Sex Rescue" talking about this.)

So in this blog post, I will mostly just post quotes from this section of "The Great Sex Rescue." Because all of this is very real, and hard to read, and people coming from a conservative Christian background need to hear it.

The chapter starts out with this:

Nothing could have prepared us for how many horrific stories of marital rape we heard in the one-on-one interviews for this book.

Yeah. So that's what this chapter is. Trigger warning.

Okay here we go.

First, "The Great Sex Rescue" rounds up some quotes from mainstream Christian marriage books which downplay rape:

We hope we can all agree that forcing someone to have sex is wrong. But to our amazement, and our great dismay, far too many Christian books include incidents of marital rape or other forms of sexual assault and then dismiss these incidents as unimportant. Several books, for instance, mention spouses who feel as if a rape has occurred-- but then give no commentary that rape is unacceptable:

• Every Heart Restored recounts a woman saying, "Without foreplay, he raped me-- if that can happen when you're married," and then just leaves that hanging, not saying, "Yes, rape can happen in marriage."
• Later again in Every Heart Restored, the authors warn, "We've heard stories about some husbands who coerced their wives into sexual intercourse one, two, and sometimes three times a day! ... If your husband is demanding sex more than once a day, he likely has a lust problem that needs to be dealt with." Coercing someone into sex apparently isn't wrong; the only problem seems to be if he exceeds his daily limit.
• Every Man's Battle has multiple depictions of sexual assault (one of which is the rape of a minor) and simply writes them off as the natural consequence of a man's struggle with lust, without explaining the harm done to the women (or even the illegal nature of many of the acts).
• His Needs, Her Needs includes this: "Many men tell me they wish their sex drive wasn't so strong. As one thirty-two-year-old executive put it, 'I feel like a fool-- like I'm begging her or even raping her, but I can't help it. I need to make love!'" We are supposed to have sympathy for the man who feels like he's raping his wife, but not for the woman enduring it.

We want to say (and we are flabbergasted that we apparently have to) that if you ever feel like you are raping someone, you probably are. Consensual, mutual, life-giving sex and rape feel very different from each other. If you feel something is off, trust that feeling and stop.

Yes.

Yes, I grew up evangelical, and all of this checks out. We were explicitly taught that all men are bursting with sexual desire they can barely control. (The poor dears! We women/ teenage girls/ 8-year-old girls need to help them by dressing modestly!) And even though typically I didn't hear it spelled out so directly- I didn't hear anyone literally say the words "men can't stop themselves from raping their wives"- that idea is always kind of there, lurking in the background of what we were taught about men and marriage and sex. Marriage is when you're finally allowed to have sex. Marriage is God's solution for men's lust problems. What reason would there be for a husband to hold back?

Continuing on with "The Great Sex Rescue":

When Christian resources fail to discuss marital rape appropriately, it leaves women without the words to describe what is happening to them. While Erika was taking a shower on her wedding night, her husband barged in and attacked her. "We hadn't had sex before we were married, and I wasn't ready yet. I remember freaking out in my mind, crying and praying, 'What is going on?' and 'What is this? I can't live with this for the rest of my life.'" The "this" that she couldn't name was repeated many times over the next few years. And it wasn't until her divorce lawyer showed concern that Erika realized that "this" was rape.
...
Erika's reality in her first marriage is the horrible, gut-wrenching conclusion that many women have come to after reading these books: if she doesn't give her husband sex, he'll have to rape her to get it.

Well... yeah. 

Of course this is how the logic works. 

I remember years ago, way back before I met my husband, way back before I figured out I'm asexual, back when I was a good pure girl and I was sure I would really love sex because I had heard it was "a beautiful gift from God" and didn't know any practical details- I happened to hear that for some women, sex might be painful (especially the first time), and I wondered about how it would play out, if that happened to me. I imagined my hypothetical Christian husband sitting me down and saying "Here's the situation, here's what has to happen, you have to have sex with me, that's what our marriage vows mean, and you're in sin if you don't do it." I imagined that he would have empathy for me, to some extent- feeling sad for how difficult and painful it would be for me to hold up my end of the deal- but he would believe that's no excuse- I STILL have to hold up my end of the deal.

We girls were taught that "men need sex", and so wives need to have sex with their husbands, even if the wives don't want to. That was the side of this teaching that the girls heard, and as I've said before, the boys might not even have been aware that that's what girls were being told. ("The Great Sex Rescue" has anecdotes in previous chapters about good men who had no idea that their wives were only having sex out of obligation, and when these men found out, they were horrified because they wanted sex to be something their wives enjoy.) But wow, if you get a man who's an abuser, who's a rapist, and *he* buys into that teaching... that's the worst situation.

Yeah... like I've said before, here's what happens to girls who grow up with a "purity" background, if they end up marrying a man: Either she marries a man who's a good person, and then she is SHOCKED at how loving and compassionate and respectful he is toward her, because she was taught that men aren't capable of being that good. Or she marries an abuser, and all of his behavior reads as completely normal to her. She doesn't recognize that it's wrong, because she was taught that's just how men are.

