Churchhoney

Well, sort of, but Derick theoretically has the ability. To me we've still got two big questions: Why doesn't Derick use the job-procuring ability he has to establish a home and life for his family where he's not entertaining JB and M every 20 minutes? And will Jeremy have whatever Derick lacks that's apparently also required to evade Boob's overwhelming influence? On the one hand, Jeremy's life seems to have been more independent and he looks tougher than Derick. On the other hand, he seems to have been hanging out with Boob and the boys quite a bit for over a year now -- so he doesn't look to have pried Jinger apart from her family at all as of yet, which I would take to be a really good sign of somebody's potential independence. Plus, as with Derick and Bin, his "ministry" ambitions make me wonder whether he, too, is at least partly courting a Duggarling so the Duggar sheen (hard to believe they still have it, but apparently...) will rub off and raise his "ministry's" fortunes. If he does want to ride the Duggars' coattails, that doesn't argue that he'll be very independent, especially if JB exerts any pressure against it, which he 100 percent will. It'll be nice if he launches Jinger into independence, but I think the jury is way out still.

Sidenote to the discussion of the TTH as a "sick system" going on over in the Other Duggar thread, there's a lengthy Homeschoolers Anonymous post (draft of lengthy footnoted paper, about ATI-type homeschooling as a kind of totalitarian system -- well, "totalist," in Robert Jay Lifton's term. Anyway, some interesting descriptions of such a system, vis a vis the goings on in The Academy of Duggardom. https://homeschoolersanonymous.org/2016/06/21/homeschooling-as-a-totalistic-tool/ The characteristics are these: Milieu Control, (2) Mystical Manipulation, (3) Demand for Purity, (4) Cult of Confession, (5) Sacred Science, (6), Loaded Language, (7) Doctrine Over Person, and (8) Dispensing of Existence. And as you can tell by the mere names, how redolent they are of Duggar Daily Life. Here are two notable ones, but the discussions of all eight are worth a look, while meditating on the sad fate of Duggar children. (Descriptions of the eight characteristics are up fairly high in the paper, and bullet-pointed, so you don't have to wade through the whole thing to get to them.): '(3) Demand for Purity 'The demand for purity is a demand to divide the world into what is “pure” and “impure” and avoid and reject everything considered the latter. Lifton describes totalist purity as “those ideas, feelings, and actions which are consistent with the totalist ideology and policy; anything else is apt to be relegated to the bad and the impure.” Dividing the world in this way creates both guilt and shame in individuals when they fail to perfectly avoid and reject what is considered “impure.” That guilt and shame then become tools of control that the totalist administration uses to manipulate people to do what the administration desires.[xviii] '(4) Cult of Confession 'The cult of confession is connected to the demand for purity. The inevitable result of the demand for purity is that people will fail, hence the resulting feelings of guilt and shame. And when people do fail, they must confess those failings. A totalist administration will take advantage of this and manipulate people into all sorts of confessions both to enhance the feelings of guilt and shame as well as to gather information about individuals that can be used against them or to exploit them in the future. Lifton describes the cult of confession as confession that is “carried beyond its ordinary religious, legal, and therapeutic expressions to the point of becoming a cult in itself. There is the demand that one confess to crimes one has not committed, to sinfulness that is artificially induced, in the name of a cure that is arbitrarily imposed.” In a totalist environment, “confession becomes a means of exploiting, rather than offering solace for, these vulnerabilities.” It also becomes “a means of maintaining an ethos of total exposure – a policy of making public (or at least known to the Organization) everything possible about the life experiences, thoughts, and passions of each individual, and especially those elements which might be regarded as derogatory.” This total exposure adds a dire sense of gravity to “the environment’s claim to total ownership of each individual self within it. Private ownership of the mind and its products – of imagination or of memory – becomes highly immoral.”[xix]' Nice description of how these eight characteristics could work together to trap somebody in a cult homeschool environment: 'To help us better understanding how homeschooling can be a totalist tool, let us explore an example connection between homeschooling and certain instances of human trafficking. If a child grows up in a new religious movement that has effectively mastered thought reform techniques like milieu control via homeschooling, that child will have no understanding of how the outside world differs from his or her experience of the totalist world. If that child also grows up memorizing nothing but the loaded language of that new religious movement, then he or she will not even know how to develop a different language by which to question the movement — and if the child ever did learn to question, he or she would feel immense guilt and shame from thinking “impure” thoughts. And if the pressure from the child’s parent(s) to stop thinking such thoughts was not enough, the child’s very own peers would step up to the task, thinking that they were saving their friend from being not “truly human.” 'A nearly perfect system of control, then, would be in place. All it would take is for the leader of the movement to declare a new vision from the movement’s deity came to him or her — say, a vision of young girls being married at the age of 12 to much older men. This leader’s vision would likely be couched in religious justifications — that we are living in apocalyptic times and must fill the earth with as many followers of the movement’s deity as possible. And if young girls are not married early, they might be led astray by the world’s wickedness.'

