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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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This was the philosophy of the church I grew up in as well.

It was full of conscientious middle class families, and the working class ones were the sort who owned a small landscaping company or something.

Even among people sort of average in conscientiousness but a bit odd, it didn't completely work. The talent my father brought to the chili cookout was... reading T S Elliot poems in a corner. He had previously worked in a restaurant, as the person in charge of soups. So I'm not sure why we didn't bring any chili, now that I think of it. Maybe he doesn't like chili. I did enjoy the TS Elliot more than the chili, but we were the only ones.

We are the sort of mildly chaotic people who need a monthly Clean the House Day, where everyone stays home and cleans the house, otherwise it will just become increasingly filthy forever.

hydroacetylene's community sounds even less conscientious than my family. Some people will decide drinking beer and playing video games are their vocation unless firmly directed otherwise. Even the ones who think it's their vocation to keep taking college classes as long as the government will keep lending them money, with no plans for using the knowledge productively, sometimes need to be told that it's a bad idea.

Well, this can still be corrected without resorting to biological birthrights. That is, the community can encourage and educate (or pressure and threaten, if we're not mincing words) people who seem to be slacking off and not contributing in good faith. You're supposed to, of your own volition, do the best you can. But if you aren't doing that people can notice and call you out for it. And this can be done in a nice way "hey, I notice you are really good at cooking and whenever you make soup everyone loves it, why don't you do that more?" or in a mean way "You don't seem to respect others or want to contribute, because you keep ignoring the previous ten conversations we've had about this. This is not Godly behavior and you need to re-evaluate your priorities if you want to remain a member in good standing."

And sometimes this leads to conflict and drama and politics. Our one pastor ended up getting kicked out by the Elders for reasons that aren't quite clear to me because they didn't publicize all the drama, and I don't think was anything particularly scandalous in non-church terms, I think it was some combination of them not liking his preaching style and him getting worked up and yelling at people when he got angry or something (This was told to me second hand by my parents, so it's not like he was going off on people in public, but apparently it was bad enough to contribute to his removal). But my point is that there are still all the normal corrective measures of a community. When someone does wrong other people can push back. Everyone should fulfill a role to the best of their ability, and should be pressured if they're not fulfilling a useful role, and none of that requires the role be based on their gender, race, or perceived social class except indirectly as those influence their abilities and preferences. Your role is a combination of your abilities, desires, AND the needs of the community. The problem was not that it was a women or someone else's role to read poems in a corner instead of bringing chili and your father falsely slotted himself into that role in place of them, the problem was that this was not a useful role that anybody needed to fulfill.