Fortunately for me, I married a man who's a good person. I'm glad he's not a Christian, because he doesn't believe any of that "purity" or "wifely submission" stuff. And yes, I went through that phase of just being ASTOUNDED at how my husband treats me with respect- it's mind-blowing, because I was taught that men aren't capable of that. 

But, yeah, in these anecdotes from "The Great Sex Rescue," these are the women who weren't so lucky. (And ... yeah, "lucky" is the right word here, because in purity culture they don't teach you ANYTHING about how to evaluate a potential partner and figure out if he's an abuser. All that matters is that you didn't have sex before marriage; that automatically means it's a healthy relationship, right?) These are the women who were taught that a man just isn't capable of treating his wife decently if she's not "submitting" to him, and giving him sex all the time, and never disagreeing with him about anything- all of us "pure" girls were taught that- and then they happen to marry a man who really acts that way, rather than a normal man who is a mature adult.

All of this is to say, yes, of course these kind of horrific things are happening as a result of conservative Christian teaching on marriage. The stories in this chapter of "The Great Sex Rescue" are hard to read, but I know that these kinds of things are real.

Another quote from "The Great Sex Rescue":

The way many Christian marriage and sex books handle the topic of marital rape can cause women to not trust men, even men who deserve their trust. Men are portrayed as unable to control their sexual urges: one little slipup and they might rape fifteen-year-olds or masturbate in the open. Multiple books tell women that if she doesn't have sex and he has an affair, it's her fault. They tell her that he can't control himself without her help. They even tell her "faithfulness is a two-person job."

Most men are not one slipup away from raping an underage girl. Most men do not find it difficult to refrain from masturbating in public. Most men do not have affairs. But when women are being told this lie that she must give her husband sex or he'll lose control of himself, men-- even the one she is in love with-- can become very frightening. And sex can feel like a threat.

Men are not more evil simply by being men. Most men are respectful people who do not harm women. But the more we unfairly portray all men as potential predators or potential rapists, the less we are able to notice when a man actually becomes one of those things.

Preach.

Men are fully capable of being decent human beings. There are some men out there who are abusers and rapists- and they should be held accountable for that, and if you meet a man like that, you need to NOT MARRY HIM. 

But purity culture/ complementarianism/ Christian marriage resources teach the opposite. Christian marriage resources teach that if your husband isn't treating you right, probably it's because you didn't "submit" to him, or you didn't give him sex enough, and obviously a man would treat you badly in that situation, that's how God made men to be.

Like I said, lucky for me that I married a man who's not a Christian. He had no idea that he's apparently incapable of being a decent human being if I'm not having sex with him or whatever. Lucky for me, he's a normal human who loves me and cares about how I feel. He's not the magical godly Christian man I always dreamed about. He's way better.

(And yes, of course Christian men can also be decent human beings. It's just nice for me that I didn't have to deal with a partner who was also unlearning purity culture at the same time I was.)

Next, "The Great Sex Rescue" has an anecdote from a woman whose husband insists on having sex with her every day, sometimes multiple times a day, even when she's having her period and she doesn't want to. "When I had our babies, he googled and told me it's okay after four weeks, we don't have to wait for six." What the actual ****. Oh, he GOOGLED. Consent doesn't matter, only GOOGLE. WTF, this guy. She also says, "I actually feel abused." And, "I tell him it hurts me when we have sex too often or when I'm on my period, but he says, then why would God say to NEVER deny each other?"

WTF, this guy. He doesn't care about how his wife feels, he doesn't care about her pain, he doesn't care about consent- all that matters is "God said" you can never say no to your spouse.

The authors of "The Great Sex Rescue" have this response to the above anecdote:

How can a man force intercourse on his wife when she's curled up in a ball, stiff and in emotional turmoil, and not think this is wrong? Or, to put it more bluntly, how can this man rape his wife and think he's morally right in doing so? We believe it comes from this faulty "Christian" teaching that this behavior is actually biblical.

Yeah... this is just like what I was describing above, the way I imagined my hypothetical "good Christian" husband would sit me down and explain why the bible says my consent doesn't matter. He would present a logical argument about why my pain doesn't matter. And he would be right- that's what the bible says, right?

And next, "The Great Sex Rescue" has quotes from actual real male commenters on their blog, literally making that argument:

Referring to the 1 Corinthians 7 passage ["Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent"], Tony commented, "Consensual is a key word. If he didn't consent to going six weeks [after a baby] or even one week a month [during her period], then unilaterally imposing that on him is certainly not consensual." Another man echoed him, "The period of abstinence after pregnancy and during the wife's period is not by mutual agreement so that the couple can devote themselves to prayer. It is being forced on us men because we are being told to give our wives a break." You need mutual consent to say no, these commenters feel-- but apparently you don't need mutual consent to say yes.

!!!!! Ladies, don't marry Tony!

Wow this is ****ed up! These men think you need 2 people to consent in order to *not* have sex, but if 1 spouse wants sex and the other doesn't, the non-consenting spouse should be overruled.

If you meet a guy who says that, don't marry him!!!!!!!!

