Spiritual Eugenics and COVID19

The Rodrigues Family and COVID 19

The Patriarchy Workshop 
       (Please scroll down at that link for Bibliography and rigorous discussion of the topic.)
Ethics Daily


Discussing Spiritual Eugenics on YouTube   
(It's apparently a 'real thing' now.)

• Ex-Christian.net
• Tri-State Freethinkers

Spiritual Eugenics in 'Multigenerational Faithfulness' in Patriarchy

• Ersatz Calvinist Replacement Theology
• More Social Darwinism (God only wants Christians and Dead-end Daughters)

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COVID19 – How Anti-Intellectual Christians Ruin Things for the Rest of Us

Thank you to Suzanne at No Longer Quivering for posting this letter to government officials who may be in a good position to reach the Rodrigues Family with some information that may finally curtail their life-endangering recklessness as our communities and our nation respond to the COVID Pandemic.

The family hobnobs with Bill Gothard's inner circle of Advanced Training Institute homeschooling families including the Duggar Family (TLC Cable Reality TV Personalities). Good stewardship for Christians should begin with love for others and concern for them by first showing them that they have inherent worth. They have equal value to all others regardless of their beliefs and religion, and their physical bodies are just as important as their individual souls. They are precious, their phsycial bodies are precious, and their part in society has as much value to society as that of any Christian – right here in the here and now.

Please note the LINK LIST below 
(following the open letter) for further reading.

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

An Open Letter to the Local Government in Wayne County, OH and the Borough of Chambersburg, PA

Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Greetings,

In the interests of Public Health, could an appropriate representative of the Wayne County Ohio Government please visit David and Jill Rodrigues to review the current precautions concerning COVID19 and what this means specifically for their family?

The Rodrigues Family of Wooster, Ohio including twelve of their children have published that the COVID19 mitigation measures issued by Pennsylvania on March 16, 2020 and subsequent orders at State and National levels allow them a religious exemption which did not impede their planned travel or activities. 

This included documentation of close physical contact with individuals of all ages in both small and large church gatherings in Ohio and Pennsylvania. 

After traveling to Chambersburg, PA, they published evidence of close physical contact citizens there at some point during March 18 - 24, 2020. This included door-to-door visits with strangers near the New Testament Baptist Church of Chambersburg. They mention the name of their 15-year-old son, so it is likely that at least some of their children participated in community visitation in the homes of private citizens there.


The family explains online that they are more concerned with the eternal fate of strangers than they are for their physical wellbeing or any public health threat. Their rationale includes their faith that their own deaths would only result in them going to heaven. The group also teaches the importance of civil disobedience when God's Law overrides Civil Law, allowing them license to act in accordance to what they understand as God's highest will.



Their evangelical religious sect and its leaders embrace a book called A More Excellent Way: Be in Health by author Henry Wright which attributes physical disease to a traceable, root spiritual cause. As a result, I am deeply concerned that the family will continue to travel, put the health of their children at risk, and thus pose an ongoing, serious health risk to an inestimable number of people.

Respectfully,

Cynthia Kunsman

Contributor, No Longer Quivering, Patheos.com

Host, UnderMuchGrace.com (Read bio HERE)

LEARN MORE about the Rodrigues Family:

Concerning Covid

• * Overview of the Family * at NoLongerQuivering.com (NLQ)
• Door to Door Visitation in Pensylvania (NLQ)
• Continued Disregard for Mitigation Efforts (NLQ) 
• Map of Travel & Mocking of Social Distancing (NLQ)
• Fundamentalists Shirking Mitigation (includes this Letter @NLQ)

About the Sect

• Bill Gothard (ATI homeschooling and IBLP organization)
• Expanded Information HERE 
• The Duggar Family
• Henry Wright (Physical disease and root spiritual cause)
• Blanket Training
• Independent Fundamental Baptists
• Quiverfull
• Second Generation Adults
• Purity Culture

Rodrigues Family Links

• Instagram Photos
• Primary Webpage
• Family's YouTube Channel
• Eldest Daughter on YouTube

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Lamenting Labors and Legacies

I always find great pleasure when speaking with Dr. John Weaver. As he waits for the upcoming release of his latest work, Technology, Management and the Evangelical Church, he's busy thinking about his next book – all of which became necessary for him to write after learning more about the complicated tapestry of abuses within the modern Evangelical Church in the US. I love how he sets me thinking about the language that I use, his rich sense of scholarship that drives questions about the origins of terminology, and how it affects us. 

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Abuser Taxonomy

Excerpt from Healing From Hidden Abuse:

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How Some Churches Shame Their Members

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Remembering Sir Nicholas Winton and Hot Dogs on Independence Day

Image pirated from Despair.com

[ETA:  I learned the day after I published this that Sir Winton passed away in 2015, not 2019.  Though I'm glad for the error because of the common themes between what he did for innocent children and what many children currently suffer at the US/Mexico border.]

