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Real Life Fundie Encounters - Part 4


Coconut Flan

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@EyesOpen Yes, that is the Gothard umbrella. My background is reformed, non-ATI but my in laws were into it (MIL still is) so I've seen it.

I think some traditional but non-ATI folks go for this idea because they see it as husband is head of the family.  In my experience, some of these folks skip right over the implication that wives and children don't have a direct communication to Christ in this diagram.

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25 minutes ago, GenerationCedarchip said:

@EyesOpen Yes, that is the Gothard umbrella. My background is reformed, non-ATI but my in laws were into it (MIL still is) so I've seen it.

I think some traditional but non-ATI folks go for this idea because they see it as husband is head of the family.  In my experience, some of these folks skip right over the implication that wives and children don't have a direct communication to Christ in this diagram.

EXACTLY. My husband does not stand between myself and God. He is neither responsible for my failures, my grace or salvation... but I can’t exactly say that!

Is this over the top?

While I’m happy that my husband is a leader, he is not in between myself and God. He is not responsible for my sin, my grace or my salvation, this almost seems like I need to go through him to get to God. It’s definitely Steve and my job to teach the kids about Jesus and His love and sacrifice but their salvation and relationship with the Lord also isn’t ‘through’ us. If you’ve followed the Duggars at all, they were involved with Bill Gothard who had a movement and he promoted this idea of the umbrellas over the various groups. Unfortunately, I think this idea can be misconstrued and people might not feel they have a personal relationship with the Lord instead trying to please their parent or spouse instead of the Father.

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47 minutes ago, EyesOpen said:

EXACTLY. My husband does not stand between myself and God. He is neither responsible for my failures, my grace or salvation... but I can’t exactly say that!

Is this over the top?

While I’m happy that my husband is a leader, he is not in between myself and God. He is not responsible for my sin, my grace or my salvation, this almost seems like I need to go through him to get to God. It’s definitely Steve and my job to teach the kids about Jesus and His love and sacrifice but their salvation and relationship with the Lord also isn’t ‘through’ us. If you’ve followed the Duggars at all, they were involved with Bill Gothard who had a movement and he promoted this idea of the umbrellas over the various groups. Unfortunately, I think this idea can be misconstrued and people might not feel they have a personal relationship with the Lord instead trying to please their parent or spouse instead of the Father.

Too late I posted it. I’m probably dangerously close to being unfriended. I don’t know how to change the hearts and minds of Trump supporters. Do they not understand he’d abort his own daughter’s baby if it profited him?

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17 minutes ago, smittykins said:

Didn't he want Tiffany aborted, or is that just a rumor?

I think he did. But it might have been a rumor but I have heard this multiple times. 

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Saw mom and three daughter fundies at Wal-Mart today.  Best guess is UPC.  Mom and two daughters had on the requisite denim skirts, third daughter had on leggings.  All of them had long stringy hair badly in need of washing.  It was combed neatly and held back with barrettes but needed a good shampooing.  It makes me thankful that my parents broke away from the legalistic teachings more than 40 years ago.

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My mom added me to a Facebook group for Dave Ramsey leghumpers that are stay at home moms. These people are really hardcore "what would Dave think about this" fanatics. Considering Mr EW & I were never taught about how to properly build credit (God says you don't need it *eye roll*) , invest, etc following all of Dave's steps aren't helpful. We will never be able to buy a home with cash or eat rice and beans every day in order to save more money. 

This must be in response to me telling her we would not be thinking of having kids until we were in a better place. And if it never happened oh well it never happened. I see my sister (who will start the baby popping out process next year while her spoiled ass jerk of alpha male fundie husband earns and oversees all the $$$) is happily roaming around the group already. 

  

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4 hours ago, EowynW said:

My mom added me to a Facebook group for Dave Ramsey leghumpers that are stay at home moms. These people are really hardcore "what would Dave think about this" fanatics. Considering Mr EW & I were never taught about how to properly build credit (God says you don't need it *eye roll*) , invest, etc following all of Dave's steps aren't helpful. We will never be able to buy a home with cash or eat rice and beans every day in order to save more money. 