And part of me wants to be like, "How can a husband have no empathy, like this- forcing his wife into sex because 'that's what the bible says' regardless of how she feels?" But... actually, there are a lot of situations in evangelicalism that get framed as a conflict between your fallible human emotions and the absolute truth of the bible, and you have to be strong and do the right thing and disregard your emotions. For example, Abraham was commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac- and so Christians should also be willing to sacrifice our children if God commands it. (WTF. If God tells you to kill a child, you quit religion right then and there, okay?) For example, evangelicals feel sad about how they have to tell queer people "we don't support your lifestyle", and have to vote against their rights, but that's simply what they must do- don't let your compassion lead your astray and convince you to reject what the bible says about homosexuality!

So killing your conscience in order to do what "the bible says" is very much a normal part of being evangelical.

That earlier anecdote from the woman whose husband believes that google overrides consent... like he's just thinking in terms of "right and wrong" as presented by the bible, and he can't see that his wife is an actual real person, right there in front of him, who is in pain. But that's... to put it bluntly, that's an essential part of what it means to be evangelical. (See also: hell, divorce, sexual abuse, and so many other issues.)

All right, one last big block quote from "The Great Sex Rescue":

Abusive men are using our evangelical resources as weapons. That's why Christian resources simply must do better. Not one of the books we looked at, except our secular control book, John Gottman's The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, even mentioned the idea of consent. This isn't acceptable. And so let's be clear: marital rape and sexual assault, whether by physical force or coercive threats, are real and are wrong. These all count as forms of sexual assault:

• If a spouse is angry and potentially violent or verbally abusive, and you feel you have to have sex in order to protect yourself or your children.
• If a spouse routinely physically abuses you, and you find this happens less often if you have sex more.
• If a spouse routinely verbally abuses you and tells you that you are worthless or tells you that you will be disobeying God if you refuse sex.
• If a spouse doesn't give you any access to money or groceries or toiletries unless you regularly have sex.
• If a spouse has sex with you while you are sleeping (whether or not your spouse wakes you up in the process).
• If a spouse forces a sexual act that you do not want, that is also sexual assault, even if the rest of the sexual encounter was consensual. We received a letter from a woman saying, "I told my husband I wasn't comfortable with sex toys, but in the middle of sex, he'll use one on me suddenly, with no warning, after whipping it out from under a pillow."
• If a spouse threatens that if you do not have sex, he or she will look at porn, go on sex chat websites, go to strip clubs, or visit prostitutes. 

These are all evil, even if not all are prosecutable in a court of law. And compliance does not equal consent either. Even if you did not physically fight or verbally say no, that does not mean you went along with it willingly. If any of these are happening to you, please call a domestic abuse hotline, or reach out to a licensed counselor who specializes in domestic violence.

Yes. I feel it's important for me to type up this entire list, in case someone hasn't heard this before and needs to hear it. (Also they wrote the list in a gender-neutral way. Yes, people of any gender can be rapists or rape victims, though the focus of this chapter is specifically the problem of husbands raping their wives.)

So, to sum up this section of "The Great Sex Rescue": Yes, all of this is very real and needs to be said. Yes, Christian marriage books teach women that this kind of behavior from men is to be expected, because men "need" sex, and "God says" you're required to meet your husband's sexual needs. The truth is, men are fully capable of being better than that. If a man is an abuser or rapist, he should be held accountable for that, because that's not "just how men are."

---

Links to all posts in this series can be found here: Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"

Related: 

6 Ways Purity Culture Did NOT Teach Me About Consent 

"Boys Can't Stop"

He's Not "My Future Husband" 

Feminism 101: Rape

Blogaround

1. Paul Alexander, forced into an iron lung by polio in 1952, dies at 78 (March 13) "He was eventually recognized by Guinness World Records as the longest-surviving iron lung patient."

2. It Matters That Mainstream Media Missed Katie Britt's Lie (March 11) "Where was the mainstream press on this? Why did it take an independent journalist like Katz digging into the details of this story for it to come to light that the points within were built on misrepresentations, if not outright lies?"

3. Islands of Insight teaches logic puzzles (March 18) "So not only does the game have a massive number of high quality logical puzzles within a single flexible framework, it also teaches players how to get good at solving logic puzzles."

4. AstraZeneca to cap out-of-pocket inhaler costs in US, following rival Boehringer's move (March 19) "Breztri Aerosphere costs $645 in the U.S. but $49 in the UK, according to a letter by Sanders and other lawmakers sent to the four companies earlier this year."

5. Preacher John MacArthur faces backlash after saying MLK was "not a Christian at all" (March 14) What on earth.

A Bit Suspicious That "Heavenly Tourism" Confirms Everything We Already Believe

A comic showing a man in a devil outfit at the gates of heaven. He says, "Sorry about this - I died at a costume party." Image source.

Anyone remember the whole "heavenly tourism" fad?

A few years ago, some "heavenly tourism" stories started popping up. Books like "Heaven Is For Real" and "The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven," which were (supposedly true) accounts of people who had near-death experiences, and supposedly went to heaven and then came back. It was a whole thing in Christian culture, back then. (Later, Alex Malarkey, the boy from "The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven" said that whole book was not true.)