This.^^^ Those who are good at creating sick systems tend to be really really good at it, I think. The system just flows out of them. Out of their internal sickness, I suppose. Plus, the Duggarlings are almost certainly getting other STAY-WHERE-YOU-ARE! messages from just about everything they're exposed to in their tiny forays outside the family living room/bus/hotel suite. As here, in this article noting that Gothard is on the speakers' circuit again: https://homeschoolersanonymous.org/2016/06/20/bill-gothard-claims-to-have-secret-cure-for-mental-illness/ 'Gothard doesn’t have a lot of new things to say in his “new” talk. Most of it sounds familiar to those of us who ever were enmeshed in his prior organization. The Four Fears that he outlines are, he claims, innate to every human experience, and are at the root of every mental illness. He claims to be able to treat mental illness effectively while heavily implying that most children of Christian parents, and perhaps, I think, he is referring to people like me – children of parents who once adhered to his cult’s teachings – who leave the church are also probably mentally ill. This correlation is disturbing. In some cases, of course, he’s right. But for many, the depression, anxiety, OCD or PTSD diagnoses can be directly traced back to a traumatizing religious past.' "Disturbing." No shit, Sherlock. Let's internalize that: Leaving is proof that you're mentally ill. And this is what the Duggarlings hear when they go on the road, supposedly an experience that would bring them new perspectives and points of view. I know firsthand how poisonous this can be, since the you're-insane-and-we'll-get-you-committed card got played on me a lot as a kid. And though I was seething with rage rather than utterly brainwashed as well as somewhat enlightened about what my people were, fairly confident that they -- and not I -- had the corner on the insanity, and pretty sure that they also couldn't actually accomplish this (for one thing, they wouldn't have wanted to let me out of the house for long, even to make good on their own threats), I remember it making me quite nervous to hear it. So imagine Jinger or Jana or Jenny or Jackson hearing this. They might as well have a moat full of salt-water crocodiles surrounding that house. Re: Gothard. Although his shtick appears to be pretty much the same as in the past, he also seems to be going further round the bend these days. For example, 'Gothard even claimed he, like Moses, will live to 120 years of age and that his “ministry has just begun.' https://homeschoolersanonymous.org/2016/06/15/christian-conference-features-alleged-sexual-predator-bill-gothard/ And there's much, much more. Yet people are still inviting him to speak (at length) and defending him strongly. And, of course, the Duggs are still regularly shipping their kids to the heart of Gothardland. The Duggarlings are in a freaking gulag, really.

Wonder if he fantasizes about that lake opening up on one end so he can ski far far away... ... and change clothes. Imagine falling into the water in wet jeans.

... Well... if you have to have your own accrediting body because no one else will accredit you -- and that' s not because there are no other church-affiliated schools; there are many -- there are definitely some questionable things involved. That said, all of these colleges are fairly new by the academic-world's standards, and they've been trying to improve their general reputations and their ability to attract better faculty to attract more students. Ten years ago at Patrick Henry, for example, there was a revolt of faculty, with many leaving all at once, over what they complained were curriculum decisions wholly driven by an extremely restrictive ideology. Seems you hear less of that today.

Hey, in most organizations it takes until at least your 30s to claw your way into a significant executive position. In some situations, it's hard to get there before you're 60. So why not found a religious sect? Then you can be total monarch and boss of your fawning admirers by 27, and without graduating from high school! Just tell 'em God sent ya. Seriously. Such a scam for the power hungry who don't want to actually work for that power. All you need is to be a charismatic bad boyfriend and attribute your erratic abusive behavior to whichever god the locals have already pledged fealty to. (Or, if you want to work a little harder and are kind of imaginative, make a god up. See Hubbard, L. Ron.)

No kidding. And I'll bet that in at least some cases it intensifies the heartbreak. Really really wanting to be married to someone absolutely heightens some people's feelings of attachment to the person they're dating as does really really wanting to have complete sexual intimacy (which -- Bates, Duggars and similar -- is not a thing that only people of your ilk sometimes defer until marriage, so "courtship" really isn't "necessary" on those grounds). So for these people, I can't see how their attachments and emotions aren't driven to an absolute fever pitch during these courtships. They have to crave not just sex, a ring and a mortgage but frontal hugs(!), kissing and even private conversations and evenings spent alone with the person they're seeing. The perfectly natural desire for those things can't help but fuel intense fantasies that absolutely can increase emotional attachment and make the relationship feel like a love for the ages even when you aren't even getting to know the person very well. No way that doesn't intensify the heartache for at least some people. If you broke up after that, you'd be left holding the remnants of those extremely strong thwarted emotions....And because you'd never really gotten close to the person you couldn't even console yourself with a full list of their faults and all the reasons you're lucky you didn't end up marrying them! You wouldn't just be losing your once-thought-to-be-God-given partner but a partner you still were in the throes of idealizing.

