dark_christianity on LJ...

[rev_yurodivy]

My membership request there got accepted! Yay! *dance*

....Now I have over 1K entries to sift through so I can gain more information. ._. Oh well.

Aaaaaaand one of the first things I see? An entry on Michael Pearl. Rrrrrgh. *goes rabid and froths at the mouth a bit* My parents never read him, thankfully, but they did read James Dobson, who is marginally the lesser of two evils. And he brags about abusing his dog. Yeah. Now, the Pearls had lots of books in the YMCA library, and in the library of the first college I went to, and I'm sure the Kenersville library has some of their books too (it's just too far of a walk even for me, so I never go there.)

Oh, on a semi-related note, I found an interesting new word today: alterophobia. In the wake of the Sophie Lancaster case, people started using it to refer to fear of subcultures, especially lifestyle subcultures-- specifically goths, punks, et cetera. I've been studying subcultures for a while, and I've noticed a very strong pattern in the way the media and public at large reacts to them. I'm still trying to organize my thoughts, but I was wondering if anyone would be interested in a blog series on them?

And that about covers it, I think! I'll be interested to hear everyone's thoughts. ;) Any personal experiences you might have with being a subculture member might be useful as well (for those of you who are, or who have been raised in environments hostile to subcultures.) I've got my own to talk about, of course...

Comments

[feathertail]

I was brought up to be really suspicious and skeptical of people who dress funny, basically. >.> There's a big sense of propriety in Mormonism, and any thing that's improper is considered suspect if not sinful. I internalized a lot of it, so I feel awkward about the idea of wearing ears and a tail in public (for instance), and it took me forever to decide it was okay to play D&D.

[rev_yurodivy]

Yes, and your experiences seem to be pretty common...among conservative groups in general, actually. Religious or otherwise, conformity is a desired trait among those kinds of communities. Oddly enough that kind of environment actually [i]encourages[/i] subcultural and countercultural movements to spring up.

Either way. :/ There's really nothing wrong with dressing oddly. And if you're even remotely like me you'll get over the oddness of wearing ears and a tail/some other peculiar thing pretty quickly.

[rev_yurodivy]

Okay, so it looks like they don't like BBCode here. x_x I forgot the comment boxes prefer HTML.

[feathertail]

Here's hoping. >.>b

(Also try using HTML tags instead of BBcode!)

[rev_yurodivy]

I'm...mostly sure that's the case. I'm mostly looking at when subcultures started to form, and how extreme they were. I really need to make my research a little more global, the only other country I've been heavily looking into is Japan, which has formed some extreme subcultures.

(Yep, I know. *points to the comment above yours*)

[ordinarygirl]

Ah, dark_christian... I joined back in the day when there wasn't moderated membership, just before the whole strikethrough debacle. It's never really given me anything I didn't already know or guess about dominionist christians, but I kinda grew up with them...

Mind if I ask if there's a reason you signed up?

[rev_yurodivy]

Dogemperor has been doing a lot of research on dominionist connections on various mainstream personages and organizations-- including politicians (Sarah Palin has heavy dominionist connections, and a number of abusive youth camps are connected to dominionism. She's been able to gather a lot of first-hand accounts.) That's one of the reasons. Secondly, it helps to gather as much information as possible, especially outside my own experiences.

Also, it's nice to know she's not dead or anything, since her DailyKos blog hasn't been updated in over a year, and since she'd recently been talking about Michael Murray both FT and I had gotten kind of worried, considering he had a psychotic break and committed a murder-suicide tied into PTSD from an abusive upbringing in an environment similar to the youth camps I mentioned.

Thirdly, I grew up in the South around Southern Baptists and almost got sent to a youth camp. It's a personal subject for me, and I'd like to have as much information on it as possible. I can't figure out all this alone-- haven't got the time or resources-- so it helps to have a large community around.

And even if it sounds like a conspiracy, there are a lot of mainstream organizations with dominionist connections, and I'd like to avoid getting behind them. Again, there's a lot of readily accessible information on who to keep away from there.

So, that about sums it up. ._.b

[rev_yurodivy]

*should be Matthew Murray, not Michael Murray

[ordinarygirl]

Oh, so many of the reasons that I joined, then, wanting to follow dogemperor's stuff aside (as that's how I first ran into her). Yeah, I wasn't diagnosed as being bipolar until I was 19, so when I was a teenager, I was a "problem child", and amongst the many therapists I went to that completely failed to do anything but tell me to pray and be good, my parents considered sending me to a boarding school for "troubled teens", run by some fundamentalist group that I can't remember anymore.

...anyway, yeah. XD I wasn't trying to pry or anything, which I now feel like I seemed like I was and... yeah. Not the most coherent right now, it's late.

[rev_yurodivy]

I guess I was kind of lucky in that I got diagnosed with autism early-ish. ^^; I was eight or nine, can't remember specifically. You probably had a rougher time of it than I had...

Don't worry about it, if I didn't want people to know some about my personal life I wouldn't be making public blog entries. ;P