Transplanting a Seattleite

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/25/health/camel-milk-in-the-us-intl/index.html

My walking partner told me about amish and camels, and I went googling. I’ll be back to comment further, but don’t have the time right now.

The Saudi guy pushing the camel milk itself appears in this earlier story at Vice, mentioning benefits to kids with autism (I am moderately skeptical, altho I am inclined to believe that if you are allergic to cow’s milk, switching to some other animal or plant milk might definitely help you feel better!):

https://www.vice.com/en/article/8qkz4p/amish-farmers-are-milking-camels-for-your-health

Also says this:

“The camels on these farms actually come from Australia. Camels run wild over there—they're an invasive species—so a couple of years ago these Amish farmers imported them by the thousands.” My current question was how did the Amish wind up with camels, but no apparent contact with Muslims to go with. This would be an answer.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=79943&page=1

So, apparently Australia is the only place with “wild” camels currently, and they are now exporting them not just to Amish farmers in the US to milk and give Nativity rides at Christmas with, but also to Saudi to provide camel meat to people doing the Hajj and similar. Australia’s camels original came from Northern India, according to that article.

Everything about camels is unexpected.

https://www.pennlive.com/life/2019/07/what-does-pennsylvania-camels-milk-taste-like-video.html

It looks like this farmer is where it started, and the autism stuff is in this article too, altho they are a little cagy about how they present it and make sure it is in quotes (as Vice did). Amos Miller has been in the news for other reasons associated with food safety, at least one death, and a contempt finding — not sure where that stands now, but just to be clear: I am in favor of food safety and I think raw milk other than whatever you milk yourself is probably a bad idea.

This is so weird, tho! If I’ve assembled this picture correctly, a while back, some domesticated Northern Indian camels were shipped to Australia where feral herds grew. The descendants of those Northern Indian camels were then captured, transported and sold in the United States to Amish farmers, who milk them and give Nativity rides on them? Without any camel wrangers coming along at any stage of the game? Granted, this is a _great_ life for a camel. They are not carrying hundreds of pounds across a desert with inadequate food and water. The worst thing they are dealing with is Pennsylvania winter, and they seem to have adequate shelter there.

Am I having relationship conflict? Sure. I have relationships, so conflict happens. Nothing particularly different or worse/bad is happening in any of my core relationships. Don’t think this is about me, specifically.

It _is_, of course, about me, because this is my space to work through ideas and try to understand … stuff.

I was raised in a JW family (my grandfather had converted before my father was born, back in the 1920s or so, even before they’d settled on the JW name). My younger sister left in her teens. I left when I was 25, which is unusually late for someone to leave while young, and unusually early for someone to leave after a long period of time in the cult. If you are thinking, is it really a cult? They refer to being a member as being “In the Truth” and they call the people in charge “The Governing Body” and the group as a whole as “The Organization”. I think that makes it _fairly clear_. It’s a cult.

Once I left, I did not bounce back. Again, this is very unusual for any long term member with extensive family still in the cult. You don’t get to keep those family relationships when you exit. The only relationship they will have with you is attempts to get you to return. This is not an exaggeration. There is plenty of readily accessible JW material (you can go to their website) that describes that this is the policy, and how it is implemented. Again, it’s a cult. Again, it makes it hard to leave and stay gone. Humans generally want to maintain connections to their friends and family of long-standing, so ending that all at once is hard. And anyone who has been in for a long time does not have strong relationships with outsiders _because the group also bans that_. It’s a cult.

While I was a member, I was told over and over and over again in my interactions with outsiders (generally answering their questions about the cult I was then a member of) that I was the most reasonable JW / person in a cult that they had ever met. I never quite knew what to make of this? Until recently, I would have assumed that fundamentally this was a result of my autism. And it may well be. However, I got to thinking about structures for managing relationship conflict last night, and I now think there is something else entirely going on. Probably autism related — because ME! But it isn’t inherent to the autism.

While I was a sincere member (because for a long time, I was — the last five years, not so much, but for a long time I was a sincere member), I maintained an independent conscience. Not as a child, of course, but, let’s call it high school on. On specific issues where I felt the Organization’s position was completely unsupportable by scripture, I actually would argue with men holding positions within The Organization. (I didn’t lose, and if you have any understanding of cults, this is all by itself somewhat incredible and difficult to believe. Also, it is true. They were very afraid of me by the end of this process, a fact which I did not fully appreciate for a few years, but have realized for a long time now.)