You were absolutely in the right state. Right church, just slightly wrong pew. And, as you suggest, the mid-Atlantic -- really small world. Big amen to the seeming effect of the mess on Harris. Something good can come out of the worst stuff, sometimes.

That very very huge sexual scandal -- the ironies of these sexual scandals occurring in the midst of the superpurity-crowd; I'm sick of those ironies, because When Will Anybody Ever Learn???-- was centered in Gaithersburg, basically a DC suburb, though one of the farther-flung ones.

Well, they certainly are matched in that way. You definitely have a point there. I also think that you're probably right that none of this talk really means much to quite a few of the people who talk it -- won't drive them nuts or anything and is just kind of pro forma, the sort of thing that everybody says in your community. I think my leeriness comes from happening to know a couple of people who "strayed" a bit and then went back to the "I'm a miserable sinner" thing as heavily "reformed sinners" and then really went off the rails later, with drinking and apparently-out-of-the-blue angry divorces. My completely-without-basis diagnosis has always been that their prodigal-son returns were somehow related to self-condemnation and a lack of proper perspective on what's unforgivably bad and what isn't, and so on. Obviously, I could be dead wrong about that being the problem! Anyway, there's something in Jeremy's vibe -- and Jinger's, actually -- that makes me feel as if they'd be in danger of similar meltdowns .... Like, maybe, they take the "I'm a miserable sinner" stuff too seriously, maybe? Brood on it and feel angry about it in ways that maybe other people don't? But, of course, this is even more without basis than what I imagine about the people I actually know! .... Anyway, I hope they aren't this way and that they actually are matched. .....

What bothers me about him -- and the rest of them who say similar stuff -- is that he at least seems to think that he was some overweening sinner and now he's storming around his little church trying to stomp out what he (apparently) sees as huge evil in himself and everybody else. Since they have no judgment about what constitutes real evil and what's a big deal and what isn't, I question how much judgment they have about other important stuff. Their thinking is all out of proportion. (not that he's any different from any Duggar at all, in this, of course.)

Thanks for finding this. I'm pretty sure that I got my idea from reading a bunch of commentaries from people like this who'd been into the "Kissed Dating Goodbye" crowd (on purpose or by command) ... and then those impressions got firmed up by the Duggars' taking-it-to-the-limit and very legalistic, concrete approach to everything.. At one point a long time ago I sought out a bunch of "kissed dating goodbye" stuff, and I remember finding a lot of it. By now, though, of course, I've forgotten what it actually said! "was Josh Harris in I Kissed Dating Goodbye and the Ludy's in several of their books that popularized the idea that everytime you fall in love or get "emotionally attached" to someone, you give away a piece of your heart. The more pieces you give away, the less of your heart you have to give to your spouse someday. He even went so far as to say that each of those former flames actually have some sort of hold on you." Oy. Any and all "emotional attachment" rips a piece out of your heart that you can never get back -- it freaking shrinks your heart so that you become less capable of love in the future. Horrifying that a whole set of people would teach this to their kids.........Among at least some of these people, I stuppose it stems from the same rage for total control that bans friendships. Because it's bogus as all heck.

I don't know. As I understood it, you give away pieces of your heart every time you so much as spend five minutes alone with the person in a room, hold his or her hand, have coffee with him/her on your own, walk the mall and windowshop or bowl together, feel sad when your special friend has gone home for the evening or talk with the person of interest for more than 10 minutes at a stretch. Am I overstating this? I thought it was not sex but really any level of personal intimacy or emotional attachment that tore hunks off the heart. Isn't that why you weren't supposed to date?

Well, Esther Keller got John Shrader. I rest my case. Maybe Crazy Gothardy God doesn't have a very good selection. And they should try shopping in another store.

You can buy one on Amazon for $3.16 plus shipping. : ) https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0979927900/ref=tmm_other_meta_binding_used_olp_sr?ie=UTF8&condition=used&qid=1467231650&sr=8-1

Good point about Mechelle.

