Churchhoney

Or maybe Jill is so handicapped by her upbringing that she's scared shitless of doing things like making an effort to speak Spanish to others, even though people with more normal upbringings don't think that's such a huge deal. To someone who's never gone on her own to a grocery store in her own home town, I expect it's a very very big deal indeed. No need to put this onto Derick, as far as I can see. Jill has been utterly warped and damaged by her parents. I expect that Derick's main crime is that he fell for JB and M's crap and married Jill without realizing her stunting and her damage.

This is what's wrong. He's a lunatic control freak. No one is allowed to have autonomy. I suppose the ones that married in might think they're due some. But in Jim Bob's "mind" (I use the term loosely), no one is. He really should be stopped. Should have been stopped decades ago. But instead he's glorified by a tv network. And years worth of morning tv programs and magazine articles that describe him as "conservative' and "devout." Pure bullshit. Poisonous bullshit, too.

Especially since that's only one of dozens and dozens and dozens of things they routinely do that stunt and confuse people.

No. You're actually sputtering sensibly. These people will do that to you.

The thing is, for a certain kind of person, if you're made to feel responsible for your family members, every day of your life from the time you're a little kid, you're likely to remain chained to those family members forever. I expect Jana may be that sort of a person, and I'm 100 percent sure that she was brainwashed from childhood to feel an extreme level of responsibility for her family. If she left on her own, the guilt might make her more miserable than she probably is now. And when you've been carefully groomed to the idea that you may not legitimately have mind of your own, and kept from having any experiences that would let a mind of your own begin to grow and gather confidence in itself, mere age won't do a thing to give you that sense of autonomy. I've been in a similar situation. And even though I left it -- because I was allowed to go to school among other people, where I did pick up some confidence and autonomy -- I'm wearing a lot of those crippling chains to this day. Jana's had no chance to shed her chains for a second. So it's just not realistic to think that she can or, in my opinion anyway, to look down on her for not being able to do it. She is what she's been made. And she was made in a situation that's such an outlier most can't even really imagine what it's like. That's one of the things that really makes this show evil. It allows people to think that Jana's (and the others') situation has been so close to normal that we can expect them to behave normally. Unfair to the kids and a boon to their horrifying parents, who go right on perpetrating their child (and now adult) abuse.

When they do the new series, I suggest this title: 19 Reasons Not to Marry a Duggar...and Counting

My guess is that Jill is completely overwhelmed by the reality of learning a foreign language and getting along in a foreign country as a responsible adult with only one other known adult as company. She's really hardly ever learned anything before, and she's never even gone to the grocery store without being accompanied, let alone done something joblike or interacted socially with strangers, without having her entire family right around her. And it looks like Derick is so excited to be national boundaries away from the TTH (and who can blame him) that he can't even think about anything else. He's just jumping for joy right now that he's hundreds of miles from the 24/7 breathing-down-your-neck of DuggarWorld. I think Derick does have some seriousness in him -- and an interest in having a life fitting for an actual, you know, adult -- and will eventually try to figure this out. But I don't know what he'll do, since I'm still sure that he never bargained on being saddled with someone like Jill, who's completely out of her depth in anything like real-world adult situations but is actually too uninformed and underdeveloped to fully realize that or to be able to do something about it. Really, she'll need to go through about 50 skipped steps of education and psychological maturation if she's ever to manage anything besides living in a house near her parents, chasing down her husband for lunch every day, and having her siblings over for mutual babysitting sessions. It's a mess. That's for sure. They really should have called these shows: Why You Should Never Ever Marry a Duggar. At this point, I find them exasperating but I also feel sorry for them. I think Derick was probably a kind of shy little dweeb who fell for the Duggar fantasy hook line and sinker and thereby got himself into this ill-advised marriage. Ironic that the Duggs advertise their women as real helpmeets, when Derick is finding that as a 21st century man you can't get any help out of one of them at all. And Jill is just utterly unequipped for adult life. She was allowed to have a few little approved dreams -- missions and ministry, midwifery -- but she was simultaneously deprived of any of the tools she'd need to realize even those fully Gothard-approved goals let alone anything else. At the same time, she was told daily that she was being brilliantly prepared for those things. It's all very well to say Hey, she's an adult, time to pull herself up by her bootstraps. But in real life, almost nobody actually manages that bootstrap thing, especially when they've been subjected to delusion and intellectual and emotional deprivation. It's a lot easier said than done (about a billion times easier, in my opinion) for people to set about on their own to overcome all the lacks of their upbringing and accomplish it to any degree, especially when they've had the kind of upbringing that deliberately blinds them to their being any lacks in it at all. Can't really see Jill managing it, especially if they remain so closely tied to Duggarville, where the brainwashing continues.

