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Post by Vyckie D. Garrison on Jul 2, 2010 12:20:42 GMT -5
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Post by MoonlitNight on Jul 2, 2010 13:55:32 GMT -5
I think most people, probably everybody, feel that hunger for an extended family, but few of us have one that works well, for whatever reason. Frequent moves, family tension, and all that.
What most of my friends and I have done is make family-by-choice -- meaning a network of friends that is as supportive (often more) than most of our blood families. It works, and it really ought to be more common. Not too many blood extended families can boast relationships as good and as strong, as a family-by-choice. Mine has a couple pairs of exes that get along better than plenty of married couples.
Every week one of our friends and neighbours has roughly a dozen people over for "family dinner", and not a single one of them is related by blood....but every single person there always has a long-standing, trusted relationship of some kind with one, usually several other people there.
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autumn
Junior Member
Posts: 56
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Post by autumn on Jul 2, 2010 15:12:06 GMT -5
Humans have a deep need to form community. Churches have filled that role for eons and it's a shame that people are now using them as a cloak for political motives. especially since SO many people trust churches and think that nothing ill intended can come from them.
What's needed is an orchestrated effort to pull back the veil from these dominionist theology groups so people realize that they are using our freedom of religion to build a power base and take it away from us!!
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Post by humbletigger on Jul 3, 2010 15:47:26 GMT -5
I married into a Christian family hoping to get that closeness of extended family. And it kind of worked for a while.
When all of our children were little, we would get together once a year with my husband's parents, siblings and our children. We did this four, five times? While the children were little it worked out okay.
The oldest brother was into Gothard before I had children, so most of what they were doing went over my head. We did draw their names for Christmas, and asked people in our church what to buy for children in those days. Apparently, Care Bears was not the right answer.
They said nothing to our face, then sent us a "thank you" card thanking us for the teaching opportunity. Apparently they made a religious teaching out of stopping on the way home and dumping the Care Bear in a dumpster. My poor niece. If they had told us it was inappropriate at the time, we would have apologized and run to K-Mart and bought something the parents were okay with. But they handled it the snotty religious way in which the most heartache that could be got from the situation was wrung out. Bah.
The other family seemed more laid back, and we enjoyed all of our neices and nephews. Later the Gothard family came to their senses, and the seeming more moderate family has turned into a Phil Lancaster family cult. The third siblings, missionaries recently returned from Brazil, have always had their children in public school. Go figure.
We home school, but have always leaned away from the stricter stuff and more so as our children got older. My daughter pretty much demanded it! LOL But as we get farther and farther away from fundamentalism, our family on his side has less and less to do with us.
So, the church fill the gap of missing extended family? I wish. It has never been that way for us, but maybe because our family and the church are synonymous.
My money is on my neighbors and party friends. They are by far the most supportive of all the circles my life connects with. NOT the "church"- at least not the fundamentalis church of theonomists.
My new Lutheran church is pretty welcoming. We even have a facebook group "the fellowship of cussing lutherans"- LOL. We will not be getting any kudos from fundies any time soon.
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Post by arietty on Jul 3, 2010 23:15:18 GMT -5
Rambling here..
I had no extended family at all. Everyone dead or living overseas. I knew I needed the church.. after my divorce when the church labeled me a jezebel or whatever and completely dumped me I had no one AT ALL, just me and a whole lot of little kids.
My 2nd husband has a huge extended family which at first looked very appealing to me.. I wanted to be a part of that. I actually yearned to be a part of it, still wanting community. But it did not take long to realize that I would have to talk the talk and walk the walk (fundamentalism) to find any acceptance and my husband is absolutely gun shy of their judgments and has very little to do with them. So they work well among themselves and enjoy being a huge family but we are just too worldly for them. I have to avoid things like even being their FB friends because my kids might post something on my wall that is BAD.. a bad word, talking about bad music, talking about going to a bad place (bar, club..), expressing anger about ANYTHING.. really what is the point.