Wonder whether maybe the main difference between the Duggar male and female marriage ratio could be the relative amount of as-yet-unsatisfied desires among the potential mates, not necessarily anything about the Duggars themselves. I expect that a whole lot of stunted fundie men (the only kind of man/boy I can imagine being willing to sign up as a Jim Bob Duggar in-law) are desperate to find some fundie woman into whom they may freely ejaculate and who might also provide regular cooking and housecleaning services as well as frequent upward glances of respect and admiration. Some in that group could be fairly hot to court Duggar girls, Jim Bob and Michelle notwithstanding. And, of course, all three who've volunteered also probably have ambitions to be tv preachers. Something tantalizingly promised by the Duggar connection. Stunted fundie women, however, likely don't have such a list of strong desires that Duggar men might fill, seems to me. Their sexual desires are more likely to be kind of inchoate and ill-understood by their owners, so they may not drive their behavior as much. And they don't have a chance of getting cooking, cleaning, or admiring and respectful looks from their potential fundie spouses, so I doubt that many stunted fundie women sit around craving those things. Desire for a headship who supports the family also wouldn't be in play since the Duggar boys clearly can't support anybody. Even the one who works several jobs works all of them for free. Can't support anybody on that. So it looks to me as if the potential wives just have a lot less motivation to overcome their JimBob-induced gag reflexes than the potential husbands would. Could just be age too, though, I guess. Two of the three as-yet-unspoken-for Duggar men are still a bit younger than any of the Duggar wimmenfolk have been when married off. And one of them has already had a courtship (which, notably, was with one of the -- I expect -- relatively few fundie young women who's bold and entrepreneurial enough to openly crave the media spotlight and strategize means of getting into it.) Plus, of course, the guy-is-at-least-as-old-as-or-a-bit-older-than-the-woman tradition holds in fundie world, I think, Bin notwithstanding. Given those things, maybe we need to wait a few years before concluding that Duggar boys are even less interesting to potential spouses than Duggar girls. (Of course, if they go off tv, the whole family's marriageability stock may drop, given that the TeeVee fame factor clearly played a major role in all the courtships so far, I think ....)

You picturing something like the ending of The Graduate? Jana's long-rumored secret Internet love busts into the parking lot where she's being wed to yet another incompetent faux preacher, yells "Jana!" She turns, yells "Secret Internet Love!" and runs madly back up the aisle (wearing shoes) to him. They roar off in his car to an unknown but happier future. (They drive because it's a long wait between buses in Tonittown.) Yeah. I could get behind that one.

Can I sit with you?!

No. The Duggars have lived such a fake life in so many ways -- Gothardism alone is all about fakeness, and in their case it's way exacerbated by phony crazy parents and living with tv cameras in the house all the time -- that I'm pretty sure none of them has the slightest clue how to have an honest conversation about anything or even any clue that that's something you might want to do. And I think Derick's biggest problem in life is probably that he's almost wholly a follower, who falls in with the ways of whoever he's with, so I expect being in the bosom of the Duggars has made him behave pretty much exactly like a Duggar. There's no way in hell that Jill has ever seen a personal and honest conversation modeled or even held up as a good thing. Instead, she's seen nothing but presenting yourself in certain ways, often in very public forums, while stifling all impulses to communicate privately or truthfully (remember the Gothard no-friend rule?). So she writes made-for-cult-mates or made-for-tv letters full of mostly phoniness of whatever kind she thinks is required by the audience. And then Derick follows suit. Ditto for every other Duggar and everyone else they ever have a so-called relationship with. This is one of the many ways in which those kids' lives and futures have been utterly poisoned.

The people who say this about homeschooling are primarily fundamentalist, Dominionist Christians who firmly believe -- or follow somebody who firmly believes -- that all public functions must be turned into Christian functions so that Christ can come and claim his kingdom. And the only way to turn schooling into true Christian schooling is for the relatively limited number of families who believe this to educate their kids themselves. They aspire to spread that belief among the whole population, but they're also quite happy right now to be the special small group that knows this truth and lives it. The home schooling not only wrests education away from the evil secularized government we now have but puts it firmly in the hands of the patriarch and his helpmeet of each clan, in line with another of these folks' principles. These people are educating to create an army of sorts to take over the world for their version of Christ, not to produce kids who do any of the worthless secular things you mention, such as higher math. (not joking) IN addition, of course, Jim Bob and Michelle are not just zealots but ignorant idiots. So they take this version of homeschooling to stupid limits that even most of their co-religionists spurn. People who think this way make up the largest segment of U.S. homeschoolers and absolutely are the loudest and most philosophically unified group of homeschoolers. But lots of other people homeschool, for lots of reasons, and they're mostly perfectly sane people who don't have any designs on destroying the public schools for everyone. People in cults like the Duggar cult do.

And never-before-seen videos of the Red Birthing. They should definitely get a cutting board. What was that flimsy thing that was sliding around on Jessa's counter?

Stop confusing me with facts. Sounds sensible. That makes it easy for the kids to toss those certificates right where they belong

You're probably okay if nobody photographs it. Of course, with today's photography climate, you'd probably have to confiscate the devices of everyone in the place to be sure that didn't happen ....

Somebody spilled cherry syrup on the lens? ...That might have been their first oops of the day.