It’s rare but there are strains of fundamentalist Christianity that do accept alternative healing methods & some other forms of metaphysical/New Age philosophy.
Not sure what it adds to the discussion, but just to point out,
Round here
a) Vaccination is compulsory
b) Primary school education is compulsory - and curriculum is set by the state.
In Denmark there’s talk of making circumcision illegal for children. Male circumcision; female circumcision is already illegal.
My sister is a lesbian who has raised eight daughters. I am often been told by certain groups that gay parenting is child abuse. When a lesbian friend of my sister was raped and got pregnant, she and her partner decided to raise the child together. I told her to ask anti-abortion people and the like what to do. Their answer was unanimous “Have the child and give it to a real family.”
It’s weird that fundamentalist whacko Christians can have as many children as they want, but gays and considered bad parents.
:dubious: Did you read the second half of that post?
And yes, they use hippy crystal-woo doctors. They seriously argued with me back and forth about my aunt getting a root canal because “root canals are poison!” and they would rather have some quack with an internet dental degree try to use herbs and ground up crystals to take away the infection. Eventually she had the tooth pulled but absolutely refused anything like a root canal to save her tooth.
My grandfather had a fairly minor but not catastrophic criminal record. Nowadays, that might be enough to prevent him from being approved to adopt. Should my father have been taken away and put into foster care from birth? Where do you draw the line? And consider how many births there are a year - that’s a lot of cases to wind their ways through Social Services Court toward adjudication. Mom admits to once smoking pot. Take the kid away? Mom and dad admit to using pot extensively in college but they quit ten years ago.Take the kid away? Mom and dad admit to using pot extensively in college but now they only do so occasionally when dad’s sister is in town, and they always get Uncle Bill to watch the kid in the meantime and keep all drugs away from the kid. Take the kid away?
I’m glad you asked, I have a Weirdometer 2050 XL over here that I’m not using. This is the enhanced XL model that incorporates the latest research into social deviance to identify the difference between parents who have an admiration for medieval literature, fashion, and aesthetics but keep that interest well balanced with a healthy, integrated pro-social lifestyle on the one hand and parents who are just crazy geeky roleplayers and LARPheads on the other hand.
Perhaps, though, you should wait until they come out with the Weirdometer 2050 XL Mark 2 next year. It’s supposed to have an attachment that automatically scans Magic: The Gathering card collections and matches them against a ten-year study of social outcomes matched against Ultra-Rare card ownership practices. Surprisingly enough, Johnson (2014) claims that owning just one Wurmcoil Engine card is not associated with sufficient deviancy to support taking a child away.
When I was a kid, there was a form that teachers would harangue us week after week about taking home to our parents to get filled out. The form asked for answers to some rather personal family matter questions. In later years, I found out that that form was part of a government program to allocate funds to areas that they thought were deprived. So if you answered “B” to Question 2, the school got $1,000 to use however they thought best (i.e. not on you). Answer “C”, the school got $1,500. Answer “A” or “D”, the school got nothing. Fun times.
Shows what you know. They’re called mythic rares.
Yup, purely aesthetic. Ignoring the fact that again, I find it hard to believe that there’s some group of people who are both fundamentalist Christians AND new-age hippies, the stuff described isn’t anti-intellectual, and doesn’t instill subservience in women only. Leftists love to throw this accusation around, but they have no idea what they’re talking about, because they only project, they never actually listen to the Right. A lot of anti-intellectualism is just against people who hold themselves out to be intellectuals, and use that as an excuse to promote the crushing of freedom. The idea that women should work in a certain way is mirrored by the fact that men have to work, too, and provide for the family. Are you sure you don’t just believe that women shouldn’t have to work? There’s a lot of putting women on a pedestal in modern, blue-state, media-driven culture, and people really end up EFFECTIVELY believing such things, however much they’d deny it when phrased directly. I could go on and on, but to an honest person it’s clear that parents attempting to teach these beliefs can’t cause serious damage. After all, the kids will turn 18 eventually and have their own freedom. No matter who raises them they’d eventually have to disabuse themselves of SOME bad ideas. I mean, unless you force the kids-turned-adults to do something, they’re largely subject of their own free will, however much that is influenced by their upbringing.
Accept, sure. Who doesn’t accept it a little? I could tell you that a lot of that shit works a little just because it involves relaxing and sometimes forms of massage and stuff.
But people who are fundamentalist Christian but believe in new age medicine and completely eschew modern medicine? Like new age medicine, with the quartz crystals and stuff? The new agies and the jesus-freaks are complete opposites and they both know it. The new agies are hyper liberal free-spirit people. Christofundies are the opposite culturally/socially, they believe in duty and following one specific set life path.
I mean, as far as I know.
Where Christofundies would get new-age ideas I have no idea.
Maybe these aunt/uncle are just flat-out weirdos. There are plenty of flakey weirdos out there, who believe crazy mish moshes of crazy things, even when they normally don’t even go together.
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy: Crystal Healing: A Christian Perspective Part 1 | Trinity Phix
Is it common? No. But it is common for seriously conservative fundamentalists to be into herbalism (healing with God’s plants) and herbalism is sometimes a gateway into crystal healing. Since it’s perfectly possible (as that blog demonstrates) to work up a reasonable Christian argument in their favor, some succumb. Most don’t, most remain convinced that crystal healing is inherently “occult” and therefore forbidden or cursed. But for those who really kind of want to be persuaded, it’s not a very hard sell.
