Churchhoney

So you're thinking the repositioning would go like this? Ashley Madison: "The place where the faithful go to be unfaithful" ?

Sometimes we support something loudest at the very time that we're feeling the most doubt about it. And sometimes the doubt eventually wins after that. I cherish this tiny hope that that might be starting to happen to Derick at this point -- or at least that it'll happen to some Duggar or Duggar-adjacent one of these days. Surely some one of them must be bright enough to notice some horrible contradiction among the millions that'll be strong enough to start breaking the hold of the cult stupidity on their dim brains.

Why do I have the feeling that only grown men are the only ones who don't have some sick interview? (or at least a sick 50-page intrusive questionnaire, like the one for ALERT.) Heck, maybe they even have one of those for the men. Gothard seems to crave the dominance that goes along with making people confess stuff. Such a creep.

Definitely true about the book being full of bullshit! I'm pretty sure I've seen a picture or two of Jana at JTTH where she seems to be in the overseer position, though, and I think she's been there when she's been beyond the regular age limit for enrollee/participants. So in this case I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that she was there as a "leader" rather than as just one of the schmucks. They do pull the leaders from the former ranks. And given how often the ATI operation has asked various Duggars to speak at events and so on, including the kids, it seems to me perfectly reasonable that she would have been asked. To me it seems kind of unlikely that she would always be sent as punishment, into her 20s, when she's appeared on tv to be pretty damned docile and to have had most of the fight well beaten out of her even before that. Plus, David Waller has been on hand for the book writing to get the Gothard stuff in correctly, and I wonder whether he would have wanted a flat-out lie about her being a leader to be printed, given that probably a lot of Gothard and ex-Gothard women would have known the truth since they'd been at the same activities and they might well have blabbed and messed with the credibility. After all, that was basically just a biographical tidbit, not anything that needed to be in the book. They could just as easily have said that young women have sought Jana's advice at book signings and so on rather than at JTTH.

I think that was probably more Jim Bob's thing.

Not necessarily, if you're one of the leaders or instructors. And those are girls and young women, for the most part, not older people, it seems. Then you get to be the little drill sergeant for everybody else. According to the family and the Duggar girls' book, at least in later years Jana was one of the drill sergeants and not one of the rank and file enrollees. .... And that may or may not have changed the way she felt about it. But for many people, that would at least mitigate, if not completely remove, the punishment aspect, seems to me. The prisoner that gets to lord it over the other prisoners is often quite happy, at least compared to the other prisoners. And sometimes in absolute terms.

Yeah. Cause you leave a situation like this, and you're a ladylike, beaten down person like Jana. And yet you leave the instant you get your first chance, and in three short months you live entirely on your own, make friends when you've never had an actual friend before in your life, start drinking, gather together your little conservative Republican and formerly Gothard-brainwashed self and step out to meet a biracial divorced father of two who also happens to have a lot of time on his hands, start fucking him regularly and hide 100 percent of this from everyone including your incredibly nosy and widely connected family in a smallish rural community. Then, when mommy and daddy call, you run right back home, build a treehouse, scooter on the floor with the littles, and stand smiling in Lowes in your extremely modest outfit. Even though you're still seeing your fuck buddy "every chance you get." And even though some of your sibs, such as your twin and Joseph, for example, have managed some fairly long periods of filming when they were barely seen at all, to the point that the audience doesn't even know whether they live at the house. Somehow, despite everything you've now accomplished, you apparently don't even have the guts to do what they did. And somehow, though now you're back at the old homestead, you still manage to hide the meat of your recent adventures from your whole family -- although not from this neighbor or whatever who reports it to a gossip website. And, despite the fact that you're apparently quite a different person now from what anybody expects, you remain at home for a year and counting, looking for all the world as if you can't and/or won't get out. When clearly, since you did it once with absolutely no experience to tell you that you could, you could get out now and go and be with your lover -- whose existence or, at least, identity, your family has still not managed to ferret out after all of this, even though they live in the aforementioned southern rural area, where gossip is rife and where, I expect, mixed-race relationships still cause quite a few people to whisper wildly behind their hands. And somehow even Amy hasn't picked up on the details of this and reported to some of the rags on her speed-dial. Yeah. Sounds really really plausible to me. That said, I hope it's all true.

It's all for effect, I suppose. LIke everything else they do. And we -- and probably everyone else -- noticed and and commented. So "mission" accomplished, I guess.