This must be in response to me telling her we would not be thinking of having kids until we were in a better place. And if it never happened oh well it never happened. I see my sister (who will start the baby popping out process next year while her spoiled ass jerk of alpha male fundie husband earns and oversees all the $$$) is happily roaming around the group already. 

  

You can take yourself out of the group, and you can also tell facebook to not let others add you back.  I think it gives you the option when you are leaving it.

I'm not really impressed with what I've seen of Dave Ramsey.

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7 hours ago, EowynW said:

My mom added me to a Facebook group for Dave Ramsey leghumpers that are stay at home moms. These people are really hardcore "what would Dave think about this" fanatics. Considering Mr EW & I were never taught about how to properly build credit (God says you don't need it *eye roll*) , invest, etc following all of Dave's steps aren't helpful. We will never be able to buy a home with cash or eat rice and beans every day in order to save more money. 

This must be in response to me telling her we would not be thinking of having kids until we were in a better place. And if it never happened oh well it never happened. I see my sister (who will start the baby popping out process next year while her spoiled ass jerk of alpha male fundie husband earns and oversees all the $$$) is happily roaming around the group already. 

  

I was taught that debt was a sin..."the borrower is servant to the lender" and all that. Thank the goddesses that I'm not fundie anymore! So yeah, I wasn't taught about credit or investment or anything like that, and my husband and I had to figure it out ourselves (he wasn't really taught money management either). 

And about the kids...like you, I grew up poor in a large fundie family, and I didn't like it and didn't want that life for myself. Popping out kids, hell no. I have two. I love them to death, but two is ENOUGH! And I don't consider "mom" to be my highest identity or my purpose in life. I don't like it when I think people are viewing me as a "mother" above anything else. 

If it helps, I stopped giving my mother a lot of info about my life. Also she's not allowed on my FB, along with most of my family members! That way I keep my FB page a nice calm place.

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She wasn't a fundie, per se, at least you wouldn't have expected her to be.  Her IRL job is as a school RN and then she has a business on the side as a living history educator, along with well-done historic craftwork.  That's all I say, the world is small.

Anyway, we had just been introduced by my SO and we started to trade happy stories about a celtic fest we'd recently attended.  She said that some ladies (sic) had tried to lift a man's kilt to see what was underneath.  His response to them was that he'd never been married.  No, I didn't get it either, but I smiled politely.

And then I said - not emotionally, but strongly - "I hate to hear about women doing that kind of thing. You know the next guy is going to say, 'They do it to us, we can do it to them!'"

She looked a little nonplussed and I apologized, and said, "This recent court stuff has me pretty upset."

"Oh!!!" she replied.  "I know what you mean.  It's like, all a kid has to do is go to the guidance counselor and say 'Mr. SoAndSo said suchAndSuch' and the poor guy is marked FOREVER!"

I'm sure some kids use the times to their advantage.  It's the worse part of human nature.  But I could tell she wasn't at all flapped about current events.

And to add insult, we had just driven past a line of anti-women picketers and I had flipped 'em the bird.  SO said, "What were they protesting?" and I said, "I dunno!"  (He's not a keeper.)

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So if fundies don't believe in debt or borrowing are they also against taking out a mortgage to buy a house?

And if they don't believe in mortgages, how do they ever save up enough to buy a house (that's not a hovel) for cash?

Are fundies perfectly OK in paying rent forever, rather than building equity by owning a house?

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53 minutes ago, Red Hair, Black Dress said:

So if fundies don't believe in debt or borrowing are they also against taking out a mortgage to buy a house?

And if they don't believe in mortgages, how do they ever save up enough to buy a house (that's not a hovel) for cash?

Are fundies perfectly OK in paying rent forever, rather than building equity by owning a house?

Well Mr. EW grew up ATI/Gothard. Though his  parents later back pedaled and said there was some good debt, honestly, they didn't try hard enough to talk over the messages in the fundie world.  When you grow up your whole life being told by everyone that God doesn't want you to have debt and you must pay in cash for everything (he actually sat and saw Gorhard teach this in person), you take that to heart as an earnest preachers kid. Later in his life his parents were all "oh well you know there's good kinds of debt you need" yet they rarely mentioned how you need it and it's essential to living life and they just never sat their boys down to teach them. It's very confusing to sort out as an adult and he's very guilty about it to this day for hurting himself like that. He didn't know though. He was misled in the name of God. Like we all were  

Me, well I just wasn't to "worry" about debt or credit because I "didn't need it as a woman" and only my brother got to prepare for real life. 

