Is anyone else an atheist with BC besides me?
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CLC - I know just what you mean about the "social" void - when one doesn't fit a certain "mold" - it can be difficult to create community. Those I know who actually worked with ( a nonprofit, years ago) working to help create community in urban areas talked about the Three Places: Home, Work, and the "third" place. The need for community - was what was meant by the "third place."
In Britain, a great example is the Pub. You can go into any village ( or you could when I lived there years ago) and the Pub was the social center - the mythological place "where everybody knew your name" - but in that case, it really did exist. Not great for me - as a non smoker and a non beer drinker, well, speaking of not fitting in. Alas, the gardens were usually gorgeous...
I can't imagine how anyone creates connections, community today, with young children, and the time spent working, and getting them to their own activities. Most of the (younger) women I know raising children feel shattered, almost splintered with the different demands on their time.
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scorch - when i posted before, I said you were laugh out loud funny and that was true but as I continue to read your blog, I must say you are also deadly serious. Wow, I am incredibly impressed by everything I am reading.
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I think the social void thing might be more of an issue in a country where "What church do you attend?" is considered a reasonable question when you meet someone. That is most definitely not the case in my part of the world and I don't feel I'm missing anything by not attending any church.
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Bev, I would have been hanging out of the car screaming! But you got a good deal on the car--a just reward for the trial you endured!
Glad you're enjoying the blog. I figure by Christmas I can sell some limited edition Tamoxifen ornaments at a high price!
Scorch
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Well, I guess in a way we are making a community here - sometimes when I tell people what I do each day I say -"and I hang out on the bc discussion board with the atheists"...when I freaked out about my suspicious looking lymph cells I sat down here first....(after leaving sobbing messages to both my sisters over the phone) I mean - look how we felt when we thought sunflowers wasn't coming back...
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SoCalLisa,
My husband was in the military and we moved a lot as well. I think a certain independence happens when one can't put down roots for years. This is as long as we have lived anywhere, 11 years, and I must admit we are getting itchy feet. We talk about moving all the time, but we just don't have the energy for it.
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I too have lived in many places and agree it gives more freedom from the conventional definitions used in most communities. Made me realize too, that when I was living in one place for a longer time, I still resisted the various labels offered! Thinking again of CLC, and wondering how it is raising children without the "roots" of tradition, continuity.
Thanks, Flannel, it was an abrupt unwelcome severance for me too ;-) Nice to learn from this wonderful group of thinking, feeling women. Fascinated by Scorchy, and if I decorated a tree, I'd defiitely buy a decoration - might add a few crushed Arimidex for extra glitter
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I need a Femara ornament and while you're making them, Scorch, how about a really nice Fuck Breast Cancer ornament too. I need them for my chanukah bush - which I don't have anyway but I'd get one just for the ornaments.
I had a wonderful sense of community growing up in Da Bronx. Everyone seemed to be Jewish and I believed the majority of the world was which is pretty funny now when you think of it. I thought everyone liked us too. Boy, was I wrong lol.
As I've said before, my father was atheist, mom wasn't but might as well have been. We never went to temple or learned anything but we had our family traditions and I wouldn't trade that. As an adult I lost 99% percent of that community, except for the once a year Passover dinner at my cousin's house which is really about family, not religion. The older I get, the more anti religion I get. Too much evil shit happens in the name of it. I would like to believe in a supreme being if only there was even one shred of evidence but alas, no.
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So much of the bonding time to the community revolved around the kids when they were here..the schools, sports and activities involved us parents too..we had so much time together those days...
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Wow, this thread has been busy! Sunflowers, I'm so happy to see you back here...and the new posters. Hello to all!
I've been off camping. DH and I set up two tents in the rain - found out our old tent (53 years, really) leaked even though we sprayed it before we went. So we had to run and buy a large tarp to throw over it, but we were fine for the rest of the trip. The one year old tent we set up for our daughters and sons-in-law (grandkids slept with us) held fine, which was surprising. They don't look very waterproof. It rained almost every night and got down into the mid-forties. The lake was freezing cold. If all of this sounds like the trip was bad - nope best trip ever! At home I had been waking up every two hours and not sleeping well at all. In the tent I slept like a rock. Living spending my day outside, looking up at night and being able to see the stars - amazing how many are there that I can't see at home - sleeping in the fresh air - yep put me down in the list that if I worshiped anything it would be nature!
When our girls were young DH belonged to a volunteer group which was a tightly knit group with many family functions. That might be the reason we didn't feel a social void. However, my oldest granddaughter (8) had been saying that she'd never been to "our" church and wanted to go. All of her friends' families seem to go to church so she just assumed we had one. This summer she went to vacation bible school with one of her friends and came home singing all kinds of songs and talking about Jesus. My daughter is now facing some of the issues that others have mentioned here.