However I now have that extended family I longed for and Vyckie it is all thanks to QF, HAHAHAHA.. my older kids are adults and we help each other, socialize together, go to concerts, watch films, laugh our heads off, drink wine and rely on each other. It's been quite meaningful for me after being so isolated for so long. I don't think we would pass any family values tests LOL but we are very close knit.
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Post by xara on Jul 5, 2010 10:16:45 GMT -5
I feel similar to Bronwyn. For me growing up, I couldn't stand the family I was born to. I had very little in common with them and I never fit in. I have since found common ground with certain members but overall I don't have much in common with my extended biological family.
For years I wouldn't even say the "f" word (family). Or if I did I said it with tons of scorn and derision. I considered it a dirty word. Because they were the people that I had to deal with, most of whom I didn't like as people, who wanted me to be someone other than who I was. And I kind of liked who I was, or at least who I was becoming.
Church didn't fill the need for community for me either. Because the church I grew up in was so anti-woman I never felt welcome there. In fact felt guilty for living. That God hated women. No, the church made me suicidal but not part of a community.
I have always been closer to friends than family. I formed some really close friendships in college for which I am grateful. That group of friends has stuck together for over 20 years. We have seen each other at our best and worst and we have stuck together through it all. I still see many of them a few times a month. We have several large gatherings each year. We even have an "Orphan's Thanksgiving." Because there is the family you are born to, the family married into or born to you, and the family you choose.
My true family is the last category. It just happens to contain a few people from my birth family. I no longer consider family a dirty word, but I reserve the right to decide for myself who is my family and who is not.
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Post by lvgdandppl on Jul 5, 2010 19:47:21 GMT -5
Vyckie,
Do you agree with this statement? “The goal of the movement is to create a theocracy..." Is there any evidence to support this statement, or is the author's statement based on opinion? I ask because that's really harsh to claim that the Christian right is trying to take over our democratic republic to create a theocracy. Maybe I'm reading that wrong. Does the author of American Fascists elaborate about this?
Thanks, Jennifer
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Post by nikita on Jul 5, 2010 20:23:20 GMT -5
Vyckie, Do you agree with this statement? “The goal of the movement is to create a theocracy..." Is there any evidence to support this statement, or is the author's statement based on opinion? I ask because that's really harsh to claim that the Christian right is trying to take over our democratic republic to create a theocracy. Maybe I'm reading that wrong. Does the author of American Fascists elaborate about this? Thanks, Jennifer I'm not Vyckie but I'm gonna throw in my two cents here. I understand your unease with this statement. I too hate conspiracy theories and knee-jerk alarmist statements by people who are not on the Right or whatever. And until I researched some of this recently I would never have believed that any Christian church with more than twenty members wanted to take over anything other than their own members and future members. But in an effort to understand some things I've run across the extreme end of the Dominonist theology out there and yes, there are Christian doctrinal positions that really do believe that the earth must be subjugated to the church and believers, that America is in a covenant with God and will be bound by it. See the RPNA website for an example of this thought. www.reformedpresbytery.org/about.htmlIt is a doctrine that has gained popularity in recent years and is something that is causing some alarm. I have no problem with people believing and worshipping as they choose and participating in the political life of the country, far from it. But this is much more insidious to me, more alarming than individuals seeking to make their communities and country better. This is a belief system that says it has the divine mandate from God Himself to make sure we are all right in line with them on everything, both religious and civil. And it's the 'civil governments' part of the equation that gives me the wiggins. So yeah, no knee-jerk alarmist 'oh no! conservatives on the rise!' is my particular problem (although I'm kinda disgusted with the current political climate but that's another problem for another forum). It's the broader dominionist/reconstructionist movements that alarm me. And for the record I'm not overly fond of Hedges' book either for various reasons. But there is a real problem out there that we ignore to our peril. IMHO.
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Post by cherylannhannah on Jul 6, 2010 6:16:05 GMT -5
I hate to admit this, but I was a card carrying member of the RPNA. You don't have to worry about them taking over anything. Though the website still exists, the group does not, or only in isolated pockets of a few people here or there. The whole thing imploded back in 2006. I was excommunicated along with all the members of my local congregation because we dared to stand up to the leadership and call them on their abuses of authority in their dealings with us.