I did not go out of my way to say, “I’m a JW” or anything like that. However, I did state things that I could or could not do, as they came up. “I do not celebrate Christmas” wasn’t a thing I volunteered, but provided by way of explaining my non-participation in a holiday party. I was happy to explain _why_ JW’s don’t celebrate Christmas (still willing to do that!) _when asked_. When the other person wanted to drop it, I fucking dropped it. This is probably why people thought I was reasonable. It was because I could provide the complete basis for the belief / proscription / requirement, on demand, in a coherent format, and then stop. That is _not_ the easiest thing in the world to learn how to do.

Evangelicals _in general_ including JWs typically lack the _and then stop_ capability. Honestly, they’re usually pretty shitty on the “complete basis for …” part, and rarely good at the “in a coherent format”. They generally _don’t_ give the actual basis for their belief, which is that they are a member of a family / group that requires them to believe the thing. They frequently don’t realize that the actual basis for their belief is their group membership. When you are arguing about a belief or value that a person is required to hold to maintain membership in good standing in the group that contains all of the people that are important to them, you are not arguing about the belief or the value. You are actually arguing about whether or not the person is willing to break with everyone they care about over an idea. And they probably aren’t, no matter how reprehensible or risible the idea is. Interestingly, this is exactly what slows people down in terms of _joining_ a cult in a lapse of judgment. The cult makes it clear they are going to have to give up all their important relationships — and the important relationships will often make it clear that if they join the cult, that connection is over. It’s tough to get someone with satisfying relationships to make that leap.

Flip side, someone who _does not_ have satisfying relationships is pretty easy to get to sign up by offering them the appearance and possibly even the reality of satisfying relationships. Join us, and you’ll have structured, free activities to fill your non-work hours, a sense of meaning, the satisfaction of looking forward to 99% of humanity being offed sometime in the next little bit by god so you can enjoy living forever on a paradise earth (nothing like a little genocidal fantasy revenge to take the edge off of loneliness and shame!).

As much as I would like to say that I left because I disapprove of genocide, even as a fantasy (I do! Now. I didn’t then. My bad.), that’s not why I left. I _left_ because The Organization asserted that it was influenced by Jehovah, sort of nudged along in a management sense, to get the bad humans out of The Organization, and the door-to-door ministry would ensure that we would present the opportunity to everyone thus making it possible for any good humans not in The Organization to find their way to Eternal Life in Paradise on Earth. Any mere human organization couldn’t offer this, and the world was all under Satan’s influence, so being In the Truth was the only safe place, and even if there seemed to be someone bad, that’d all be found out in good time, don’t worry about it. I left because it was really impossible to believe this. Remember: my grandfather converted, and I read. A Lot. It was really clear that The Organization was largely composed of criminals, and most people who were not cult members were basically decent human beings. And largely is not some sort of 51% of the people broke the speed limit occasionally. The list of _people I knew_ committing felonies and remaining in good standing was kind of astonishing. There was an even longer list of people I knew committing felonies and going to prison for them (and I don’t mean COs who didn’t want to serve when drafted during Viet Nam), who were in good standing despite internal reports of what they had done, and they were only booted out after it became a public legal matter.

Some years ago, I tried to read a book that was written by a Law Professor colleague of a family member. The book was about private law, and what public law can maybe learn from it. It’s a terrible book, which was really apparent when the events surrounding the Great Organic Peanut shortage were described in a way that asserted that kosher regulation in that situation was helpful, when in fact, that is the opposite of true. Kosher failures were present, documented and being discussed but no meaningful action to mitigate the problems was taken and no removal of certification occurred. Remember: people _died_ from the PCA nonsense. Private law is not great. Public law has issues, for sure. But we are not going to be fixing those issues by reference to retrograde religious organizations.

Once I was out, I did what I could to exploit loopholes in communication and contact to maintain family relationships. Functionally, I was responsive to requests for assistance and very proactive in offering assistance in dealing with transportation to medical appointments and similar (my mother never got a driver’s license. There was some implausible story about her hitting a dog, but I think this is really because she was undocumented). I did finally end this limited contact after repeated abuse that led me to go No Contact with my mother, and to set fairly clear terms for any ongoing contact with my father. The abuse was not physical in nature. When I stopped being a JW, I knew — because I had seen it all happen with my younger sister’s exit from The Organization — that my mother would remove all evidence of my existence from the walls of the house. I had not, however, anticipated how far she was prepared to take that. She squirreled away everything, and sorted through it repeatedly over the years, so once I left, she started going through her extensive stash and asking me to come over and “pick up my things”. “My things” included my baby book, and various childhood art projects, which I was mostly happy to have back. But they also included her copies of the candid photos from my first wedding (I’d long since destroyed mine), and _every single Happy Anniversary Card_ I’d given my parents that was not also signed by either of my older siblings.

