Not everyone shares the same sentiment for the environment. Christians, I have noticed, seem to be against respecting the environment because they are afraid they will fall into some sort of pagan, earth worship. I have an uncle who takes particular relish in not caring about the environment. He seems to get some sort of pleasure in being against environmentalism. Once he was showing me a recycled pen and telling me how much he hated it. He said he hated it because it was recycled. He said it was the ugliest pen and the crappiest pen he had ever seen. He was showing it to me to make a point, that he hated environmentalism.
I have an 'uncle' who is a Christian minister. He sneered at the Buddhist religion when I asked him about his trip to Asia and he expressed racial prejudice when his daughter brought a black friend and sat in the front row. So I stopped going to all family reunions there and seeing them.
My family is my spiritual family. I no longer have a family based on descent. Just people I know. That is a broken tradition.... It no longer has significance. Someone may be in a spiritual family that considers themselves a niece, nephew, grandmother etc. They are part of my family....My Spiritual Family.
Christians? I have met true Christians but that's just a name for many people. It has no meaning. There are more people without such classifications which fit the true description much better.
Throughout my life I have seen those who have had pride of pedigree that has taken them away from their spiritual family. Some people look at people like dogs with impressive ancestors. Your spiritual family seldom has the same graphs on your soul as your pedigree.
My experience of my own Christian family is very similar, Steve. Our religious differences seem to be the unbridgeable gap.
It's not uncommon to find strains of racism in Christianity. They seem to have a very long history together. My cousin told me that her father had said that the black people were destroying the white race. He would never say this openly, but I have no doubt he believes it and that she was telling the truth. It is just a fault in reasoning. I have a book called "Race and Reason" which was my great granddad's. In was reading through it and the guy was giving all of these calmly reasoned arguments for why segregation is necessary on rational and calmly reasoned grounds. He argued that the people who were for integration were influenced to much by sentiment and not the facts (the same argument that was made towards the segregationists).
Keep in mind, I was raised in Alabama.
But I have experienced that same split with Christian relatives as you, Steve. My whole extended family is Christian, on both sides. Not a dissident among them. Uncles, aunts, cousins, all Christian. It is really amazing. You would think there would be at least one stragler besides me. My sister is almost not Christian, but even if not a card carrier, she is still Christian in her psychological structure.
I noticed as time went by that I was developing a sort of "lost sinner" complex. I was picking it up from my relatives that I was a lost sinner. Not that they were saying that. But subtle things can give you the idea. So you can see that makes communication tough. Still, they do not try to convert me anymore like they did when I was younger and not as capable of challenging them.
Now I assume they just write me off as lost. Strange.