Today, we Americans celebrate the Declaration of our Independence from crazy King George III and the British Parliament's entitlement to our then colonial livelihood. Informed and misinformed by a host of influences, my understanding of it all and my cause to celebrate continues to change, but I don't hesitate to do so. I celebrate for sundry reasons and causes of heritage, lineage, religious freedom, and the precious gift of liberty. For those who are denied such blessings, I pray, grieve, and mourn.

I descended from a family of three French militia mercenaries who claimed Pennsylvania as their home and marched under a flag bearing a rattlesnake.  Dr Forrest Moyer who is known as the “Father of Pediatrics” in Allentown, PA spent three days and nights in a cot beside me after my birth, years before the advent of neonatal intensive care units there. He told my parents to expect my death, and I am proud that I was baptized as a Moravian that morning.

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Continuing the Discussion of Cognitive Bias

Here we are, still plugging along in the ongoing discussion of cognitive biases. Track the progress here and via guest posts at No Longer Quivering to learn more about common CranioRectal Inversions that can put us at risk.

This focus aims at improving our habits to ensure our safety and self care, especially during recovery from a spiritual abuse experience. Further discussion of Judith Herman's stages of recovery from trauma await as we are still on the first one. 

I plan to update the index of related posts a few times a year, but please don't hold me to it. (Search queries are your friend.)

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The Culture that Created a Need for Rachel Held Evans

Rachel Held Evans( RHE) captured the attention of many – some who praised her, and others who are still bubbling over with miserable things to say about her. She was like a fresh breath of honesty, wrapping words around the frustrations of a whole generation of American Evangelicals. I find myself thinking of the analogy of breathing as quite fitting in light of her untimely death, reminding us all of the fragile and temporary nature of life itself. We are but a vapor. We know the exhalation of her creative expression which endures in her absence, but do we understand the culture which she drew into herself which prompted her message?

Consider that 70% of American adults identify as Christian with the Great Awakening revivals as factors that solidified the predominantly Protestant demographic. The First (1730-40) gave us many Puritans, Presbyterians, and pietists, and the Second Great Awakening (1790-1820) produced Methodists and Baptists.

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Mother's Day Thoughts

Found on social media:

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Attributed to Augustine

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Memory Memes

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More Memes

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Many Memes

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Self-Justification's Role in Cognitive Dissonance

Whether we consider memory, our personal history, or a decision we made today, without our notice, our trait of consistency likely rules us. If anything was truly an innate trait that we humans suffer because of the Fall of Man, surely it is the illusion that we are independent, self-sufficient creatures. Self-justification rests the heart of our struggle to comfort our egos and acts as comfort's right hand. We strive to be enough on our own, free from a Creator, and our very own brains write the narrative to convince us that it is so.

Knowledge of how our minds work and why they work the way that they do can mature us. We can learn to slow down the knee-jerk self-justification process to give us more time to respond to life instead of just reacting to it. Whether we seek to minimize our own culpability for an error or craft a history that softens our regret, if we are aware of this very human quality, we stand a better chance of circumventing its pitfalls. We will never break free of bias, but we can learn to be better stewards of our own thoughts, feelings, and behavior. 

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External and Internal Expressions of Cognitive Dissonance

The last post left us wondering about the results of Leon Festinger's study of forced behavioral compliance. Participants were placed into two separate groups, one of which was well paid, and the other which received a nominal amount to compensate them for their time in the tediously boring hour and the request to lie to the new test subjects on their way out. 

(Note the adjustment in the value of the reward in this blog post to approximate a contemporary value.) Only one group described the test as unpleasant, and the other claimed that they enjoyed performing the study, expressing positive feelings about it. But which group enjoyed themselves?

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Studying the Stress of Forced Compliance

Read Part I here.

What evidence exists to support the claim that a person will change their thoughts and even their record of events to assuage the distress of cognitive dissonance? For that, we must travel back to Stanford in the 1950s to examine Festinger's study.

Students at Stanford were recruited with the understanding that they were helping the school to streamline their study design concerning “Measures of Performance.” The students did not realize that they were being observed to determine how they would handle the stress of cognitive dissonance, believing the study to be a measure to improve the research method that the school employed. Each student was paid for their time.

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Revisiting Cognitive Dissonance

In our last discussion of bias, we took note of the human preference for consistency. Not only do we build upon previous learning and decisions with new choices when they are consistent with past behavior, we also strive for personal consistency in our thoughts, emotions, and actions. A lack of consistency and continuity among these three aspects of self causes an intensely uncomfortable mental distress. Information that challenges current thought, required behavioral compliance that contradicts thought and emotion, or the induction of intense, unpleasant feeling can create this disruption in the consistency of self. The experience of that painful stress is called cognitive dissonance. 