Fine, but she handed them to my younger sibling, who was visiting with her then husband and stepchildren, and asked her to hand them off to me. I really feel like if you are going to hand a bomb of that nature to someone, you shouldn’t be _that_ surprised to have it lobbed right back at you. The grenade tossed back down the hall is an absolute cliche of war movies.

Remarkably, once I was No Contact with my mother, I kinda felt like I might want to have children of my own. Go figure.

I tell this long story for a variety of reasons. First, I probably _ought_ to write it down somewhere; it’s probably interesting and might help other people make sense of things they have experienced or watched someone else go through or heard about or whatever. Second, and more relevantly, this is a _very high degree of relationship conflict_.

There are higher degrees! Nobody died (well, fortunately, my mother did eventually die, but that’s totally unrelated to this story. She is out of her misery, and so are the rest of us). Nobody had to go to the hospital. The police were not involved. But for number of involved persons, and the length of time that this particular relationship conflict has extended over — there are updates that I haven’t included; this is a many-decades long conflict, and when I say I know The Organization is (or at least was — maybe they’ve forgotten!) afraid of me, I’m not precisely exaggerating. I’m not proud of everything I did at the height of the conflict, but I’m not exactly ashamed either.

(ETA: I will mention that while the police and medical professionals were not involved in any of the events with my parents, my exit from The Organization was prompted by my decision to get a divorce from my then-husband, and the end of that relationship _did_ involve police and medical professionals and an order for protection.)

Third, and probably most importantly, I can _now_ see embedded in these events a meaning that was not apparent to me at the time, or for decades thereafter as I repeated, many, many times, a very particular pattern.

I have a _very_ well defined structure for managing relationship conflict. Here it is:

Notice the conflict. Identify the boundaries of the conflict clearly, and the nature of it. Accept the elements of the conflict that are not-remediable, after putting in good faith efforts to mitigate / remediate / persuade / convince. Sometimes, I find that my position is Incorrect and I adopt the position of the other parties, and the conflict is over. Occasionally, the reverse is true. Ideally, we both meet in a new, better position. But if none of these happen, just _knowing_ exactly what the conflict is is the first element of my structure.

Reduce active conflict, by agreeing to steer clear of the conflict boundaries. As needed, reduce the amount of contact with the other person or persons, until the remaining contact is tolerable to everyone. That might require reducing contact to zero.

Make it as clear as possible that, if the other person’s position changes materially, the relationship can be further modified. “My door is always open.” “Your choices have led to …” My daughter calls this, “Make them dump you”. I actually don’t totally agree with either the Make Them Dump You policy as a policy, or my daughter’s characterization of what I do as a Make Them Dump You policy, but her perspective seems worth including here because it’s entirely possible she sees this more clearly than I do.

I think that this above structure for managing relationship conflict is _why_ people used to tell me that I was the most reasonable JW they’d ever met / said other admiring things about how handled an unpleasant interaction at work / in a social setting / etc.

I want to be super clear about a couple things. I am _not_ advocating for this. Don’t do it. It’s actually not a good way to live your life. You might think about moments where you wish you had called someone out for their *ist joke or comment, or where you wish you had NOT called someone out for their *ist joke or comment, and where everything got heated and there was shouting and so forth. Let me tell you, when you identify the *ist joke or comment as a conflict element and then relentlessly manage it as I describe above, the pain goes on for a lot longer. I am a “rip the bandage off” sort of person in a lot of ways, but not in this area. When I experience values conflict with someone, I will tell them _and then we will talk about it a lot_. That’s not better.

I do not know how I can be more clear about this. _Being reasonable and patient is a total crock of shit._ People will admire you for your restraint and _they will continue merrily on in their wickedness_. You’re better off with the heated exchange. You’ll get clarity, and there will be a nice, sharp moment that everyone can point to and go, that’s where it ended. And it will have ended. Maybe it will restart. Maybe it won’t. But it will not be just fucking dragging on.

I don’t think anyone has read this far. This is a thing that I do, and I am telling you: don’t do it. Don’t advocate for it. Don’t aspire to it. It wasn’t just avoidance and denial that got our country to where it is right now. It was a lot of people like me, who thought that we could figure out a way to accomplish goals together.

