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Time Warp Tuesday: Revisiting the Petri dish

I’m excited to be part of the inaugural outing of Time Warp Tuesday hosted by Four of a Kind, in which we bring back a post from our past and look at it anew.

Our prompt this time is Waiting. I’m stretching the meaning a bit to mean waiting for the wheels of justice to turn, as they have just this week completedtheir cycle in one notorious case.

I’m going with recent history. In 2008 I wrote a post about the FLDS sect (Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) when its practices came into public scrutiny due to a raid on its compound. I was wondering what it was like for those FLDS women, who seemed scarily Stepford-ish. Brainwashed, clearly.

But then I began wondering how much of a difference there really was between those women and me. And maybe even you.

This week, the sect’s leader, Warren Jeffs, was sentenced to life plus 20 years in prison for se.x.ually as.sault.ing children. So I thought my post from 3½  years ago was a good one to trot out.

You can find the post here, in which I examined the Petri dishes of culture every human lives in. Time Warp Tuesday asks, “Has your perspective changed?” Mine has not. I selected this post because I think it’s wise, when I’m feeling judgmental, for me to seek the ways I exhibit the thing I’m being judgmental about.

Please visit Time Warp Tuesdays for more on this week’s topic of Waiting.

6 Responses

  1. Here from Time Warp…I read and commented on your post from the past and I really respect that your perspective hasn’t changed since you wrote it. I know how important it is to be able to evolve in life, especially when new and relevant information comes to light, however I also appreciate that there are times when we need to hold true to our beliefs and the passage of time doesn’t change the way we think or feel about something.

    This was my favorite part of your new post: “I think it’s wise, when I’m feeling judgmental, for me to seek the ways I exhibit the thing I’m being judgmental about.”

    I think you are very wise and am grateful for another opportunity to learn from you. Thank you so much for sharing, for participating in my first blog hop and as always, for your support and encouragement. I hope that you will “do the Time Warp again” with us next week or another Tuesday in the future. 🙂

  2. Wow, what an incredibly thought provoking post. Your right that those women are acting just like everyone else acts, they were just doing so in a different and separate culture so it seems very foreign and so easy to judge. But they are not so different from us, they are just being raised in a different petri dish.

    Having spent a lot of time away from the United States as a child (I grew up in Hong Kong until middle school) I always felt kind of removed from the culture; it took a long time for me to be re-immersed and feel like it was my own. But still, I think that time away has always given me a little more perspective than others who have always lived here. The reality is every culture looks strange to people who are used to something else and as hard as it is we must remind ourselves constantly not to judge. Especially as the world gets smaller and smaller.

    Thanks for the reminder and the perspective!

  3. I have thought about this post for a few hours: thank you for raising such intense questions about how much people are shaped by their environment.

    It is easy to dismiss the women of FLDS, but they were immersed in a culture their whole lives, from birth onwards, isolated from the rest of the world and in a completely controlled environment. It’s somewhat akin to the Jaycee Duggans case, except she remembered her other life that she had lived for 13 years.

    Thank you for making me think. I’ll be pondering this for a while…

  4. I’m totally a non-conformist. I’m having a difficult time at work lately, because the people in my section are clearly creating extra work for themselves because they are not thinking about the issues (they’ve shown me evidence of this – I’m not jumping to conclusions). Someone tells them that a method is progressive, and they just accept it, rather than questioning it. It’s making me crazy because I am going to end up doing extra, unnecessary work because someone claimed “it’s scientific” when it’s really just an attempt to avoid being questioned. Making me crazy!!!

    So, am I always out of my element? Or is my culture that of the questioners, and I’m just rarely in their company? I’m not much for judging – whatever works for others is (mostly) fine with me. But if I’m not imposing my beliefs on you, please don’t try to convince me that I’m in the wrong when it comes to your beliefs. (Not that I’m not open to new ideas, but I try to think things through before I commit to a position.)

    You are pretty wise, though..

  5. Bringing back our posts from the past…what a cool idea. Like one of the other comments, I can’t get your thought-provoking post off my mind Lori. I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly sways my views about this particular topic. I wondered if it’s because my adoptive mother was raised in a strong Mormon family in Salt Lake and I know for a fact that their religious beliefs tend to be where the men play a more dominant role than the women. Although, I am fully aware this is a far-extreme radical off-shoot of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints, my views are perhaps a little more jaded from my own life experiences. It’s hard for me to fathom any mother standing by and watching as a grown adult “leader” violates their helpless, whimpering daughter and not seeing it as being wrong. Even animals out in the wild seem to be more protective of their offspring.

    1. “Even animals out in the wild seem to be more protective of their offspring.”

      So true. As you and others have pointed out, it makes you wonder what kind of “nurture” can override our “nature.”

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