These stories were, basically, about proving how right our religious beliefs are. Scoring points against people from other religions and/or atheists. Doesn't that seem... extremely weird? If you really got to go see what heaven was like, shouldn't it be about learning incredible new otherworldly information, rather than confirming that you already were right about everything?

The "heavenly tourism" stories included elements like this: A child goes to heaven and sees Jesus, who looks basically like what Christians expect Jesus to look like. The child sees angels, who are basically what Christians expect angels to look like. The child meets some of his relatives who died a long time ago- and is able to later describe what these relatives looked like, which shouldn't be possible because the child had never met them on earth- and this matches Christians' beliefs about who is in heaven and what kind of existence they would have. And so on.

And there's usually an aspect of the story that's just there to score points for "pro-life" ideology: The child meets another child in heaven, who explains that she's the sister who died in their mom's belly, or something along those lines. And when the child comes back from heaven and tells his mom, the mom is so surprised, because she never told him that she had a miscarriage/abortion. (I say this "scores points" for the "pro-life" side because "pro-life" people wrongly believe that pro-choice people view a fetus as having no value/soul/life/etc at any point of development up until birth. So, if a dead fetus goes to heaven, that means abortion should always be illegal, or something. Uh, okay.)

And there may be a few elements of the story which at first don't seem to match what Christians believe- the child says he saw something in heaven, and the good Christian adults who are listening to this story can't figure out what he's talking about. But, they dig a little deeper and they find that it TOTALLY DOES match something the bible said, or whatever, just in a way they didn't expect. So, see, we were right about everything.

Really? Someone goes to heaven and comes back, and all we get is more confidence that we were already right about everything? We don't, like, learn anything new? Really?

I gotta say, I believe in heaven, but I definitely think I'm wrong about a lot of aspects of it. If heaven is real, probably the first thing that happens to everyone who goes there is they find out it's completely different from what they expected. It must be; we have no mechanism to actually get reliable information on what heaven is like- most of our beliefs are basically folklore that has gradually built up over hundreds or thousands of years, with no way to actually fact-check any of it. A lot of it has got to be just plain wrong. And wouldn't it be awesome, to get a glimpse of what heaven really is, and find out how wrong you are?

Personally, my beliefs about heaven and resurrection come from two main sources:

1. The world is not just. I want to believe that somehow, someday, all the wrongs will be made right. I want to believe that justice is real. And so I hope that there is resurrection, that heaven is real, and I imagine what heaven would have to be like, to truly create justice.
   But maybe that's just wishful thinking. Just because I want it, doesn't mean it's actually real. Which brings me to point number 2...
2. There is a long tradition of people believing in various religions because we want there to be more than just this world. (And, in particular, I'm a Christian, so I'm influenced by Christian beliefs about resurrection and heaven.) Thousands of years of people saying the world is not just and we hope for a better world. Okay, maybe that's just wishful thinking too, and there's nothing real to it. But since it's so common, I kind of believe there's something there. I hope there is.

That's, uh, that's pretty much it. That's all the "evidence" we have that heaven exists. (I put "evidence" in scare quotes because honestly neither of those things really adds up to any evidence at all.) That's all we have to go on, as we speculate about what heaven is like. Point 1 is just our opinions on what perfect justice should look like, and point 2 is claims from religions about how maybe a few hundred years ago, God spoke to someone and gave some clues about what heaven is like. That's it. So, okay, that's the broad outlines of what heaven is, but we seriously know nothing about the details. Like, you could say "I believe God will make everything right, but I don't have any idea how that will work" and that's basically it. Beyond that, any details you believe about heaven are just fan theories.

So, wow, how cool would it be to actually go to heaven and see what it's like, and then come back? And likely the main thing that would happen is you would find out how totally wrong you are about pretty much all of it. Very cool to learn new information and find out which things we were wrong about.

Right?

But, apparently not. Because that's not the angle that those "heavenly tourism" stories take at all. They're not about learning something new; they're used as evidence that Christians are already right about everything. They're evidence for the beliefs we already have, something you can bring up in an argument with non-Christians (though honestly I don't think these kinds of stories are at all convincing to non-Christians, so good luck with that!), rather than an incredibly useful tool for examining our own beliefs and getting rid of the ones which are just wrong.

Isn't that a little... strange?

And really it's about the whole concept of certainty, about how when I was an evangelical I thought I was right about everything, because the bible gives us all the answers and that's that. But now I'm like, I don't know, I hope resurrection is real, I believe in it, but I don't know, I could be wrong. I see the ways that my beliefs are based on ... like... what I *want* to be true, rather than things I actually have evidence for. And... I do believe people have a conscience that comes from God, and so it does mean something that we understand this world is not the way it should be, and we want there to be a better world- so, perhaps that means there *is* a better world- so, there's that, but that's not really evidence either. (It's a fan theory.)

Winning arguments. Scoring points. Telling other people why you're right and they're wrong. Imagine you get to go to heaven- YOU GET TO GO TO HEAVEN- and that's all you get out of it.

---

Related:

Sure Of What We Hope For 

Someday Dave Ramsey will have to stand before God and explain why he fired a pregnant woman

And this song, "Heaven is a place on earth." Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. We'll make heaven a place on earth. That's my religion.