Seems pretty clear from these shows that JB has moved in as dictator to his children's spouses just the way he dictates to his own kids. Say "I do" to a Duggar and you're immediately a wholly-owned subsidiary of Jim Bob and Michelle (and the proxy kid, of course). Derick had to flee the country to get away from it just a tad, and you can see from the new spring in his step that he feels like he's been released from prison. Seems to me this spectacle may do nothing but diminish the other Duggarlings' marriage chances, unless they've fled the compound completely. The fact that the Duggs think all of this is okay just shows (yet again) how truly out of touch with reality they are.

Well, they're keeping their story consistent, at any rate. This is what they've said ever since this mess began. ... .Some people involved in similar church situations seem to think it's plausible, too, given the kinds of public confessions a lot of people have heard. And with the Kellers being sort of Gothard operatives, they may well have been in line to hear those confessions, since it seems that those are the people JB turned to, to the extent that he turned to anyone.

My "these people really are just stupid" theory accrues more evidence all the time.

You know, I really hope I'm misjudging her. But actions speak awfully loudly ...

I expect that, to some extent at least, she knows full well what she deprived her children of and enjoys the thought of it. Having enjoyed those things when they can't makes her superior to them and also is a power she holds over them. I do think that Jim Bob is the worse of the two selfish power mongers in the household. But I have a feeling that depriving her kids of stuff she herself clearly still thinks is fun provides her with a little thrill of power and control that may partly compensate her for whatever grievances she's accumulated through life. She's clearly a person nearly -- or wholly -- devoid of empathy, it seems to me. So the kids' struggles? Well, Jesus is testing them, just like he's tested Michelle. She can live with it. And she raised them right.

Jim Bob -- at least; maybe Michelle too -- is both stupid and sick. He's also mean and selfish. Whatever he latches onto will partake of those qualities. He wants religion to buttress his beliefs and behaviors. He's not looking to learn new beliefs and behaviors from religion. So his religion will look like him. IN other words, like what you described right here. None of what goes on with the Duggars is about religion. It's about the Duggar parents' personality disorders and selfishness. Religion is just something they twist to justify what they would do anyway because they're sick people. And they love religion because it makes it easier for them to do things that all people with their sickness would like to do but find it hard to get away with.

But this is the wishful thinking part. You can't pin the way stupid, ignorant, venal, mean and, in the case of some of the Duggars, possibly insane people interpret a religion on the religion, or its scriptures or its theologians. These are very minor beings who want things in a certain way the way a tantrumming two-year-old does and they grab onto a "faith" (or a philosophy or a political ideology) and pretend that it means exactly what they want. They aren't interpreting theology accurately or consistently or with benign intent. They're just wanting to have their own way -- a stupid, psycho way, in this case -- and are grabbing onto bits and pieces of theology that they can toss together to make it seem (to them as well as to others) that their way is the right way and the best way. You can't look at their "theological interpretations" as being anything except the wishful thinking and arguing of a kid whose dog ate his homework or who swears he saw a burglar taking the cookies from the cookie jar. Except their excuses supposedly come from a revered book and a longstanding religious tradition, so they manage to convince some people that the excuses are accurate. We just can't conclude that the religion itself makes no sense because its interpretation by Josh, Anna, Jim Bob, Michelle and Gothard -- to cover their own heinies and make themselves feel good -- because these people are wishfully thinking, true dumb-asses who have no logic or reason at all but are mad with desire for rationalizations for their wants and behaviors. (which often boil down to -- I want everything I do to be right and everything anyone else does to be wrong.) What you're describing and naming isn't the Protestant faith as laid out by its theologians and serious adherents but as laid out by a bunch of idiots who grab onto it as a cover for doing whatever the hell they want. It's the misfortune of theologians and philosophers that there are way more people who'll do that kind of thing than there are people who will take ideas seriously and try to do right things rather than doing just what they want.

Well, the Bible is -- literally -- an anthology of translated works assembled by various committees over hundreds of years in several different parts of the world. So ....

Not necessarily. Like her favorite son, she is pretty sly. Maybe she dreamed it up and engaged in a wee bit of practice just so she could teach it to the girls. She may have demonstrated it to them using a light baby doll and a feather duster.

Important preparatory step for assuming a woman's place in years to come. Once you've mastered being eternally barefoot, you're halfway there.

I think you might be on to something. Except how would Michelle have learned such a skill?

Maybe the cat is pregnant.