 

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So... a mortgage might may be OK, but fundies generally won't discuss/ admit to having one? 

I assume a car loan for a decent vehicle is out?

The overriding teaching then, is pay for everything in cash, although there are some forms of good debt.  But we're not going to talk about them or teach you money management. Because all debt bad bad, very bad. Even though we (parents) have good debt that we won't discuss and pretend we don't have.

I'm just SMH at how stupid and limiting and actively trying to doom children to fail all this is.  Because somehow the idea of money management is a sin. 

The hypocrisy of it too, of fundie parents who have "good" debt, yet harangue their children that all debt is bad.

It's like the fundie Southern Baptist adults I knew growing up who swore up and down they didn't drink. Oh no of course not. Drinking is a Sin. There had never been and never would be a drop of liquor in their houses. Signed the non drinking pledge at church.  Voted yearly to keep the county dry. Made all their children promise never to drink.  Lectured the children about the ruination that one drink could lead to.

All of my friends knew where their parents kept the liquor, usually under the kitchen sink behind the cleaning products. And all of them had stories of their fathers and other adult men gathering in the kitchen, furtively bringing out the bottle, drinks all round, which were then quickly tossed back. This was so the "ladies" didn't know they drank.  I guess they figured no one could smell liquor on their breath.

The really funny thing was my mother telling the same story about drinking at afternoon bridge parties, only the women hid their liquor in the linen closet behind "feminine products."

I think the game was the women pretended not to know the men drank, and the men really were completely ignorant that the women drank.  

Heathen not Christian Catholics that we were my parents kept the liquor on the sideboard in the den.

The really funny thing was the local taxi company, that no one ever used as a taxi, made its money doing liquor runs to the next county were there was a liquor store, and to the grocery store for beer. Because obviously if you "don't drink" you certainly can't be seen buying anything.

But oh no none of these people drank or had ever even had one drink ever in their whole lives. Because they told you so. Because drinking is a Sin.

 

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Did you know daiquiris aren't alcoholic.  At least not by the under the kitchen sink rum drinking Church of God pastor's wife's teachings.  I really like my drive-thru bloody marys.  Only in Louisiana!  Thank God for religious freedom from legalism. 

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21 hours ago, Red Hair, Black Dress said:

So if fundies don't believe in debt or borrowing are they also against taking out a mortgage to buy a house?

And if they don't believe in mortgages, how do they ever save up enough to buy a house (that's not a hovel) for cash?

Are fundies perfectly OK in paying rent forever, rather than building equity by owning a house?

I'm pretty sure if was a Dave Ramsey call in I heard once, a few years back.  A man called in and he was all excited.  He and his wife had sold their house because they had a mortgage.  They were renting a basement bedroom from a friend of theirs and he was so happy because they were not in debt for a mortgage.  They had a couple of kids, all of them were apparently crammed into this one room.  Dave Ramsey (I think it was him, but at least the host of the show if it was someone else) was happy for them and said that they had done the right thing.

In what world was that right?  They were able to afford the mortgage.  It was just sinful to be in debt, according to them.

18 hours ago, EowynW said:

The difference between a Baptist and a Methodist is that the Methodist will say hello to you in the liquor store. :D

Oklahoma finally allows strong beer and wine sales in the grocery stores.  It was voted on several months ago and took effect Oct. 1.  I'm still officially S. Baptist (in name only) but I never bought into the "drinking is a sin" thing the Baptist church proclaims.  We don't drink a lot, but it's never been a secret. One of the Sunday School teachers at a class I attended did make a point of reminding the entire class that Baptists don't drink.  I was not the only one smirking at her.  One of the pastors at one of the Baptist churches we attended commented about looking in the parking lot of liquor stores to see if he could recognize any members cars.  Which I thought was was over the line! But now that we can buy wine in the grocery store, I'm just waiting.  I'm sure I'll see at least a couple of people I know from the Baptist Church in that section - hopefully they will at least be honest and not try to hide what's in their baskets!  I know I won't hide mine.  Bad, backsliding Baptist that I am! ?

