Linnea

[linnea]

Re-posting this at Vyckie's request. What a good idea, to be able to zero in on one person instead of reading through the whole thread to find them!

I'm Linnea. (I meant to capitalize it when I registered, but oops.)

I'm an atheist with pagan tendencies. I postponed marriage and children until my late 30's. (My kids are now 11 and 13.) I'm fascinated by religion. I have a relatively egalitarian, but not entirely happy, marriage. My husband is bipolar and I can see that if he were in charge of everything it would be very Bad News.

And adding: it's interesting that some aspects of the Quiverfull lifestyle (breastfeeding, growing your own food, simple living in general) are things that I do/did. I never homeschooled, but I strongly considered it. The QF folks present it as all being part of a package, but there are parts of that package that you can do for other reasons.

And by the way, I was an anthropology major in college too, but I never did anything with it after that (other than to view the world through that lens).

[anotheramy]

My husband had a BAD childhood, and I think if we'd gone down the patriarchal path, it would have been Bad News as well.

Many of the "crunchy" aspects of QF are things I do as well, but I'm starting to wonder how many of those families do those things because they want to as opposed to not being able to afford alternatives.

[tapati]

Hi Linnea! Yes I think Anthro changes the way you see things forever! Families are "micro-cultures." Culture influences everything! Of course religion and culture are inter-dependent as well.

I also did home birth, stayed with my kids until they were school age, home-schooled for a few years when the school system couldn't really teach my learning disabled daughter, and so on. They were all things I thought about and choices I made after considering options, though, not forced as a package deal. I agree, there are other reasons to do some of these things.

[linnea]

Many of the "crunchy" aspects of QF are things I do as well, but I'm starting to wonder how many of those families do those things because they want to as opposed to not being able to afford alternatives.

There also seems to be a back-to-the-land, withdraw-from-society subtext to a lot of the Quiverfull stuff. It's a very rural movement, isn't it? I mean, I don't see anybody blogging about living with their 12 children in Brooklyn.

[themomma]

Yeah, that is true. I think it is people wanting to get back to idyllic times Laura Engalls Wilder stories...

[marie]

...but tend to forget that living in a sod house bit with snakes dropping out of the ceiling thing. Hello. I live in a farm but I love me my modern conveniences.

Sorry about your husband, linnea. I have a brother with OCD and before he got meds, he was in bad shape.

Would you mind explaining, for I am sheltered, what your pagan tendencies are?

[arietty]

I'm finding the idea of being an urban big homeschooling family interesting. What if you DID live in Brooklyn and you made use of NYC's vast educational and cultural opportunities. What if..

Instead of baking bread and crock pots and once a month cooking you toured the gastronomic diversity of a big city. I always thought it would be interesting to eat only chinese food for one month. You could pick a cuisine, go shopping at a grocery store dedicated to that cuisine and cook and eat it for a week. Research the recipes and ethnic differences in the food.

Imagine if instead of doing A'Beka for science you went to the Natural History museum for a whole week doing all the tours! And going home and researching online what you learned about!

You don't have any room for chickens in Brooklyn but maybe your teens can stand up for free range eggs by spending a few days at a PETA office and borrowing their varying horror films. This could lead to a study of animal rights philosophy, propaganda etc..

It would be great as a homeschooler (or parent!) to always seek to expand one's resources for education rather than limit them as a lot of QF people do, ever censoring what material their children have access to.

[themomma]

We are rural but I have heard that is some places "somewhere" there are whole neighborhoods that homeschool. That would be so awesome!

[coleslaw]

Imagine if instead of doing A'Beka for science you went to the Natural History museum for a whole week doing all the tours! And going home and researching online what you learned about!

Your kids would learn a lot about evolution, not to mention deep time. Of course, I see this as a Good Thing.

Even though I didn't home school, I certainly took advantage of all the educational opportunities our small city provides. My son still remembers the time I took him to tour the local dairy. No cows, alas, but we did get to see how the milk was bottled. Another time I took him and a friend to see a hands on exhibit of DaVinci's inventions at the local museum. Whatever there was to see here and nearby, we saw. And then there was the trip to Williamsburg and environs on which we saw 4 Civil War battlefields in one day because son had become a Civil War buff after watching Ken Burns series on PBS.

[linnea]

Hee, Arrietty. That sounds like the exact opposite of what many QF homeschoolers do.

Marie, here's what I mean when I say I have pagan tendencies: I'm an atheist, but I do sometimes feel called to worship/honor/celebrate *something*, and the closest I can get to defining that *something* is to say that I worship the earth, or nature, or maybe life itself. Some people call it "earth-based spirituality".

I believe in evolution. I don't think that some Being deliberately set out to create the universe, or this planet, or the life on it. The fact that life arose, and not just life, but intelligent, conscious, self-aware life, is to me an awesome, wondrous thing. So maybe I worship evolution, LOL.

There are a lot of different kinds of pagans around, some who believe in a Goddess/God and some who don't. Many of them (me included) do rituals to mark the cycle of the seasons: the solstices and equinoxes. I find that these rituals speak to me and move me greatly.