We have been wrong. We need to put that down and actually do what we should have done a long time ago. Pass the ERA. Reform SCOTUS, so that it once more has one justice per district, and they actually _oversee their district_. Reform SCOTUS so that it handles most cases that rise to that level as individual judges or panels, not en banc. Get rid of the filibuster. Pass voting rights legislation. Revisit the failed reapportionment of 1920, and return our country to _truly_ representative democracy. We have a super complicated mechanism for deciding what is going to happen that _does not require us all to agree_. We should update it, and make use of it. Extensively.

I’m going to wrap up with this link:

https://www.vilendrerlaw.com/five-main-causes-conflict-mediation-can-resolve/

It’s a great taxonomy. I’m not opposed to mediation. But sometimes, you really, really, really need to stop.

I got an FB message from a cousin (by marriage, on my dad's side) with condolences on the death of my mother. She had attended the memorial and was thinking of me on the way home.

I said thanks, what? (<-- not an exact quote).

My mother died on October 1. I found out about 3 weeks later, quite by accident. My younger sister was also not notified, and some of the cousins on my mom's side (two of her nephews and their families) were also not notified. The cousins who _were_ notified, assumed I already knew -- a reasonable assumption.

This was not an oversight. The sister who was in charge of the memorial made a point of getting my contact information when I saw her in person in Seattle in April. My father has _always_ told me of all the deaths in the family and any funerals and memorials as they came along. With the exception of calling me to tell me about his liver cancer and my mother's declinining health shortly before her death, that's basically the only time he ever contacts me, because Jehovah's Witnesses --- which my parents and the sister who did not contact me still are -- believe that contact with family members who have left the organization must be cut off completely, with a very limited exemption for family business. But it's a mystery why they decided not to tell my that my mother died.

I sent belated condolences via email to my father, to ensure he had all my current contact information (again) and I'll send a letter. I called a cousin who I am close to (he hadn't heard either; my mother was his aunt, and a mutual uncle died earlier in the year), and felt better after talking to him.

I didn't sleep well. Being reminded forcibly of the mean-spirited crazy that is my family of origin, well, it is hard to maintain emotional equilibrium in the face of that.

Please do not send condolences for my loss. I know that's the formula, and I usually encourage people to stick to the etiquette formula, but in this case, what I'm really looking for is agreement that, yeah, it's super weird and basically wrong to not tell someone that their mother died for three weeks after the fact. I don't care _how_ serious the rift is in the family. Memorials are for the living, not the dead, and people went to that memorial hoping to see me. The sister who ran the thing and didn't tell me said she didn't know why I wasn't there and attributed the estrangement to me. I don't know that I would or would not have gone to the memorial. I certainly didn't want that decision taken entirely away from me. And I would have spent the last three weeks communicating with other family members had I known what had happened.

Well, sure I'm estranged from _her_ by choice. She sexually molested me extensively. I want nothing to do with her. Losing contact with her was one of the best things about Not Being a Jehovah's Witness Any More. Her continued membership in that organization is solid evidence in my mind that it is in no way representative of any just deity.

But being estranged from the rest of my family was never my choice and I've done everything I can think of -- short of harassment and stalking -- to repair that rift. My mother was a major participant in ensuring the distance was as great as possible. But her death is clearly not going to lead to any kind of repair attempts on the other side.

So the next time someone tells you, oh, Jehovah's Witness are Nice People, well, don't you you believe it. And if they tell you, they don't really shun their ex-members, don't believe that, either.

Look, I get that the Lutherans down the street at Mt Calvalry, as Missouri Synod affiliates, are definitely NOT my people. I believe I have blogged about them before. However, I was digging around trying to figure out what is going on (or happened to terminate) the proposal to turn the derelict McDonald's next to Kmart into a Panera Bread and stumbled across the Highrock Church plant _that meets at my daughter's school_. Okay, so, creepy, and I don't like that, but whatever. What is Highrock Church?

Unclear. Sure, they do all kinds of nice things in Arlington, like fund a part time social worker for the town and run what sounds like a bang-up Xmas pageant. But they are _also_ affiliated with ECC; they are an Evangelical Covenant Church.

I'm a single-issue sort of person. So when when I want to know precisely what kind of church I'm dealing with, I look at two things, in order: what do they have to say about abortion, and just exactly which brand of awful are they about marriage equality (and believe me, I am overjoyed whenever I stumble across a congregation of truly loving people who truly understand that we are all responsible for our own selves, and should be supported in our own decision making. But boy, is that rare.).

Here is the 1994 ECC statement on abortion.

http://www.covchurch.org/resolutions/1994-abortion/

Here is the relevant sentence: "However, we recognize that in some tragic instances abortion may need to be considered to safeguard the life of the mother or in cases of rape or incest."