Blogaround

1. How (Not) To Do Autism Awareness Month (March 1) "I think most people know at this point that autism exists and a few basic traits, and would go 'Oh yeah, I support autistic people' in April, but months later when someone you work with is 'weird' and communicates more directly and bluntly than others, do you just go with it or do you assume they’re being rude to people and complain to someone?"

2. "Complete" Manhood and The Desirability of Becoming Human in Bicentennial Man (1999) (March 7) "I cannot stress this enough. They had the opportunity, right here, to fashion 'Can Andrew open a bank account?' into a central plot point about the legal recognition of his personhood, and the movie just... breezes past it. Andrew gets a bank account and nobody tries to stop him and it's fine."

3. Tom Hanks Mad He Didn't Learn About The Tulsa Massacre In School, And He's Right (March 8) "And it made me mad. It made me mad that somebody had somehow made an editorial process of what was appropriate for us to learn about our own American history."

4. Farewell, OnlySky (March 7, via) Sad to hear that atheist blogging site OnlySky is shutting down.

5. Why is New York Times campaign coverage so bad? Because that’s what the publisher wants. (March 7) "Yes, but sometimes it is obvious what’s right. Defending democracy would age just fine, I assure you."

6. Therapist Reacts to WALL-E (January 10) "I understand that on paper, that sounds ridiculous and kind of stupid. And yet, I kid you not, I think this is one of the most beautiful love stories I've ever seen on film." 29-minute video from Cinema Therapy.

7. This tweet:

Jesus teaching only in parabolas pic.twitter.com/b8Yty5VTVx

— Scott Barber (@thescottbarber) March 13, 2024

8. And this song, if you're into Phil Joel/ Newsboys songs from the year 2000 (I know I am!)

9. At least you quickly know to not bother reading the rest (March 13) Oh ChatGPT.

Americans Living Abroad- Time To Register To Vote!

American flag. Image source.

Hi all, just a reminder that if you are a US citizen living outside the US, you have the right to vote in the election. You need to register though, and every state's laws are a little different, but fortunately there is a really nice website that can walk you through it: votefromabroad.org (As far as I know, you need to register every year you vote by absentee, even if you already registered in previous years.)

Some states allow you to vote by email, and other states require fax or physically mailing your ballot back. Also, we're not anywhere close to the deadline for registering to vote in the general election, but if you want to vote in the primaries, you'll have to check the information for your state to find out deadlines for that.

The site, votefromabroad.org, is created by Democrats Abroad, but the site itself is non-partisan. (Though if you don't want to use this site, you can google "FPCA" and find other sites which will also give you the information on how to vote.)

If you have any friends who are Americans living abroad, share the link with them~ votefromabroad.org  

Blogaround

1. Paleontologists discover a 240-million-year-old 'dragon' fossil in full (February 23, via) "It's a fitting discovery in the Year of the Dragon: A team of scientists has uncovered a complete fossil of an aquatic reptile that resembles a 'Chinese dragon' because of its snake-like appearance and elongated neck." Cool!

2. NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity has flown its last flight after suffering rotor damage (January 26, via) "The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) chopper was tasked with demonstrating that powered flight is indeed possible on Mars despite the planet's thin atmosphere — it promptly did so during a five-flight campaign that spring."

3. I didn’t fancy men or women. Then I had a baby (February 13, via) Article about an asexual woman who decided to get pregnant using a sperm donor.

4. What TV Shows Get Wrong (and Right!) About Therapy (November 15) 27-minute video from Cinema Therapy.

5. A ‘Reading Rainbow’ Documentary Is Coming Next Month (February 28) Cool!

6. When Star Trek Confronted Racism Head-On (February 28) 23-minute video about a "Deep Space Nine" episode

7. If Elisabeth Elliot's Marriage Advice was Supposed to Ruin Your Life, This is the First I've Heard It (February 12) "The book is a frankly overheated and occasionally goofy account of two people who, like all young people, have very intense and primarily interior problems that don’t make sense to anyone over twenty-five. Passion and Purity, though, is told through the perspective of a much older woman who actually does seem to agree that these problems are very serious, and that the tortured process of wondering if you’re touching your boyfriend too much or if he loves you too much is actually part of preparation for marriage. How do we make sense of this?"

Here's How We Do Our Budget

An envelope with US dollars in it. Image source.

So, I had always heard people give advice that "you should have a budget." And I've tried to do that, using various strategies, which had a lot of flaws- until I finally found a strategy that actually makes sense for us. So in this post I basically want to write about things I've tried before, why they didn't work well, and what my husband and I do now for our budget strategy.

In the past, there were times I attempted to make a "monthly budget" for myself. I wrote down all the categories that I spend money in, looked at some data from the previous few months, to estimate what numbers would be reasonable for each category, and set a limit for each of the categories. The intent being, in every category, I have to keep my spending under that limit every month. That's how budgets work, right?

There were a lot of problems with this.