Edited to change "are girls" to "our girls." Geez.
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Lisa, I was thinking of what you just said, when CLC was posting. So many of my friends created their "communities" around their children, but it was almost like "famiy" you were kinda stuck with the parents of your kids friends?
Riverrat - thanks - LOVED hearing about your camping trip. A 53 yr old tent, ah, folks after my own heart. I still darn socks
Heck, it's only the big toe that seems to go!I'd definitely join all in the Church of Nature, think the Pagans may have already orgaznized it a few centuries ago, and then a certain "other" church kinda took many of their celebrations as their own, but I like the originals better.
One of my favorite things about New England is getting to experience the full four seasons, with all their Nature celebrations.
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Sunflower when our kids are in a cazillion different things, you can pick and choose who you want to hang out with and where you want to volunteer..even now when my kids are in their forties, we still have kept many of our friends in a kind of community as we live in a small town near a large city
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Bevg49: I'd like to believe in a supreme being long enough so I could positively identify it (them) and kick its (their) ass(es)! There is a big rock I pass every day. someone painted it gold--like a gold nugget I guess. I've taken to kicking it as I walk by. Now, I'm not all out going for the gold as I would break my foot. But I do like the action of symbolically kicking caner's ass.
If it has an ass. Does cancer have an ass?
Scorchy
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Scorchy - only in Foctober, and if it's PINK, kick it!
eta: Foctober is Barbe's word - but I LOVE LOVE LOVE it so mch I'm using it too....
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DH and I had a long discussion about whether we could stand to live in the same place long enough to make buying a house worthwhile. We once agreed we would move to another city across the country just to live on a different street. I miss the purging that moving requires. We both grew up in government towns which had lots of moving in and out.
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I was brought up as a Catholic in a not very religious family and went to a Catholic high school. I went to church regularly through my twenties and mid-thirties out of long habit and a feeling that it was the right thing to do. I did not socialize with anyone through any church I went to as it had never been my custom nor my family's. Church did not fill a social void in our lives.
At some point I began to do some thinking about the sheer size and age of the universe and somehow what I had been taught didn't make sense any more, much as I tried to make it do so. Believing in the church's teachings had been so comfortable and such a familiar a way of understanding the world that I had simply rolled along with it, pushing away occasional doubts. I also believed that I would be rewarded for my faith by eventually going to heaven, because that is what I had been taught.
After a while, I began to accept that my "faith", which I had been told to blindly accept, was really mysticism based on superstition and invented over a long period of time by people looking to explain the unknown, comfort and control people and/or consolidate power depending on their motivations. Basically it was no different than believing in Aphrodite and Zeus in ancient Greece or worshiping fire. I stopped going to church regularly.
A few years later, I had the opposite of a born-again experience during my first child's birth. I had a blinding and powerful revelation that this life we are living is all that there is, that there is nothing more after we die. I still firmly believe that, in spite of occasional twinges of Catholic guilt, because believing otherwise just does not make sense to me.
I decided to bring my children up without the burden of formal religious teachings explaining their world or going to a church and fortunately my husband agreed. I have always said that once they turned 18, and after they have taken a comparative religion course, if they want to adopt a religion I would support their choice ... as long as it didn't involve animal or human sacrifice
I made a point of teaching them morals and ethics, and explained why I no longer believed that there was a god, heaven or hell; also why I was not bring them up as I had been raised, as a Catholic, or as any Christian faith. I have raised two sensible, honest and decent young adults, neither of which feels any need for a religion or social ties to a church, temple or mosque.
I would be very surprised to discover there is a god after I die, but I doubt that will happen.
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My parents were hippies. We moved constantly. I never went to school for more than two years in the same place. There was the year we lived on a school bus selling art work in malls. There was the months on the commune in Virginia. There was the few months in Florida. There was the free school based on Somerhill....and so on.
It is in my blood...that purging of packing up and moving. However, for me, it is something I have tried to subdue. I craved structure as a kid. My parents were unstructured and confused or confusing. Perhaps that is at the very foundation of my wish to have a social network for my children. But, religion it will never be.
My kids both dance, and we have met many parents there. However, we are looked at as odd there...somewhat outcast. My son is the only boy that dances other than the dance teacher's sons and one boy who dances only hip hop. The other mothers (with their daughters in pink tutus) look at me a bit askance. The fathers...well...askance is an understatement with some. We are certainly not part of the social enclave they have grown there. My son wants nothing to do with sports, though we have tried it out. He wants to be an actor. And my daughter is very shy. So they are not working up their own network.