…Seriously? I understand that “anti-intellectual” is thrown around quite a lot, but look at this shit. These parents are intentionally attempting to shield their children from ever being confronted with anything that challenges or refutes their worldview. If that is not damn near textbook anti-intellectualism, then I’d like you to show me an example, because you may have just defined the word out of existence.
What are you even talking about? When did I say anything about women not working? Or for that matter anything about women working? No, I spoke of the women being subservient. Explicitly forbidding your female children from seeking higher education is about one thing and one thing only: keeping them subservient to the men. It’s a more “cultured” variant on the classic “only men get to learn how to read and write” gag. And it’s not funny.
Or you could format your thoughts in a way that people can understand. Seriously, what are you even trying to say? I literally cannot understand what you’re talking about. Are you saying that women shouldn’t be taught that they have the same opportunities as men? Are you saying that it’s a bad thing that women are taught to be subservient? What are you even trying to say?
You’re wrong. This sort of indoctrination and the culture that comes with it leaves psychological scars on people. It hurts them in ways they will be recovering for for much of their lives.
There’s a bit of a difference between “apparently my dad was wrong about people getting what’s coming for them” and “apparently my dad was wrong about me needing to be completely subservient to the patriarch of my household and now I’ve basically scuttled any hope of an independent future and I’m stuck in a situation where I am not free and not able to do anything about it. Also, I have deep-seated issues when it comes to recognizing and addressing abusive behavior because everything about my upbringing made it clear that such behavior could not happen to me and that if it did, I deserved it”.
Some bad ideas are more harmful than others. If I taught my child that murder, rape, and pedophilia was okay, and that he should seek out and molest children, then damn straight they’d need to disabuse themselves of those bad ideas. That does not excuse my teaching those things. I fucked up, and I deserve to be held accountable in some manner for this. These are ideas that will fuck a person up for life. Years of therapy later, they’re still gonna bear scars. The idea that this is harmless, and that people just bounce back, is simply wrong. That’s not what happens.
Once you poison your epistemology, you have no filter. You have no way of determining how good or bad an idea is. Is it any wonder that those who believe the most fervently in something which they cannot possibly prove and those who hold up belief without good reason as the highest virtue would be drawn towards other comforting, baseless beliefs?
Seriously Edwin.
Spend some time reading. This shit gets really heavy really fast. The scars from teachings like this run deep. To brush them off, as though our brains get a hard reset at age 18 when we get out of the house (assuming one can, because with no valuable life skills other than “be a wife”, options are limited), ignores the real abuses caused by these beliefs. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Okay, again I ask if you read the second half of my post. As you didn’t respond to anything I actually said and just ran off at the mouth (fingers?) at the mention of Jesus let me try again.
My point was that I find their parenting terrifying and they find my parenting terrifying but it doesn’t matter because we all ended up with happy, healthy, competent kids. There was no mention anywhere in anything I’ve said about taking her kids away from her, in fact I said the exact opposite of that.
Here’s hoping. It’s not too many steps from where they are to where the emotional and spiritual abuse starts.
I agree they are walking a fine, fine line. But truth be told, their kids are truly loved, well fed and part of a huge supportive community. They will be limited to being wives and mothers with no other skill set, but lots of women throughout history have done the same and been very happy with it. And they are all in their young teens (the oldest is 16) and will potentially have a mind expanding experience that can help them lead a happier, more productive life. I’m friends with the girls on facebook, not because I love all the Jesus updates all day long but because when one of them finally has an awakening of some kind I want them to know how to contact me so I can help guide them through it if they need my assistance.
The kids aren’t beaten. They aren’t starved. They aren’t forced into prostitution or child bride situations. They can all read and write and play at least one instrument. The fact that my values are the complete opposite of theirs isn’t enough for me to say the kids are being abused and I would never advocate taking the kids away because they choose differently for their family than I choose for mine.
But yeah, they’re total nutballs.
If you think that it’s right for a set of parents to be prevented from adopting, because the adoption wouldn’t be in the child best interest, then it logically follows that being raised by the same set of parents wouldn’t be in the best interest of a natural children, either.
So, the response to your questions is easy : if you think that a parent shouldn’t be allowed to adopt because he smoked pot once, then he shouldn’t be allowed to raise his own children, either. If something is bad for an adopted child, it’s equally bad for a non-adopted child. If you think that having smoked pot once isn’t important enough to justify removing a baby from the care of his biological parents, then you shouldn’t deem it important enough to reject an adoption, either. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.
There’s no magical property of biological children that is making them immune to what would harm adopted kids, and the other way around.
You’re ignoring a point that’s already been made. The situation of adoption and the situation where a couple is raising their biological child are not the same.
When the state has custody of a child, and is deciding where to place that child, the state must do what is in the child’s best interest.
Not so when a biological parent or parents are raising their own child. Then the state must prevent the child from being abused, but that’s it. Other things, such as the intellectual climate of the household or the amount of tobacco or marijuana smoked, are not the government’s business, regardless of how they affect the child’s well-being or future prospects.
The state should protect kids to the maximum extent possible with the resources at its disposal.
Homeschooling should be outlawed. I’m OK with the setting up various alternative schools (I have nothing against alternative teaching methods.) but this must be audited by outside authorities and fall under the state education system (so more like Charter schools, I think?) and all kids must attend school.
Non-vaccination should be outlawed. I’d allow no non-medical exceptions.
I’m not a huge fan of homeschooling but I know several parents doing a great job homeschooling their kids. Absolutely no harm is being done. If you’re going to propose something like this you need to provide clear positive proof that all homeschooling is harmful in a tangible way or else you’re just removing someone’s freedom to educate their children as they see fit on a whim.