I'm also very concerned about the environment, and I consider trying to live lightly on the planet to be a spiritual practice. Yes, when I ride my bike to work instead of driving, or hang my laundry on the line instead of using the dryer, I'm practicing my paganism!

So that's my long-winded explanation of what I mean by "pagan tendencies".

[jemand]

linnea... cool explanation. The only "pagan tendencies" this atheist leans toward is a great appreciation for Discordianism! Loosely described as a parody religion slightly more complex than "Flying Spaghetti Monsterism" it's principles (or one set of them) are laid out in the "Principia Discordia." In it, the goddess Eris loves to sow confusion by telling ALL of her followers some contradicting idea of religious "truth." I find it pretty fun and/or funny.

[marie]

Thanks for the explanation, Linnea. That made a lot of sense.

[anotheramy]

Apr 16, 2009 22:31:11 GMT -5 arietty said:

I'm finding the idea of being an urban big homeschooling family interesting. What if you DID live in Brooklyn and you made use of NYC's vast educational and cultural opportunities. What if..

I'm trying to imagine the family of 12 that could afford to live in Brooklyn on one income!

In college I knew people who were (secular) homeschooled in NYC, and they had awesome experiences because of all cultural opportunities. They also took a lot of courses at CUNY branches and the New School. It's definitely not that kind of place where a kid could easily be isolated or sheltered.

[rosa]

There are a lot of conservative Jews with many, many children living in Brooklyn. (and there are chickens in Brooklyn, too - when I stayed with a friend there, I could hear them.)

There are homeschoolers who live in cities - Minneapolis isn't New York, but when I volunteered at the library we got homeschooling/unschooling families. But they seem not to be homeschooling for religious reasons as often (two of my coworkers homeschooled, not for religious reasons, but they both live in outer suburbs).

[aimai]

Thanks for mentionining the ORthodox Jews, Rosa, I meant to post that too but forgot that discussion. Yes, large families exist and even thrive, after a fashion, in cities. I wish we could get some X orthodox jewish women to come on the board and talk about their situations/experiences.

aimai

[rosa]

That's an interesting thought, Aimai. There are plenty of churches with very patriarchal teachings that people leave and don't write exposes - I wonder if there's some mechanism inside the community that makes abused women feel like their husbands are not the result of the patriarchal religion.

[linnea]

Good point, Rosa. There are probably a lot of parallels between the two communities. What I was thinking, though, was that one of the goals of the Quiverfull movement is to get as far out into the country as possible. If you search for "quiverfull blog" you'll find loads of them, and it seems like half of them talk about moving to a farm and growing your own vegetables, like Laura's family did.

Wondering what a search for blogs by hasidic women would yield . . .

[anotheramy]

A quick search
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/jewish-women-in-marriage-law-protest-679073.html
"Orthodox Jewish women who are being held in marriages against their will have started protests outside the home of a man who has refused to grant a religious divorce to his ex-wife for nearly 40 years."


Check out this guy's answer, which sounds a lot like the Christian answer when one wants to sweep things under the rug:
judaism.about.com/library/3_askrabbi_o/bl_simmons_womenstatus.htm

And a book:
www.amazon.com/Unchosen-Hidden-Lives-Hasidic-Rebels/dp/0807036277

No blogs yet.

Perhaps this should go in a different thread?

[arietty]

I think it would be great to start a thread about Hasidic patriarchy, who knows someone might show up and start posting! I know it's all pretty much the same thing, endless children, rules about dress, father in charge of everything.

I read a Salon or Time article once (I think) that was written by a reporter whose brother was a born again Hasid, the family had been liberal jews. He went to visit his brother after being cut off from him for a long time and found him living in squalor and poverty in a rural area with 12 kids and an exhausted wife, in a small community of other believers living similarly.

[rosa]

The only Orthodox Jew I've ever had any longtime contact with is an online poster in another forum I'm on. I think he lives in New Jersey. Anyway, in his community they not only have all the clothing and multiple children but the men are not expected to work - he's a fulltime Torah scholar and his wife supports them running a home daycare (if you can believe him. He's so obnoxious I sometimes think he's an anti-Semitic fake, except he's no more obnoxious than, say, Sirius here. Not *all* of these men can be making up their lives for trolling purposes, can they?)

[rosa]

Thank you for the link, Anotheramy.

[barbaraw]

Apr 16, 2009 23:19:56 GMT -5 linnea said:

I'm an atheist, but I do sometimes feel called to worship/honor/celebrate *something*, and the closest I can get to defining that *something* is to say that I worship the earth, or nature, or maybe life itself.

[snip]

So that's my long-winded explanation of what I mean by "pagan tendencies".

Have you heard of Michael and Connie Dowd: www.thankgodforevolution.com/? Their religion is called "Creatheism," and you can put the accent on the "theism," as Michael does, or on the "atheism" like Connie does, depending on your leanings.

[linnea]

Cool! Thanks very much for the link. I think I read about them a while back in the UU magazine.