Things have reached such a pass that now none of the elders who were overseeing the various "societies" will even speak to one another. At best we were never more than a fringe element on the extremes of presbyterianism and not at all representative of most Reformed congregations.
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Post by nikita on Jul 6, 2010 8:30:23 GMT -5
I hate to admit this, but I was a card carrying member of the RPNA. You don't have to worry about them taking over anything. Though the website still exists, the group does not, or only in isolated pockets of a few people here or there. The whole thing imploded back in 2006. I was excommunicated along with all the members of my local congregation because we dared to stand up to the leadership and call them on their abuses of authority in their dealings with us. Things have reached such a pass that now none of the elders who were overseeing the various "societies" will even speak to one another. At best we were never more than a fringe element on the extremes of presbyterianism and not at all representative of most Reformed congregations. The stories you could tell... Good to know they imploded. I don't have any proof of this, but my gut feeling is that smallish groups of people who are intolerant of people outside their special group to such a degree tend to eventually hate each other too. Can't prove it, but I think it's true. I've seen it happen around me before. They may be disbanded but the underlying philosophy they espoused is still intact. It would be great to know just who and how many are out there who think the same way but I imagine that is hard to quantify unless you are a professional tasked to keep track of these sorts of things. The theology is hateful and frightening though, no less so because the people involved don't think it's hateful and don't mean actual harm by it. I think it's scarier when people hurt you for your own good than when they just hurt you because they hate you. I'm glad you're out of that particular branch of this movement. Now if we could just persuade you to tell us all the gory details I'd be so happy. But that might not be something you either can do or would be comfortable doing. No pressure.
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Post by cherylannhannah on Jul 6, 2010 10:25:52 GMT -5
The stories you could tell... Good to know they imploded. I don't have any proof of this, but my gut feeling is that smallish groups of people who are intolerant of people outside their special group to such a degree tend to eventually hate each other too. Can't prove it, but I think it's true. I've seen it happen around me before. They may be disbanded but the underlying philosophy they espoused is still intact. It would be great to know just who and how many are out there who think the same way but I imagine that is hard to quantify unless you are a professional tasked to keep track of these sorts of things. The theology is hateful and frightening though, no less so because the people involved don't think it's hateful and don't mean actual harm by it. I think it's scarier when people hurt you for your own good than when they just hurt you because they hate you. I'm glad you're out of that particular branch of this movement. Now if we could just persuade you to tell us all the gory details I'd be so happy. But that might not be something you either can do or would be comfortable doing. No pressure. I don't know that any of us hate one another. I know that there is still a tremendous amount of anger and a feeling of betrayal on my part towards the leadership. And it is confusing too, because on some level I still care for and miss them as people. I had some good times with them. The theology itself isn't scary for me. It was the application that was totally messed up and part of the reason for that was the patriarchalism that overlay everything else and corrupted it. I did a lot of reading about the history of the original Covenanters and many of them were people worthy of emulation in terms of their love, devotion, and sacrifice for one another and for God. And you have to realize that in the times that they were living, they had a great role in helping to lay the foundation for many of the civil liberities that we now enjoy because they refused to allow the State, as respresented by the Monarchy, dictate to them how they would worship. It has been said that one of the first things that British troops would do when they entered an American town during the War of Independence was to set fire to the Presbyterian churches because they were the ones who provided the philosophical underpinnings for challenging England's tyranny against her own colonies. Presbyterianism, with its graduated court system, is an ecclesiastical form of classical republicanism applied to the church. There are supposed to be checks and balances within it to prevent abuse. However, I have noticed that mankind is quite capable of abusing any system when he really wants to. Nothing is fail safe in this world. I am working on the story and I sent Vyckie the first installment of it. I'm afraid I am not much of a story teller like some of the other ladies on this forum so it may not make for exciting reading. One of my best friends, who is an excellent writer, has taken it upon her to write a novel based on our experiences in the RPNA. She has sent me installments of it, but so far I haven't been able to read it because it is just too painful and still too close, even after four years.
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