Here is the 2004 ECC statement on abortion.

http://www.covchurch.org/resolutions/2004-abortion/

Here is the _same sentence_, with a key change. "However, we recognize that in some tragic instances abortion may need to be considered to safeguard the life of the mother."

Apparently, Highrock is affiliated with an organization that thinks a child impregnated by her father should bring that kiddo to term, unless doing so will kill her.

It may be a wonderful Xmas pageant. But that position is Immorality. It is what happens when people who are lucky enough never have to make a hard decision expend several paragraphs distracting you from how they are going to judge you for doing something that they've never had to deal with.

I'm sure you've already figured out how they stand on marriage equality, but just in case you haven't:

http://www.covchurch.org/resolutions/1996-human-sexuality/

"to care for persons involved in sexual sins such as adultery, homosexual behavior and promiscuity, compassionately recognizing the potential of these sins to take the form of addiction."

They haven't updated this position, altho they do file this statement under sexuality, without any explanation of why within the statement.

http://www.covchurch.org/resolutions/2001-hate-crimes-and-the-spirit-of-prejudice/

Truly, they have no idea how much of the problem they really are.

Anyway. If you happen to run across Highrock, know this. They're smart, well-educated, and they are diverse in a way that, sadly, a lot of congregations are not diverse, especially in the Boston area. Don't let that distract you from the _lack_ of diversity in certain other core areas -- or from the profound failure of empathy that underlies the larger organization with which they are affiliated.

Also, you know, Park Street Church connection. A word to the wise is sufficient, amirite?

ETA: On the off chance that some of my readers are going, yeah, but you know maybe the Acton plant is kind of a renegade, nicer group within ECC, not really connected to the highest, policy setting levels of the organization, contemplate the fact that Rebecca Barnett was a candidate for ECC's Executive Board this calendar year.

http://www.covchurch.org/gather/wp-content/uploads/sites/74/2015/06/13.-2015-Candidate-Biographical-Information.pdf

ETAYA: I love the internet. This kind of research used to take hours, and I often wound up having to go to the library, because while I owned several denominational references, they were rarely detailed to up to date enough to answer the questions I had.

Because the question is likely to arise, who runs Bible Gateway? Well, at the time of this writing, according to Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BibleGateway.com

Zondervan, which is an evangelical press. Zondervan, in turn, is owned by HarperCollins, so BibleGateway is yet another attribute of the enormous, traditional publishing industry. It didn't start out that way, but nothing ever does.

Moving along. If you were raised in a certain kind of Bible studying, churchy environment, and you are a certain kind of nerd, you remember owning, or at least lusting after, a study bible that was split into quadrants with one translation in each quadrant of the page (sort of like the shrunk down versions of some editions of the OED). When the web came along, BibleGateway became a donation supported version of the same thing -- type a verse into one box and pick a translation out of the drop down and you could compare and contrast. I've used it on and off for years, but sometime in the last few years when I wasn't paying attention, the number of translations in that drop down box metastasized, and you can now use it for many languages (Het Boek is in it!). It doesn't have everything (James Moffatt's NT, for example, isn't there, a translation that I had a lot of affection for and, according to wikipedia, so did MLK Jr), and it is for the _Christian_ Bible, so the only Jewish bibles on the list are ones in the Messianic Bible genre. (<-- I'll just apologize up front, because I probably offended somebody here. I'm open to suggestions for improvement.)

I was over at BibleGateway because I had finished (don't know how that happened) all of the ebooks I was in the middle of and didn't feel like shopping for something new. So I paged through the virtual TBR stack on my Voyage and spotted a bunch of ebooks I had bought when I was going to church with T. last summer. I started reading John Buehrens' _Understanding the Bible_ and he retells the Isaac Asimov quit telling the Dorothy Parker pearls before swine joke because no one got it any more. And I was thinking, no, sweetie, they got it. They just didn't _like_ the joke, and furthermore, the way Parker used that saying in the anecdote, if considered in the sense of the biblical use of the phrase, doesn't reflect at all well on Parker. But then I thought, maybe I've misremembered how the phrase was used. I hadn't.

Which is all very ironic when the argument the whole tale is in support of is, you should understand the Bible so you will understand cultural uses of Biblical turns of phrase. Fortunately, Buehrens relies only weakly upon this justification for Bible study; he's more reliant on Bishop Spong's argument that liberals gotta know what's in the Bible or the fundies are gonna own it.

