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greevous0079 karma

If you haven't seen it before you really need to watch this documentary and its follow up.. Finally, Heather has done some TED talks as well. Here's another one.

My brother-in-law went deaf as an adult, and my wife and I learned ASL in order to be able to communicate with him better. We've tracked the lives of the Artinian family for 20 years now. It's truly amazing watch Heather doing a TED talk. She's grown up to be such a lovely young woman.

greevous0063 karma

Heh. I've been a hearing signer for over a decade, and I never made the connection until you just said that. Wow. So culturally Deaf people are vaguely hinting "vampire" when they sign that someone has a cochlear implant... completely missed that.

greevous0035 karma

Plenty of hearing people know ASL and hang out with deaf folks.

It depends on what you mean by "hang out." They certainly can interact, but it's a rare hearing person who is viewed as culturally Deaf. Even many hearing children of deaf parents (CODAs) experience a certain degree of exclusion.

Lots of people in wheelchairs also band together to form communities for mutual support and friendship

This simply isn't true, at least not in a qualitative way. Culture is built around a number of foundations, and language and history are two important ones. Being in a wheel chair doesn't change your language or your cultural history.

greevous0025 karma

The issue is one of perspective. From the perspective of someone who is culturally Deaf, it's not "denying improvement", it's maximizing access to a culture.

Reframe it another way to see if it resonates better. Let's say someone is raised culturally urban African American in a poor neighborhood. Their entire family is of that culture, and has been for as long as anyone can remember. Suddenly, someone shows up with a device that when implanted makes their skin turn white and deposits $1000 a month in a bank account that they can access. What would be the reaction of this person's family? It would be incredibly mixed, right? Some people would focus on the benefits of $1000 a month being deposited in their account. Some would be extremely distrustful. Some would be jealous. Some would feel like something was being taken away from them. Like all analogies, this one is imperfect, but it can help frame up why CIs are so controversial for the culturally Deaf.

greevous006 karma

Huh? Baptists don't baptize infants, and neither do Anabaptists. They both practice "believer's baptism." Most fundamentalists believe the same thing. Infant baptism is associated with the older parts of Christianity (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican, and a few of the churches that emerged from them).

Fundamentalism isn't unique to any particular type of Christian (it simply means "someone who emphasizes the fundamentals of the faith), but it grew out of a kind of "reaction" to mainline Protestant practices in the 1800s and 1900s. Particularly influenced were Baptist and Presbyterian denominations.

So I'm not sure how you can say any particular denomination "aren't fundies." There are "fundies" in almost all denominations. They represent the more conservative elements of the denomination. That said, if you were to line up an "average representative" of each Protestant denomination from "more fundamentalist" to "more progressive," you'd almost certainly put the average Baptist and the average Anabaptist closer to the "fundamentalist" side of this dichotomy than the "progressive" side.