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21 hours ago, Red Hair, Black Dress said:

So... a mortgage might may be OK, but fundies generally won't discuss/ admit to having one? 

I assume a car loan for a decent vehicle is out?

The overriding teaching then, is pay for everything in cash, although there are some forms of good debt.  But we're not going to talk about them or teach you money management. Because all debt bad bad, very bad. Even though we (parents) have good debt that we won't discuss and pretend we don't have.

I'm just SMH at how stupid and limiting and actively trying to doom children to fail all this is.  Because somehow the idea of money management is a sin. 

 

My mother still gets upset that her children (grown) have car loans! Some of us even have TWO car payments! 

I'd rather have a car payment and a reliable vehicle than be stranded on the side of the road because I could only afford to pay cash for a clunker. Several of the vehicles my parents owned were given to them...and only one was halfway decent. We spent a lot of time waiting for tow trucks and spent a lot of money on repairs. But debt was bad.

It still doesn't make sense to me. 

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Wait, are car loans that common in the US?

I never heard of anyone taking a car loan. Although recently leasing has become a thing, which is also kind of like a loan.

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1 hour ago, CarrotCake said:

Wait, are car loans that common in the US?

Yes, they are very common, as well as leasing. 

14 hours ago, Briefly said:

I'm pretty sure if was a Dave Ramsey call in I heard once, a few years back.  A man called in and he was all excited.  He and his wife had sold their house because they had a mortgage.  They were renting a basement bedroom from a friend of theirs and he was so happy because they were not in debt for a mortgage.  They had a couple of kids, all of them were apparently crammed into this one room.  Dave Ramsey (I think it was him, but at least the host of the show if it was someone else) was happy for them and said that they had done the right thing.

I have some issues with Dave Ramsey, but I listen to him a lot, and he is not against mortgages. He only thinks that your monthly mortgage payment should not be more than 25% of your take home pay and once you have an emergency fund, you should focus on paying off the mortgage.

I'm guessing the basement bedroom story is because the family was in massive amounts of (unsecured) debt and in those cases, he does recommend people sell their house and downsize temporarily to pay off their debts, and then save up a 20% down payment on a home. 

Our country has a huge problem with debt and overspending, and so I appreciate what Ramsey teaches and how he is able to get through to a group of people (conservative evangelicals) who are often preyed upon by prosperity gospel shysters.

On 10/7/2018 at 1:22 PM, EowynW said:

My mom added me to a Facebook group for Dave Ramsey leghumpers that are stay at home moms. These people are really hardcore "what would Dave think about this" fanatics. Considering Mr EW & I were never taught about how to properly build credit (God says you don't need it *eye roll*) , invest, etc following all of Dave's steps aren't helpful. We will never be able to buy a home with cash or eat rice and beans every day in order to save more money. 

Ramsey doesn't say you have to buy a home outright in cash. And the rice and beans line is figurative, he means cut back on eating expenses to save money, which seems like something anyone should technically be able to do.

I disagree with Ramsey on some of his views on building credit, but he does cover basic investing (though it's for beginners, and for those who find themselves accumulating large amounts of wealth, I would recommend finding a personal, fee only financial adviser). If you ignore some of the Jesus talk and hard lining, his baby steps are actually pretty manageable and useful for most people living on working class or middle class incomes.

I would ignore his acolytes, who I imagine get pretty exhausting trying to one up each other, and just read his book if you are interested in money management.

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11 hours ago, Lisafer said:

My mother still gets upset that her children (grown) have car loans! Some of us even have TWO car payments! 

I'd rather have a car payment and a reliable vehicle than be stranded on the side of the road because I could only afford to pay cash for a clunker. Several of the vehicles my parents owned were given to them...and only one was halfway decent. We spent a lot of time waiting for tow trucks and spent a lot of money on repairs. But debt was bad.