So far, Buehrens' book is not appreciably more useful than the always wonderful _Ken's Guide to the Bible_ (<-- I'm serious, you should get a copy and read it. It is awesome.). However, I'm only about a fifth of the way into it so I retain hope, in part because Buehrens' opinions on translations and mine are aligned to a really shocking degree.

But it's better than it sounds.

Everyone was once again very welcoming. Today was the first day of Sunday School and they had ice cream sundaes. Pretty awesome! T. was very happy to go downstairs and was okay when I checked at the end of the sermon. Alas, I should have pulled him out at that point. It turned out he wanted more singing and he didn't get more so he was mad. I think they may have wore him out a little talking about rules, too; hard to say for sure. He's so good about about being compliant that people who are not familiar with autism and/or with him in particular have no idea that they are running the tank dry over something that actually doesn't matter at all. I am not saying the rules didn't matter -- just that they were real focused on getting him to sign the piece of paper, and based on what I saw on that paper, it was not worth the effort they were putting into it (and getting him to sign the paper wasn't going to improve compliance with the rules or understanding of them, at least not for him).

I said we didn't ever have to go back, but that didn't help at all. He wanted to go back, he just wanted to be mad right then about missing the rest of the singing. Ah, well. Live and learn. He also wanted a do-over on the service, but that wasn't an option because I had no service after this one to go to next; this was the later service.

The reading was Matthew 18:15-20, nice and short. This is a verse used as a weapon by JWs. It is part of the hierarchy, part of the disciplinary approach and part of the justification for disfellowshipping. I hadn't given it a lot of thought lately, beyond thinking about it when some issues cropped up during Occupy Wall Street. There were efforts to handle criminal sexual assault within the group and discourage victims from going to the police. When I read about that, I started ranting about this text and Mennonites and JWs and the long, sordid list of other groups which have used this kind of idea as a way to not resort to the secular justice system. People think they are doing good things for the group, but the group's supposed interests are put in direct opposition to justice for those who have been damaged by members of the group. That shit ain't right.

But what the pastor did with it here was wonderful. It was used as a way to advocate for direct communication involving interpersonal issues, and (when the interpersonal issues stop well short of criminal acts) is really a very different text when thought of that way. She positioned it within the context of the body of believers being all about relationships and love, and of course I _really_ believe in direct communication in that context. Nice sermon; very enjoyable.

Rally Sunday included junior choir before the kiddies went downstairs, and regular choir throughout. There were almost twice as many people in the pews as on our previous visit.

Not sure what our next church visit will be. I don't think we'll be able to go next Sunday, because of other commitments. I'll have to see what our choices are for the following Sunday. Given the singing issue, I'm pretty sure I want to aim for a multi-generational service.

ETA: Looks like our parish UU church will be doing a dedication Children's Service on the new connector building in 2 weeks at 9 a.m. Music! Helping make squares for a quilt. What could be better! I think I have identified where were are going next.

T. and I visited SACC on Sunday. We rode our bikes, stopping at Dunkin' Donuts on the way for his breakfast. At Dunkin', we saw a neighbor who we often meet while she is walking her dogs. It's always a little tricky to recognize each other out of context but we had a nice chat.

Then off to church. We parked my bike and his scooter off to the side where I believe the minister parked hers. The service was by Cindy Worthington Berry, of Boxborough Community Church, formerly of Westford (at the dual affiliated church, UU and Congregational United Church of Christ, thus with both Welcoming and ONA designations). Everyone was very nice. There were between 2 and 3 dozen people, a range of ages that included some children a little older than T. We were seated directly behind 4 older ladies who seemed to know each other and who seemed curious about us but not necessarily curious enough to pursue anything beyond a smile. I didn't push it, because I think it's important not to frighten people. ;-)

There were two hymnals, which was initially confusing, and the flyer was a generic for the whole summer, so it had two hymns printed and the other three were posted on the wall; that took a little deciphering. They follow a lectionary, and the minister picked the Exodus story about the oppression of God's people in Egypt and Moses' birth and adoption by Pharoah's daughter. Eeeek. And from there, we were off into an analogy of what was going on in Ferguson, the many deaths of young African American men, offered in an effort to do some consciousness raising and perhaps induce a little motivating shame ... but without a target for what to do next, which I always find a little frustrating. Liberal white guilt may actually be necessary, but we could maybe give it something worthwhile to do, perhaps? Suggest including the NAACP in your annual charitable giving? St. Louis food banks? Push to improve education of police officers to do better with situations involving the mentally ill and also to better manage racially charged issues? I am not complaining here specifically about the service. Consciousness raising is necessary. And perhaps the world will only get better if white people feel some extended, unrelieved discomfort for their unthinking maltreatment of people of color. I just get all annoyed when the uncomfortable feelings of distant bystanders become the focus ("I am on Pharaoh's staff.) rather than on the grieving families who have lost someone whose whole life was still ahead of them.

