jochanaan wrote:Ramblinman, yes. We who find less than acceptance for our naked views from "traditional" churches find a refuge of similar minds here, with an intriguing variety of viewpoint and thought pattern. If I didn't have such in "the real world" and here, I don't know what I'd do. Fall back into textiled thinking? Not a chance! But maybe hide my naked thoughts under a cloak of "talking around" the subject... *sigh* Thank God for sites like this one!
We are all born into a culture and we more or less accept it to get along, take a measure of pride in our folk ways, but some of it doesn't work very well.
A few hundred years ago peasant folk across Europe wore clothes much of the year because the weather doesn't allow nudity all the time, but groups of women would head off to the local river, perhaps the seaside to unashamedly bathe on a hot summer day or when the body became so grimy that an outdoor dip was essential to wash the skin. Men and their sons did likewise and once in a while men and women shared the water, but generally not. However, naked bathers didn't seem particularly perturbed by being seen bathing by the opposite sex. Our Continental forebears all did it at one time or another.
And this nude bathing seems to be a vestige of even older times when woodland peoples dispensed with clothes entirely during the summer, dancing, gathering berries and wild herbs, exploring the deep woods in rustic nudity to the wonder of more settled folk. Rural folk tend to hold onto old ways.
Somewhere along the way, certain elements of the Protestants decided that the body was indecent, a sexual temptation when bare. This was primarily in England, but the ban on outdoor nudity mostly applied to women and more so in urban areas less so in rural areas. On the Continent, rural women continued to bathe nude by the sea or nearby rivers as always.
By the time the FKK movement was born, Europe had become largely urbanized and nude bathing was out of favor, but this change was new, perhaps one need only look a generation back. One's parents or grandparents could remember the joys of summertime nudity.
America was initially settled largely by people from the British Isles. Not all were Puritans with all the emotional baggage about nudity, a goodly number of settlers were accustomed to bathing outdoors in summer, though segregated by sex. One of my ancestors settled in a section of Tennessee near "Pretty Creek". It was not an ugly creek by any means, but the "Pretty" in the name came from the fact that local women would bathe there, not entirely out of sight of passing men and boys. They attempted a measure of privacy, but were not unduly bothered by being seen in those days.
Over time, women were expected to bathe indoors in tubs, washbasins or whatever they had for bathing.
Men were still not stigmatized for swimming nude in farm ponds, rivers in rural areas. The cities imposed rules against nudity sooner than the rural places my family lived. The YMCA and some Midwestern schools carried on the rural tradition of male skinny dipping into urban swimming pools, but this too fell out of favor for several reasons.
The FKK movement spread to America in the 1930's on the backs of French and German immigrants and it seemed to really strike a chord with many families with deep roots in America.
America has reached a point where most of the population is urban or suburban and could not be easily bathe nude outdoors without being seen.
But American culture is much more resistant to adopting FKK, nudism, naturism than continental Europe a century ago. We have written pages about the cultural changes that led us to where we are: a badly misunderstood movement, opposed by many church groups on spurious reasons.
So this and a few other sites are a place of refuge, but we are also here to plan a comeback.
As I said before, if our struggle were merely about fighting for the right to go skinny dipping at the city pool one evening a month, it would hardly seem worth the bother. But as serious students of the Bible, we see this loathing of nudity as the tip of the iceberg.
The over-reliance on our leaders to explain the will of God to us instead of searching the scriptures daily...
Treating the present rules of our culture as if they had equal weight with scripture.
Ignorance of church history, even our own recent history when it comes to nudity and whole host of other things.
And most damning of all, the shunning of those who dare disagree. While we don't want to embrace sin, why have we refused to embrace sinners who want to return to the faith?
While we have different understandings of theology that lead to different houses of worship, can there not be a measure of mutual respect among churches?
Our problem with nudity is one of many. The Pharisees of our day profess Christ as savior, but live the same legalistic life that our Lord railed against.