Not only did it have a big-publisher editor, it was ghost written. 100 percent. The main ghost writer for writing (as opposed to the ghost writer for Gothard-friendly content) -- who has many many credentials -- may have included such errors to make it sound as if it came conversationally from the girls.

The grassroots portion of gerrymandering.

I still think they go through a helluva lot of spackle.

U.S.? Europe? Really really different on the religion front. Personally, I'd feel much more comfortable with the European climate. But I've kinda gotten used to this one. And it's certainly not universal across the country. Strongly strongly influential, though. And as we continue the human project of creating a world that can actually take every individual's personhood and well-being into account, and presumably operates with some form of democracy, it's gotta be grappled with here. Not to say that it's easy to figure out how best to do that. I think "incredulousness" is exactly the right word, by the way. If I hadn't lived here all these years, I'd be incredulous, too.

Maybe the treehouse keeps collapsing? There's little reason to be in the Lowes wood department to do work on the TTH, I would think, since the TTH is made out of steel. (Although I suppose they have a fairly constant need for spackle. And replacement drywall.)

Totally agree. I don't know what Derick means -- he may mean the legit, trained kind of Christian counselor who combines faith with human learning or he may mean a Duggar-type person who repudiates everything but the proper kind of prayer, just like Duggar Academy repudiates most learning... I guess I'm most inclined to think that he probably doesn't know which kind he means, actually. My suspicion-- based on nothing but my unreliable gut, of course! -- is that Derick started out some years ago as what I'd call a reasonable Christian who leaned toward faith that's also informed by thought and knowledge. Then, perhaps because of a combination of tough life events and falling in with the Duggars, with his follower nature, he's picked up a strong strain of much more childlike, all-or-nothing faith that rejects the mind as the Duggars do. I suspect that he's now kind of suspended between these two things, which fact isn't going to make his preaching any clearer in the near future!

Yeah, I'm not only paraphrasing but extrapolating! And also reading in from Cathy's cancer talk and the focus on all-talk missionary that argues it makes a huge difference, and in fact the only difference that really matters, by simply telling people to turn to the right Jesus rather than by doing anything concrete to improve physical conditions, and so on! It seems to me that it's the inescapable conclusion from all of that plus passages like this, from Derick's latest ruminations: "Even in times of distress, King David responded with prayers of thanksgiving and gratefulness to God. David demonstrated his genuine faith in God by imploring divine intervention. He recognized that there was no other viable solution besides that which God could provide." Strikes me that if "there is no other viable solution" and Derick recommends only that you consult a "Christian counselor," by which I expect he means somebody who's a Christian in the same mold as Dillard/Duggars/SOS, then he's essentially saying that for the problems he's writing about here, nothing human will ever bring about improvement. As you say, though, it's probably a logical contradiction with some other things that are said. Definitely the "don't abort the doctor who may cure cancer" thing, although I don't know whether I think it contradicts the "have lots of kids for the army of Christ" think or not. Since all those kids are going to do is turn the whole world 100 percent to the right Jesus and abandon all other human endeavor -- which is why they don't need to study science or history or languages or whatever in their homeschools if they don't feel like it. So .... dunno, really. I wouldn't ever put it past Derick and his cohort to be illogical! On the other hand, I wouldn't necessarily put it past me to be illogical either!