Also, between the lectionary and other god-i-ness aspects of the service, I found myself pining for the simple joy I had felt at the UU service in Acton. While T. and I have agreed to try Littleton UU (which historically apparently had an above average religious education program in terms of inclusiveness), it looks like they are in the process of hiring a new RE director. In the meantime, we're going to go back to Stow for their Labor Day weekend service.

Because SACC combined with Boxborough for the summer, we still haven't met (I exchanged email) SACC's minister; we'll definitely have to go back to listen to her and see what we think. I don't think it's entirely fair to make a decision on a church based solely on a single, summertime experience. Especially not one within walking/biking distance. I _so_ want this to work out.

T. noticed on the drive home from CVS and the grocery store (with an extremely brief stop at the Radio Shack, where despite not buying anything, we had the Best Customer Service Experience Ever) that there is a church on our street. He asked about it, I said it was the Lutheran church. He expressed an interest and I said while I was happy to take him back to the church we went to before (UU in Stow, our Parish church), or the UU church in Concord, I wasn't going to take him to the Lutheran church. He wanted to know why, and this is what I told him, "They are very strict and are completely unreasonable." <-- Notice this is me being extremely prejudiced. In fact, the people running this church are quite reasonable; the pastor, after patiently answering many questions put to him by friends of mine (years before I knew them), suggested they attend a UU church instead. Everyone was much happier as a result of this, the very best story I have ever heard about a Lutheran, ever, including the one a Lutheran friend of mine in college told me about being chased by aggressive geese, which was very funny, altho not to her at the time (and, honestly, if I were a decent human being, would _not_ still make me chuckle over 20 years later). [ETA: Actually, my summary of the Lutheran church was really not prejudiced at all. They are very strict and they are completely unreasonable, because that particular Lutheran church is Missouri Synod. Yikes. http://walkitout.livejournal.com/1155971.html]

In order to distract my son from the very attractive and nearby church that I really don't want to take him to (I do, actually, have quite a lot of issues with that denomination, in all of its flavors), I said there was a church on River Street, would he like to go to that? Technically, it is on School St just before the branch off to River Street but I had forgotten that in the moment and he is currently somewhat obsessed with River Street, altho I have no idea why. This was exciting, and he had a bunch of questions so I looked up the church.

Just so you know I was not being arbitrary, the church in question has appropriate affiliations (It is Congregational United Church of Christ) and is an Open and Affirming congregation so I don't have to feel all dirty hanging out with oppressors of my people. Further, this Sunday the service is by a pastor formerly of Westford at a church which is affiliated both with UU AND Congregational (thus having simultaneously Open and Affirming AND Welcoming credentials, which I had not thought was possible before but proves, once again, that the world is a pretty amazing and wonderful place). I feel that a woman who made all that happen has to be worth listening to for an hour.

At the suggestion of my UU minister friend (it was general advice, not specific to this), I have emailed this church ahead of time to find out about the kids' program and start a dialog about how to make that work well for T., if there really is one, which I sort of doubt at 8:30 a.m. late in August but you never know. Expect an update.

Subtitled: Viewing Faith Through an Atheist's Eyes
Published by WaterBrook Press (Random House)

I wasn't familiar with WaterBrook. This is from their website:

"WaterBrook Multnomah was launched in September 1996 as an autonomous evangelical Christian publishing division of Random House, Inc. as WaterBrook Press. Since the release of our first books in February 1998, our publishing program has grown dramatically. With the purchase of Harold Shaw Publishers in 2000 and acquisition of Multnomah Publishers in August 2006..."

The Multnomah part comes from an acquisition, it looks like, and presumably that acquisition was located in Oregon.

Anyway. Mehta was raised Jain and his parents continue in that faith. They were in the Chicago area, then Knoxville, then back to Chicago. Along the way, Hemant got to thinking (always a dangerous thing) and concluded that this whole religion thing didn't really meet his standards. The specific morals/ethics were a-o-good with him (still a non-violent vegetarian), it was more the reincarnation/timeline/etc. stuff. After participating in/leading secular group(s), he decided to learn a bit more about the Xtianity that had surrounded him growing up in the United States. To that end, he auctioned off his time on eBay, which Jim Henderson won. Henderson asked him to spend 50 hours in not more than 15 churches and write about what he experienced (<-- I think those were the details of the deal). Jim Henderson already had some experience paying people to go to church and then write about what they thought.

http://seattletimes.com/html/dannywestneat/2011003516_danny07.html

While part of the book is the reviews, a much, much larger chunk of the book is Mehta talking about himself, his background, other people like him and similar. Which is great. Altho it is a little weird that both Hemant and his mother are big Joel Osteen fans.