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Elizabeth Loftus on the Memory Illusion

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When Swimming in Biases, Try Not to Drown

Heuristics or those 'rules of thumb' that we use to cut through dense amounts of information to help us make timely decisions often involve availability biases. We remember ideas and select rationales based on how available they are to us – how close to the surface of our conscious thoughts those rationales lie. (We humans will grab the ideas that are most "available" to us – and sometimes, they are the most absurd.) When we lack enough information about a chain of events, we also draw on heuristics to 'fill in the gaps' between them so that we can better comprehend them. But they are shortcuts, and when we use these methods, we run at least some risk of falling into error. 

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Freeing Memory from Bias by Bringing it Captive

More About How Cognitive Bias Can Influence Memory

The process of memory awareness and noticing discrepancies and errors was named metamemory some forty years ago. We may recall something and have our memory of a place or an event in time, only to discover years later that we've misremembered elements of the narrative. Metamemory helps us understand the way that our self-justifying cognitive biases code and influence what we store as memory (which always differs somewhat from objective reality).

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Disparagements of Perspective or Lies of Malice? Be Free Indeed!

Totalist religion affords us a very tidy view of the world where little if any ambiguity exists. Some enlightened other came before and figured out all that people would need to know to guide themselves with great ease through the rough edges of life. That's how things were sold to me in my group of record as an adult. Critical thinking gets handed over to a religious overseer of souls, creating the illusion of moral blamelessness for members – a process dubbed 'moral disengagement'. 

But there are no pat answers to life's complex problems, and we complex and conflicted human beings make things all the murkier. If you live under a totalist religion, you can skip over the murkiness into a view of black and white, and life becomes a zero-sum game. If someone 'wins' an argument, it means that 100% of the spoils of merit go to one sole survivor, and there can be no merit spared for the other contenders. That all-or-nothingness bleeds over into other areas, too, like power and love and care. If a contender gets some of those valuable commodities, it means that there is less comfort and accomplishment left for everyone else. 

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Thinking the Unthinkable: A Challenge for the Botkins

I thought about the Botkin daughters today – and it's approximately six weeks since I received their letter. As cognitive dissonance teaches us, all people find it uncomfortable when others believe unpleasant things about them, and it occurred to me that dissonance itself is something that I definitely share in common with these young women. 

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In Remembrance and Honor of John and Halcyon Botkin

John and Halcyon Botkin are no longer with us on this side of the veil. They raised three sons and a daughter to carry on in their absence. They were proud members of Tulsa Christian Fellowship for many decades, and they raised their children in the fear and admonition of the Lord. They were dearly loved by many.

I am grateful to those who have written to me, heartbroken and offended about Geoffrey Botkin's claims that he was raised in a Marxist home as he publicly repudiates his Christian upbringing. I am also grateful to those who worked to shield Halcyon Botkin from distress, as she was quite advanced in age during the time that her son claimed that his family of origin was something other than a God-believing, God-fearing home.  I am moved by those who contacted me to attest to the Christian witness of John and Halcyon Botkin, for it speaks powerfully to their good character and their love for God and family.

For those who have questions as to why their son Geoffrey has made so many claims to have been raised as a Marxist and in a family that did not attend church, I would suggest that you contact him directly. He teaches a doctrine that was once called “multigenerational faithfulness,” and it is heartbreaking to think that he would have any desire to deprive his own parents of the honor that they are due, in both life and death. 

Geoff Botkin talked much about his 200 Year Plan for his own descendants, but he didn't seem to show much honor to his own family of origin and their own fine heritage.

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Cognitive Biases and Cranio Rectal Inversion Index

Just a reminder that the purpose of this discussion aims at stimulating thought and self awareness as tools to help those in recovery from trauma learn how to make safer choices. To make the discussion a bit lighter, we've defined Cognitive Biases as “CranioRectal Inversions” (CRI).

There are more posts to come which will first be featured at No Longer Quivering where you might want to watch for them, and they'll eventually find their way back here. For now, here are the posts on the subject through 2018. This list is not comprehensive, nor is it organized in a particular manner, save that they are loosely organized by general type (social, attributional, etc.). There are at least this many more to come.

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Zelophehad's Daughters

Originally appeared in 2010 at Quivering Daughters.com

An acquaintance of mine asked me what I knew of some of the ideas that neo-patriarchy had about unmarried women living alone. I explained that some sectors within patriarchy maintain that Numbers 30 requires unmarried adult women to have an assigned male overseer who is accountable for her and her affairs. Others in these circles maintain that all woman require a male as her a protector at all times to remain both spiritually and physically safe. Some actually extend this concept to support their idea that a woman who works outside the home (for a man other than father or husband) commits a form of adultery by serving the vision and efforts of another man.

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