For example, suppose I need to go somewhere, and I'm trying to decide if I want to take a taxi or take the subway. The taxi would be more expensive, and would mean I'm going over budget in my "transportation" category. But, if I take the subway, it takes more time and I'll be late. When I'm in that situation, I feel that it's worth it to me to spend the extra money in order to not be late. But, I can't suddenly change the budget, right? Isn't the entire point of a budget that you have to stick with it, even if it's hard? Otherwise it doesn't actually help you, right?

Also, the previous day, I had bought myself a piece of cake, which cost more than the taxi would cost, but that was in the "eating out" category where I'm not anywhere close to going over the limit, so that was fine. Uh, doesn't something seem kind of off here? Thinking about the "money to happiness" ratio, spending the money for the taxi would give me more happiness than spending the money for cake, but since they're in different categories, I can't trade them off like that. I already set the limits in each category, I can't change them- that's the whole point of having a budget, right? But something seems incredibly illogical about this.

I was giving myself more stress, over small amounts of money which didn't really matter.

And, here's another example, maybe there's some grocery item that I could buy in bulk- but if I do that, I would go over budget in the "grocery" category that month. But, uh, but doesn't buying in bulk result in more savings over the long term? Then why is my budget system telling me that's bad? There's too much focus on each month individually- the system doesn't have any built-in connection between this month and the next month. I mean, *I* can tell myself "oh actually it's a good idea to buy in bulk, even though my budget system says it's breaking a rule"- but I wasn't actually quantifying that in any way. It was just an intuition that I never gathered any data to actually evaluate, because my system wasn't designed to give me that kind of data.

Also, I was thinking about each category in percentages. Like, oh, I only spent 20% of the "clothes" budget this month, wow, only 20%, I'm doing such a great job, I'm saving so much money! And then in the "groceries" category of the budget, I went over by 10%, ah, well, that's not good, but at least 10% is a small-ish amount. I remember at one point I had an app which had a horizontal bar for each category, to show what percentage of that category's limit you spent each month- and every horizontal bar was the same length. This makes no sense. It makes no sense to feel good about saving such a "high" percentage in a small category- because the actual dollar amount is so low it doesn't matter.

And I couldn't understand what people meant when they gave advice like "you should save 10%." So... if this month I spend 90% of my salary, and save 10%, but then next month I use that 10% to buy a new computer or something... that seems like that shouldn't count as "saving 10%." The only reason I'm calling it "saving" instead of "spending" is because of the arbitrariness of where one month ends and the next month begins- that seems kind of illogical.

And there was definitely no way to accumulate long-term savings. Yeah, in theory, I put limits on all the categories, and the limits add up to *less than* my salary, so if I stay within the limits every month, then the extra will keep adding up every month, and that's my long-term savings. But there was no mechanism to ensure that this would actually happen. No way to tell if, when I go over budget in some category, is it fine, or am I spending all my "long-term savings" accidentally?

But the biggest problem with this "monthly budget" system was that it was not cumulative. Every month was treated like a completely separate event, which had no mathematical relation to any other month.

I remember saying at one point "every month I'm only spending 40% of my income" and someone was like "wow that's pretty good!" but it turns out what I actually meant was "in a normal month I'm only spending 40% of my income, and then twice a year I spend THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS on international plane tickets." Yeah, every so often the "travel" category of the budget would just be so completely overwhelmed, when I bought plane tickets which were many times higher than the monthly budget limit for "travel"- but I told myself, "it's fine, it's not like I'm doing that every month." But I wasn't actually *measuring* if it was "fine" or not. It was just... most months I spend very little for "travel", and then occasionally I spend A TON, so, overall that's probably fine, right? Well, uh, you don't know if it's "fine" if you don't do the math with the actual numbers.

Sometimes I would scroll back through several months of data, and observe "oh this month I went over budget in this category, in this month I was under budget in that category", etc, but there was never any sense of ... like... adding up the actual numbers to see if a several-month-long period was over or under budget. I mean, sometimes I sort of added them in my head, but the results depended on what month I used as the cutoff point (ie, am I adding up over the past 3 months? 6 months?) so I didn't feel like that was a well-defined and concrete measure.

Sometimes I would go over budget in some category, and I would kind of feel bad about it... like a little bit of fear that if I continue like that, I'll have financial disaster in my future. Like I'm supposed to be sticking to my budget, and some months I am and some months I'm not, and ... am I deceiving myself by pretending that's fine?

It was just emotions, which didn't have concrete data to say if those emotions were reasonable or not. I was giving myself a lot of stress over small dollar amounts which didn't really matter. (Or rather, small RMB amounts, because I'm in China.)

(And maybe a lot of the emotional aspects of budgeting are my own weird quirks- this is sort of what I saw from my parents- like saying "oh maybe we spent too much money on that" or "we can't buy that because it's too expensive" but not actually having a literal budget to specify what "too much" or "too expensive" would mean, just vaguely feeling guilty about it. And also having a high enough salary that there weren't really any practical consequences from spending amounts that felt like "too much"- just guilt, never "holy crap we can't afford rent, what are we going to do?")