As I have wrestled with this, I have had to come to some kind of acceptance that my children have the same heritage of social isolation that I myself inherited. They clearly are finding their own unique paths that aren't part of the mainstream social networks. Hopefully, they will not see it as a void as I did and that they will be more at peace with it than I have been. And, I continue to find things for them to try. My daughter is interested in 4H...and I am going to try to give that a shot this fall. Hopefully, she will meet some fellow knitters and animal lovers there...:)
Sunflowers...I am ever so glad you are back here....I feel your support and kindness like sunshine... Thank you...
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{{{{CLC}}}} - WHY are you living where you're living? You'd LOVE it in the hilltowns of Western MA ;-) I'm serious, there is just something so delicious about living in a TOLERANT, warm, CREATIVE, nuturing environment. Many move here as adults, and even more STAY here, or come back after college, etc. to "settle" - cracks me up, when I refere to a Farm that's been owned for about 20 years by a certain family, and it's still known to the person as "oh, you mean the old......place." Yup. Note: Not Ay Yup, that's down east in Maine.
4H THRIVES around here, so many kids raise animals, are on or near farms. If you haven't found a place that feels like "home" it's the LOSS of the people you're living near!
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Sun...you are wonderful! Truth is, I went to college in Western Mass...Great Barrington, and then South Hadley. It is one of my favorite places in the world.... But a job is a job...alas...
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So in fact the 'void' will not necessarily be filled by belonging to any religious group. I think travelling and moving is wonderfully liberating at one level, but also throws you very much on your own resources and sometimes it can feel like too much hard work. I was probably lucky to have had a very stable and structured upbringing which gave me a sort of solid platform from which to dive off, and so I went on my travels for about 20 years.. although in fact I've now been back here for a very long time (18 years..too long? possibly) How old are your children CLC? Sometimes kids take a bit longer to find groups to fit in with than others... and some are quite content not to be part of the mainstream ever...
SoCalLisa, how are your feet?
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Maria, my foot remains a problem. I see my PCP Thursday to see where we go from here..PT did not help..I have added a few pounds:-)
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OK, Thursday - make sure all the Gods & Goddesses are On Duty watching out for Lisa's foot. Seriously - healing wishes surrounding you. Yuck to the weight gain, makes things worse, don't we ALL know that one. But it will go away as you heal. This thread has me thinking of Pagan rituals again... 0
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I was looking at my facebook pages for the past week and it seems like so many people want us to pray for almost everything, come on now folks
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CLC,
Perhaps you and your family will be interested in this Hulu special called "Breaking Pointe". It's about 6 weeks following a ballet company around. It is a fascinating world with lots of room for men.
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Love this thread and I see it as its own community. I too was raised and schooled Catholic. When I went to college I was able to break out of the mold and only took with me the basics, moral and ethical thought, and be a good and kind person. I also found science was much more part of my beliefs. I never felt a need for any more. Met my DH at college and we agreed that if there were a "church" it defiantly was in nature. We brought up our two boys that way and celebrate holiday times more within the Pagan/Wiccan thoughts. Not as religion, but as a celebration of life's journey. Both boys are bright and happy adults now and have no need of organized religion. Our community is family and extended family no matter their beliefs. Our circle of friends are not the type that ask "what Church you go to", just ask "how are you doing?" People come and go in our lives and those that you really connect with are the ones that are your community. I've not felt a void and have always searched out those of like mind to connect with as needed. Kind of like this tread! Kitty
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Our town has a building with a community room that hosts all kinds of events and clubs for our area, a library, a used book store, our museum and a safety center..and we are only twenty minutes from downtown San Diego...noone here even asks about what church you go to or not. They figure that is your business...Did I say how much I like living here?
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Sunflowers--
Awesome. I'm getting my kicking action ready for Focktober. I may paint the rock pink just because.
Scorch
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Thanks, notself! I couldn't get it to play, but I will try again. I look for strong male leads for my son to see. He enjoys dancing, but has precious few role models... He says he will continue it until he graduates. He knows his own mind. In fact, he first decided to dance when he was 7. His sister took it, and he said, "You know, Mom, if I take dance, too, I might get better acting parts." When faced with the decision of the type of dance, he said "Mom, boys don't take ballet, so if I do, I will get all the good parts." What a kid.
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Try this http://www.hulu.com/breaking-pointe Or put Breaking Pointe in the search window of Hulu.
He must be tough strong willed kid. Good for him. Tell him to practice this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02EvsGal-Wc
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Oh, notself...I love that movie! My son had no interest in the movie itself (understandably...he is 11), but he did stop and watch the dance scenes when we saw it together. I personally love Gregory Hines. Have you ever watched Nureyev? He is my favorite male ballet dancer (after, of course, my son).
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