Well, here's the thing. I'm not saying that Derick is to be applauded. He's an uncritical thinker whose intentions lead him astray into a gigantic thinking error that's been shared by billions of people throughout history. Furthermore, the level of anger, superiority and self-righteousness we engage in around here regarding him troubles me just as much as his spoutings do -- actually more so, because I participate in it. Yeah, I know he's wrong. But you know what? I hear plenty of proudly non-fundie people spout equally stupid and unhelpful crap that's deemed to be better by a lot of us because it's not religious. "Everything happens for reason." I'm sure you've heard some proudly non-religious people spout this piece of shit. To my mind, it's exactly the same thing as what Derick preaches. But it doesn't get nearly the same response from us enlightened moderns. Our blanket, knee-jerk, all-or-nothing, unreflective condemnation of everything Duggar, Dillard, etc., is, to my mind, just as lacking in empathy and just as useless to humanity as the stuff the Duggars spout. Honestly, it drives me nuts when we instantly rant about how unbelievably evil somebody like Derick is because he shows no empathy for people while we are simultaneously showing absolutely no empathy and absolutely zero curiosity about what might lead him to say the crap he says -- or why people have said the crap he says throughout history. The thing is, I keep forgetting that this is just a "tv snark site." The trouble is, I don't like snark (even though I'm guilty of it quite frequently). I like trying to understand things, and to me that means trying to understand snarkable things too. Maybe it especially means understanding snarkable things. Because, otherwise, what is the point of righteous anger and snark? I don't think satire, for example, is the same as snark. Good satire takes on things about which the truth is still to be revealed. Things that actually have power over the satirist. Snark goes after the easy targets and is seldom an attempt to get us anywhere. As I said, I don't think good intentions are adequate. However, I still think they're way way way more defensible than bad intentions. And a lot of times, I'm pretty sure that the snark and "criticism" we engage in is pretty wholly fueled by bad intentions. Much like the bigots and missionaries we blast, I know that I way too often relish having someone to look down on and despise, without thought, without rue, without any attempt to parse out what is really going on or recognize anybody's humanity. And all that makes me, though better informed and probably smarter than Derick, a much worse person. And no more helpful to humanity than he is.

Mental illness, cancer, grinding poverty. It can all be prayed away. Furthermore, human efforts to develop solutions are pure vanity. So when someone does emerge from such a disaster, any human assistance that contributed is severely downplayed if not outright ignored or even depicted as a kind of affront to God, whose power alone must be acknowledged as controlling it all. Makes clear that religion is, indeed, the opiate of the people. And why it's been fervently supported throughout history -- and today -- by the powerful whose interests are best served when the masses passively accept their lot and can only pray. I'm afraid that getting a clue about all this is beyond the naive and ignorant like the Dillards. I do think that Derick -- like many of the ordinary people who preach this crap -- is well intentioned. Strikes me that his fervor in preaching "turn to God, turn only to God!" is as much an attempt to persuade himself to accept it as it is to convince anybody else. I'm guessing that his background, together with a follower nature and some tough things in his own life that he's struggling with, like his father's early death and his mother's scary illness (and maybe even some shocks he's gotten since becoming a Duggar-in-law), have erroneously told him that this holy passivity is the only answer (even though I see his overdone preaching as a likely sign that he, too, is uneasy with it). Too bad he keeps living among other sheep who baaa this stuff continually. If he got yanked by the neck into a good School of Critical Thinking for a four-year term, he might come out as a reasonable 21st-century person who could do some good for others instead of bleating this offensive form of the gospel that basically boils down to: Shut up and don't rock the boat. There are other theologies and non-theologies he could choose from that would be much more in line with reality and of much more use. Too bad that his chances of encountering any of them seems slim. I do think that we have to acknowledge that he's not uniquely stupid. There are hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of people on this planet still who embrace similar opiate-like views. We're awfully prone to think that poor silly Derick is unique and even evil for doing this.

Yep, you're right.

Yep. The guy's horrible but his prescriptions often work -- quite well, too, in many cases, more's the pity.

Hope so. Have you had sex with a full-of-himself 20-something jock, though? I have and, aaa, not so sure....And mine didn't even have a preference for meek women. And I knew how to have an orgasm.

Well, Loving v. Virginia (best name of a court case ever) didn't strike down the state laws until, what, '67 or thereabouts? And since we know that superfundies are at least 40 to 50 years behind any state they happen to live in when it comes to social and cultural advancement.... Not so surprising, unfortunately ....

Thanks. But to be fair, Gothard contributed a lot of it. ; )

Hey, now. They had that wonderful Branson weekend where they were able to chit chat for hours with their sisters -- whom they never get to see, put big bathrobes on over their clothes and clean each others' feet. Could risking drowning as you flail in the water in wet jeans possibly compete with that?

Wonder what a meek woman does if a man suddenly turns round and says to her, Okay -- now stop being meek. ...... Would be interesting to see this play out in the Duggalo household. (Given Jer's stated preference for meekness, I'm not expecting this to happen. I'd be pleased if it did, though. And not just because JB's head might fly off.)

I suppose that unconsciously plays into the "schooling" and "hobby" decisions made by the Dugg 'rents, too. If they encouraged reading at all, for example, the doors would open to more words -- and new dangerous-to-Duggar-continued- concepts.