Eventually I came up with a new budgeting system, which doesn't have these problems. Here are the 2 key elements:

1. Everything is cumulative, from one month to the next 
2. Don't break everything down into such small categories

This happened when my husband and I moved from a 1-bedroom to a 2-bedroom apartment, just before our son was born. The reason we had to develop a new budget strategy at that time was that the rent was much higher, and we had to have a way to guarantee that the money for rent would always be there and ready to be paid at the right time. In China, typically you pay rent once every 3 months- so yeah, every 3 months, it's a HUGE amount of money you suddenly need to come up with. My husband is the one who handles the actual transaction, and when we were in a 1-bedroom apartment it was less money so it was less of a big deal- every 3 months he'd just ask me to transfer my half of the rent to him, and then he'd pay it. But the 2-bedroom apartment was so much more expensive- what if the time comes to pay rent, and we realize one of us doesn't actually have the money for our half?

We needed to both be transferring money, every month, into a dedicated savings account that my husband has access to. So that when it's time to pay rent, the money is already there, no issue.

So basically that was my inspiration for coming up with a new budget system for us. It was about large things we needed to pay for, but not every month. So the strategy was to calculate an average cost per month, and every month we'd transfer that amount to a savings account, and then when it was time to pay it, the money would be ready.

This is completely different from my previous system- my previous system also had sort of an "average cost per month" for each category, but it was like, if I went over that amount in a particular month, that was "bad," and if I went under, that was "good." Judging myself on how many months I was "good" or "bad." The new system is different- in the new system, every month we transfer that "average cost per month" amount to a savings account, and then if we don't spend it that month, that money is still there, accumulating every month so that it's ready when we need it. Each month just rolls over into the next month, in a straightforward mathematical way. Not like my old systems, where I just vaguely felt bad about sometimes going over budget, but didn't have any sense of whether it was actually a problem.

So we figured out what the big categories are for us, the categories where some months we spend a lot and some months very little. Or categories where both my husband and I have to contribute, so it makes sense for it to be paid out of a savings account that we both are putting money into. Here are our categories:

• rent and childcare costs
• travel
• health care
• Christmas
• child's college savings
• retirement savings

For each category, I calculated an estimated cost per year, and then divided by 12 to get a cost per month, then decided what proportion should be paid by me and what proportion should be paid by my husband (you can decide this based on factors like: whoever's salary is higher should be paying more money into the savings account, or if I bought an international health insurance plan for myself then my husband wouldn't necessarily pay for that because it's not for him, if one person is always buying the groceries then you should make sure they have more remaining money than the partner who's not buying the groceries, etc).

So every month we both transfer money to the savings account, and then when we have to pay for something that falls under one of those categories, we pay it from the savings account. 

[Or rather, that's how it works theoretically but actually in practical terms it's not exactly like that. See, the way I handle this is I have a big excel spreadsheet, and it says the amount of money in the Chinese savings account and the US savings account (see we have 2 different currencies so it's complicated for us), and how much of that money is allocated to each category. And we also have categories "Perfect Number's extra money" and "Hendrix's extra money"- ie, not everything in the savings accounts is allocated to those 6 savings categories I mentioned, some of the money is actually just mine or just my husband's. And in practical terms, when I pay for something that comes from one of those savings categories, I actually just pay from my own bank account, not our savings account, and then I just adjust the numbers in the excel sheet- ie, if I spend 200 RMB on something related to vacation, I spend it from my own personal bank account, and then on the excel sheet describing the contents of our savings accounts, I subtract 200 from "travel" and add 200 to "Perfect Number's extra money"- see actually joint bank accounts aren't a thing in China, so I actually can't spend money from the savings account, I don't have access. Actually I don't transfer the full "average monthly cost" for each category into the savings account every month, because when I pay for stuff from my own account, that mathematically functions the same as a transfer. As long as I write down all the amounts in the excel sheet correctly, it doesn't matter that I didn't literally transfer the entire amount. Okay those are just some details about the practical implementation of this.]

One really cool thing about this system is that, whatever is left over from your salary (after you transfer money into the correct categories) is totally yours and you can do whatever you want with it. You use it for whatever costs you have in your daily life- stuff like buying food, clothes, birthday gifts for family, donating to charity, etc. And your spouse can't judge you for any of that spending! Sometimes I feel like my husband spends money on things that he shouldn't, but, actually, as long as he's paying the right amount into the savings account every month, it's fine! Like mathematically it actually is fine. If I truly calculated the "average cost per month" in each category correctly, then he can do whatever he wants with his leftover money and I know it won't affect our family's financial stability. (I also spend money on things that he wouldn't...)

And the category that you use for your daily expenses and/or extra money isn't subdivided any further than that. It really doesn't matter if I spent a lot of money on clothes one month, and no money on clothes in a different month, or if I took a taxi or bought a piece of cake or whatever- all of that is just summed into one category, for my daily expenses (or, as I referred to it earlier, "Perfect Number's extra money"). You just look at the total in that category, and as long as it's always a positive number, then you're fine. (Or, if you're also conceptualizing that category as your own personal "emergency savings" then as long as it's always higher than whatever you think you need as your "emergency savings" then you're fine. Yes, you should have an "emergency savings"- whether you make that its own category or lumped in with another category is up to you.)

