Posted by:
Richard Foxe
(
)
Date: February 09, 2015 07:57PM
(I discovered this site over a decade ago while I was researching stuff about a friend's mormon heritage)
Perhaps the arguing is a kind of reveling in the new freedom to disagree and criticize, which was repressed as church members. Why it continues, I'm not sure, other than to some it feels good, gives them a sense of authority, or is part of an ongoing crusade for things that were formerly forbidden and against the forbidders.
What I find most curious are the regular newsflashes that some religious figure or group, or even a simple member, has done something stupid or harmful, as if this "wrong" behavior is a direct result of their religion (and the implication that this doesn't happen to the secular, or that it somehow elevates the secular), or perhaps a schadenfreude that someone has been caught in a hypocrisy.
I like the advice which Bradley quoted from Wayne Dwyer on another (closed) thread: "When you have a choice between being right and being kind, be kind." That 'rightness' is an ego booster and it usually entails making someone else out to be 'wrong.' This is sometimes difficult in the halfway house that a recovery board represents. People here are given license, even encouragement, to go through shouting, fuming, vomiting, sweating, and shivering stages as they shed decades of baggage. Hence venting in "radical honesty" ways that would not be acceptable in general social relations is often given a pass.
But (and I know this echoes a Mormon meme, but as I said, I have never been a member)I wonder sometimes at the use people's "rightness," or conviction of truth, is being put to. I have been living in Japan, where the typical Western idea of factual truth is routinely balanced against relational truth, often deemed more urgent in collectivist societies. Radical Honesty argues that the brutal truths are always good, hence are fundamentally "kind," but from what I've seen, that can be just a smokescreen for interpersonal brutality.