Jill may well be wishing to hand off Izzy (moving to another country wasn't a good idea in that case, of course). But I'm skeptical of the cause being the married-Duggar-girls-will-love-to-screw idea, once the honeymoon period is over and aside from obligatory screwing to produce more blessings. Maybe I'm underestimating them, but I can't see Jill, Jessa, Ben or Derick actually figuring out the female orgasm. And maybe I'm crazy, but I have a hard time seeing how sex without finishing could continue to be attractive as time went by. ETA: I think that, most likely, all these different possible misconceptions are working in Jill's mind. And what they boil down to is that the life that she saw very precisely modeled by her parents and the "preparation" they always claimed they were giving her for life are exactly what most people here think they are -- complete hogwash with no connection to reality. And now Jill's struggling with finding that out. No way can she live like Michelle (even though that was supposedly the ironclad Gothard model of how life should be and what the Duggar girls were being brought up to) and no way can she do work and learn things and live in foreign countries without tremendous struggle (even though she was constantly told that her upbringing was making her one of the most competent people on earth.) Nothing she thought she knew turns out to fit with how her life is working. So obviously she's going to want that fantasy she was fed. That's quite a bind. And there's no obvious escape from it except to revise every opinion she swallowed in the TTH. I have a hard time seeing Jill doing that, but I don't see what her alternative is, either.

Oh, you're bursting my tiny bubble of belief -- or hope, I guess -- that maybe Jill is beginning to dial back some of her outsized confidence as she crashes a bit on the rocks of the real world. ... Unfortunately, the picture of her as Peggy Hill really does resonate.

"BitterApple, on 19 Dec 2015 - 10:29 AM, said: "Jill is failing at motherhood even worse than Michelle. To her credit, wasn't Michelle something like five or six kids deep before she had her laundry room breakdown? Jill can't even handle one, and Izzy seems like a relatively calm baby." I wonder whether it's more this or more that Jill's using Izzy as her excuse to run away from doing everything else. I expect there's some of both at play. But my guess would be that the fear of actually having to show progress in learning Spanish, going to a real language class with real people, going out in the community in a foreign country and so on would be much bigger problems for her than dealing with Izzy. So a good way to avoid those things is to have Izzy crawl all over her Spanish tutor, who's then too busy and distracted to make Jill participate in an hour-long focused Spanish lesson, and a great way to avoid having to go to a class full of strangers is to claim that she really needs to stay home with her son to be a good mom. Etc. I mean, we haven't really seen Jill have a breakdown. What we've seen is her backing out of doing thing after thing after thing, repeatedly using Izzy as an excuse. She's just not prepared for life, period. And that has to come as a big shock to any Duggar kid, since they've been constantly told by their parents and by the whole Gothard apparatus that they're far better prepared than anyone else. And Jill definitely quaffed all that Kool Ade containing the "we're the Duggars -- we're world beaters because of our brilliant upbringing" flavoring. I sometimes wonder whether this isn't part of what happened to Josh, too. Like Jill, he seemed to buy fully into the "I'm a Duggar so I'm really capable" idea. But then when it came to running car lots and working at a lobby, it turned out that he had no skills whatsoever, compared with other people. So why not wallow in porn? He wouldn't be the first person who's fallen headlong into a vice partly out of despair of his life having much other meaning.

Wonder if Izzy's birth may have made her less likely to go with that. .... I sure hope so.

It's going to be harder if she doesn't speak a word of Spanish.

Martin Luther: "The first and chief article is this: Jesus Christ, our God and Lord, died for our sins and was raised again for our justification (Romans 3:24-25). He alone is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29), and God has laid on Him the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:6). All have sinned and are justified freely, without their own works and merits, by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, in His blood (Romans 3:23-25). This is necessary to believe. This cannot be otherwise acquired or grasped by any work, law or merit. Therefore, it is clear and certain that this faith alone justifies us " The idea is that once you're saved you will do good works, tons of them actually, on Luther's account. But the multiple good works you'll be doing all the time are a sign of your faith and your salvation. If you have faith and are saved, you'll be impelled from within to do good works. However, they aren't the means by which you get saved. Aaaaaand .... judging by how many actual "good works" we've seen the Duggars do, what do we conclude about their state of faith and their salvation (from Luther's point of view anyway)? I don't think the giant bags of dum dums cut it.... Must say this makes me laugh. (Of course, other Protestant theologians, such as Calvin, have somewhat different takes. Luther's was more or less the founding view for Protestants, though, and the other churches tend to have variations of what he said -- Of course, what actual present-day people do when they claim to be in accord with fundamental Protestant belief often varies wildly from what the founding documents said. Wildly, and without logical basis, just whatever strikes people's fancy -- whether that fancy is to be bigoted or lazy or whatever.... Much of religion as she is actually practiced is pure wishful thinking, as far as I'm concerned.)