And another really great thing about this system is that, because it's cumulative, you can make corrections for things that happened in previous months. For example, suppose we spent more than we expected on vacation. Maybe this means the "travel" budget has a negative amount of money in it. (That is okay, temporarily, as long as it's in a bank account that is summing it up with other categories which are positive enough that the total is still positive.) So, there are a few different ways we could handle this:

• We could not make any changes, continue transferring money into the "travel" account like normal every month, and after a few months the amount will be positive. But next time we go on vacation, the amount available in the "travel" category is less than what I planned it to be, so we go on a vacation that costs less. Or wait a few extra months before taking our next vacation.
• We could transfer money from a different category, into the "travel" category. For example, maybe we found that we spent less on childcare than we expected, so we move money from the "rent and childcare" category to the "travel" category.
• For the next few months, we transfer more money (from our own salaries) into the "travel" category than we did before.

See? When we go over budget in one category, that is reflected in the number that the excel sheet says is allocated to that category. And it will always be reflected in that number- that number is the cumulative sum of every month, and that "over budget" incident will always be reflected in the history that goes into calculating the current amount. It is mathematically completely quantified in the numbers- you know exactly what it is, you don't have to vaguely feel bad about it and vaguely fear that it's going to cause problems in your future. And then you make a decision afterward about how to correct for it, and then you do that- you correct for it, and you move on. No reason to feel guilty. If, for example, you spend $200 more than expected on travel, but $200 less than expected on utilities (which I also put in the "rent" category), you simply mark in the excel sheet that you're transferring $200 from "rent" to "travel", and then all is good. The problem has been solved. No need to vaguely feel bad about it, or to tell yourself "well we don't spend that much money every month, so it's okay" and wonder if you're just making excuses to fool yourself.

Anyway, like I said, I made an excel sheet myself to keep track of all this, because I didn't find a budgeting software that I liked. Our situation is, we have accounts in the US and China, and both my husband and I are paying in to the Chinese account monthly, and we have other accounts that are our own personal accounts and not related to these savings categories, and my other accounts are my own business and aren't part of the excel sheet- yeah the reason I wrote my own excel sheet is because it's complicated and I didn't find software that did exactly what I wanted. (I also have an app on my phone for all my personal accounts in China, where I record every single transaction but I don't do any higher-level budget stuff, and a different one on my computer for all my personal accounts in the US. Those apps are just very basic money tracking apps, nothing special, I just got them from the app store or wherever. I am one of those very organized people.)

But anyway, if you want to look for a budgeting software tool that does something like this, I'll tell you that this is basically the envelope system. Search for "envelope budget" or something along those lines- there are some software programs that you can get that do this.

I have also seen some banks which allow you to categorize the money in your account into different "savings buckets"- yeah, that's basically the same as the system I'm describing here. 

Overall, my system is about categorizing your expenses, over the course of an average year, into a few big categories, and then making sure that you are putting enough money into those categories monthly. If not, then you need to make changes to your life, like going on less expensive vacations, or living in a less expensive apartment, etc. It's about those big things- I found that there's no benefit to subdividing everything into small categories and giving myself stress about the exact amounts.

The main function of my system is making sure that each big category is funded enough that I don't have to worry about it, and we can have the kind of lifestyle we want to have. Now, there are other benefits to budgeting, which my system doesn't really address- for example, comparing the amount spent on different everyday things and identifying places where the amount you spend doesn't really give you as much happiness as you should be getting for that amount of money (ie, if you regularly spend $X on something, but you find out that spending $X on something different brings you more happiness). My system doesn't really help with identifying those kinds of things, or small everyday things that add up to a big amount that could be reduced, etc. My system is just about the really big things, to answer big questions like "can we afford to go on an international vacation" or "can we afford to move to a more expensive apartment" etc. We are lucky to have a good enough income that we don't need to stress about the small everyday things.

(But also, you can totally use an envelope budget system for everyday things subdivided into smaller categories! Instead of updating an excel sheet once a month, and then making corrections afterward if you spent more than expected in some category, like I do, you could have an app on your phone so that in real time you can check how much you have available in a certain category, and if it's not enough for something you want to buy, then you make a decision right then about either not buying it, or transferring money from a different category before you buy the thing. That's also the envelope system, but being used for a different purpose than how I use it.)

Anyway, that's the overall idea we use for our family budget. I wanted to post it here on my blog because, like I said, I've tried other budget strategies in the past and they just caused me more stress without any real benefit. The current system we use, which is basically the envelope system, is designed mainly to make sure my husband and I are always prepared for large expenses that we can sort of predict but they don't happen every month. I found that the most important thing I need from a budgeting system is it needs to be cumulative- ie, we allocate money to a certain category this month, and then if we don't use it, that money continues to exist in that category and simply rolls over to the next month. This way, there's no need to wonder about "well sometimes we spend more and sometimes we spend less, so... I guess that's fine overall?" It's all right there in the math- you simply look at the numbers that say how much you currently have in each category. 

No need to feel guilty or wonder if it's bad that sometimes you went over budget. It's all right there in the math. If the math says you're fine, then you're fine.

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Readers: Do you have any useful budgeting strategies?

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