(Sorry for the Ramsey/finance mega post here, but I'm really into personal finance, so...)

I agree about a reliable vehicle being preferable to a lemon for both safety and financial reasons, but the problem is the majority of people with car loans did not buy a modest car within their budget and attempt to pay off the loans as fast as possible and keep the car until repairs cost more than a replacement.

It's much more common to only calculate if they can manage to make the monthly loan payment and buy something far outside their budgets and then trade in after only a few years. The fact of the matter is, middle class and working class people constantly carrying loans on immediately depreciating assets is one of the major reasons they will struggle to get ahead. And of course car companies are going to continue to push the idea that everyone just has to buy a brand new car every few years when really only the very wealthy can justify this.

I do appreciate how Ramsey bucks an advertising system designed to take advantage of the less wealthy and helps to empower those people. It's actually kind of woke and anti-establishment, imo. 

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37 minutes ago, nausicaa said:

(Sorry for the Ramsey/finance mega post here, but I'm really into personal finance, so...)

I agree about a reliable vehicle being preferable to a lemon for both safety and financial reasons, but the problem is the majority of people with car loans did not buy a modest car within their budget and attempt to pay off the loans as fast as possible and keep the car until repairs cost more than a replacement.

It's much more common to only calculate if they can manage to make the monthly loan payment and buy something far outside their budgets and then trade in after only a few years. The fact of the matter is, middle class and working class people constantly carrying loans on immediately depreciating assets is one of the major reasons they will struggle to get ahead. And of course car companies are going to continue to push the idea that everyone just has to buy a brand new car every few years when really only the very wealthy can justify this.

I do appreciate how Ramsey bucks an advertising system designed to take advantage of the less wealthy and helps to empower those people. It's actually kind of woke and anti-establishment, imo. 

Maybe I should have clarified a little more...myself and my siblings have for the most part had very sensible within-budget car payments. But there are fundies who think that is a sin, even within your means.

Also, there's nothing wrong necessarily with people wanting to be debt-free. The problem is insisting that one size fits all in the debt category. 

I don't care for Ramsey, he seems pompous and arrogant to me, but I'm sure he has helped some people. 

 

I think the breakthrough for me was realizing that debt can be a financial tool that you can leverage as needed to move you forward in life! It's not a moral failing, it's a financial concept.

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So... I was in a global call at work this morning. I don’t know this person or anything about them. They may even be from a different country... but her name was Praycilla. It made me think of FJ baby name guesses. This will be mine from now on! Praycilla.

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5 hours ago, CarrotCake said:

Wait, are car loans that common in the US?

I never heard of anyone taking a car loan. Although recently leasing has become a thing, which is also kind of like a loan.

We do car loans...but we usually buy fairly new vehicles (year or 2 old) and drive them until the wheels fall off or we get sick of them. His Expedition is going on 12 years of us owning it. I owned my Trailblazer for 10 years, the Mustang for 8. We just got the Explorer and will probably drive it for 10 years or so. 

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11 hours ago, CarrotCake said:

Wait, are car loans that common in the US?

I never heard of anyone taking a car loan. Although recently leasing has become a thing, which is also kind of like a loan.

Our last three cars have been used but we purchased them from a rental agency, so they are not very used.  Low mileage and they are in good condition, plus the last one still had the original factory warranty on it.  Because they are not brand new, the price is fairly low for an almost-new car. We've done the junkers and cheap cars before, when we were younger and just starting out.  We try to take good care of our vehicles so that they last many years, but not everybody does and I don't want another experience with a car that we could have replaced about 3 times with what we spent on repairs over a 2 or 3 year period.  We did that once.

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26 minutes ago, Briefly said:

Our last three cars have been used but we purchased them from a rental agency, so they are not very used.  Low mileage and they are in good condition, plus the last one still had the original factory warranty on it.  Because they are not brand new, the price is fairly low for an almost-new car.

My Explorer was a rental...it has 31K miles on it, still has some of the warranty left and was 10's of thousands cheaper than the brand new ones I was looking at and has almost ALL the bells and whistles. Brand new, it was about 43k (it's a 2017). I got it for less than 30K. I was looking at brand new that were pushing 50k

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