Mehta's critiques of churches are relatively well-aligned with common critiques of churches ("be more mission focused" is how it would be described in-group, for example, when Mehta talks about the need to reach out to the community at large vs. focusing on serving the existing believers). Mehta is himself a very appealing person.

It's an interesting read, wherever you might find yourself now or in the future, in terms of organized religion. I don't think Mehta's suggestions, if taken, would be as successful as he thinks they would be (but I don't think they would hurt for the stated goals, either). I think Mehta is not the target audience he would like to present himself as being. And I think he may drastically misunderstand the appeal of religion, given his unitary focus on reason and his general obliviousness to what at least some other people are clearly getting out of church-going.

It was super-funny reading Mehta get all offended about people arriving late, being bored and going-through-the-motions. It's a good thing he isn't religious, because he'd sure be a pain if he were saying this as a Believer.

A fast, enjoyable read.

ETA: Henderson has a book out. Review here:

http://booksaint.blogspot.com/2012/03/resignation-of-eve-jim-henderson.html

Henderson chimes in to say the summary is accurate, which is always an interesting piece of information; the reviewer segregates their opinion of what the author is saying from the description of what the author is saying, which is helpful to someone looking for an executive summary.

I'm reading along, mostly happy with the book (which I was _very_ happy to see added to the library in Mayberry <-- not its real name), when I hit 2-3 pages (116-118) about "Overpopulation Denial" as something characteristic of Religious Folk and which the Secular Perspective could add value in opposition to.

This makes me cranky. I'm a Fred Pearce fan on the subject, many of the high points picked up in this Salon interview:

http://www.salon.com/2010/04/19/population_crash_ext2010/

Rhetoric, especially environmentally oriented rhetoric, about overpopulation has a tendency to slide into Brown People Shouldn't Breed/Don't Let Brown People Move to Our Country, which All Decent People Should Recoil at in Horror when encountering, but frequently just nod their heads like this is some Wisdom From On High, to use a religious metaphor. But hey, maybe the New Atheists are smarter than that, right?

Well, maybe not.

http://www.americanhumanist.org/HNN/issue/details/2012-04-humanist-voices-in-verse-overpopulation

"China got it right when they passed a decree,
Limiting only one child to each family."

That's apparently from April 2012.

Really? Because it's okay to limit reproductive freedom as long as it's in the direction you prefer? Come on.

http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=flynn_24_5 (top google result on secular american overpopulation)

Let's go back to 1950s level of population! Written by a guy who was probably a very young person at the time, thus putting this firmly in the Conservative category, however he may identify. Looks to be written maybe in 2004 or 2005.

The main reason I like Pearce's stance, frankly, is that it aligns with one of my primary beliefs and values: individual women, with access to resources and the right to make their own decisions, will make individual decisions that are best for themselves and their family. Summed over the population of all women, the result will be the BEST decision possible: most sensitive to local conditions, best as a transitional policy, etc. Policies which attempt to thwart this process (whether by denying access to a wide variety of inexpensive forms of reproduction control OR by denying women the right to reproduce when and how they see fit, and, honestly, even by trying to reward them for reproducing more than they are inclined to do) are doomed to failure.

Fortunately.

But you look really stupid when you sign up for either side of this proposition. By including "Overpopulation Denial" in his book about Secular Americans, Niose did not do Enough to distance himself from the lunatics who think the One Child Policy is a good idea.

ETA: Wow, finding atheists who are opposed to reproductive freedom in its full form is really disturbingly easy.

http://www.vhemt.org/pop101.htm

"“Forced population control” likely refers to denying couples the freedom to breed as much as they like. Presently, China is the only place where restrictions on the right to breed exist, and there are so many exceptions to their one-child policy that their TFR, 1.5 in 2011, has never achieved 1.0.

On the other hand, “forced population control” exists everywhere that couples are denied their basic human right to not breed. Denying couples their right to not produce another dependent, especially when they can’t care for the ones they have, is far worse than denying them the freedom to create more offspring."

Oh, boy. The underlying reality is that these, um, people aren't actually taken seriously by even as many people as, say, Santorum, so there's almost no point in attacking their position. _But they make secular americans/atheists/agnostics look bad_. And that is a problem.