I had a family gathering on my dads side of the family on Saturday and it is so depressing to see how distant everybody is becoming from one another. The obvious problem is most people on my dads side of the family are not in the Mystical Body of Christ and therefore have no unity.

Now that the whole world is falling apart and even the Republican party is showing to most of them to not be conservative, they do not open their mouths because they do not want to expose to one another they are not conservative. Each one of them has a different opinion on what it means to be conservative. Many of them use to all think they had unity in the Republican party.

I am assuming most of my dads relatives still want to think of themselves as conservative even though each of them are not united together. I can tell they are very afraid of me, as, they will not bring up any of these issues with me anymore even though everything I have told them ahead of time either has come true or is in the process of becoming reality.

I do see some great signs on the horizon with Russia and “The Principle” movie. Hopefully many more people will listen once the world-view they now hold on to  increasingly is proven false.

Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promise of Christ.

I had a family gathering on my dads side of the family on Saturday and it is so depressing to see how distant everybody is becoming from one another. The obvious problem is most people on my dads side of the family are not in the Mystical Body of Christ and therefore have no unity.

Yes, the same thought has occurred to me.  I converted to the Catholic Church and over the years, the differences in outlooks becomes more and more stark.  I pray for them everyday.  

Unfortunately for many Americans politics is their true religion.  My experience is that many political "conservatives" are only fiscal conservatives but are truly social liberals.

I used to attend a study group on the Constitution and was amazed by how many people looked upon our "founding fathers" like saints.

Marsha

I am assuming most of my dads relatives still want to think of themselves as conservative even though each of them are not united together. I can tell they are very afraid of me, as, they will not bring up any of these issues with me anymore even though everything I have told them ahead of time either has come true or is in the process of becoming reality.

I have noticed the same thing.  I remember predicting the recession and the 2009 financial crisis -- not in detail but in outline.  Then I remember predicting that Catholics would almost certainly be ostracised for not accepting gαy marriage.  Nevertheless, despite a solid track record there, family members scoff at my current predictions regarding a worse depression and more open persecution.  At least, that was the case for a long time.  Things seem to be changing now, but it's still an uphill battle.  

The tendency amongst most seems to be towards outsourcing one's thinking to purported experts -- judges, pundits, media personalities, politicians, trendy book writers.  Conventionalism seems to be the enemy not only of religion, but thought, as well.  The strange thing today is that all of the conventions style themselves as being revolutionary -- women's liberation, rock'n'roll, individualism, divorce, marrying for romantic love untethered to common sense, birth control, fornication, etc.  

People can flatter themselves as being rebellious despite tediously and narrow-mindedly conforming to benighted contemporary social etiquette as if it were the most self-evident dogma -- nothing truer had ever been thought.  Suggesting that people knew better in 1914 than they do in 2014 is now branded as extreme and revolutionary thinking, which is a great historical irony and is truly hilarious in a way.  People even use all the same arguments once rejected by revolutionaries as oppressive to the dynamism of the human spirit -- "The smart men in society don't think there's a problem," "If we followed what you recommend, so many people would lose their livelihoods," "You would shake up the foundations of society and break apart families," "If you were to say that in front of my friend, who falls under your label, he would fight you and I wouldn't step in," etc.

Behold, the great herd.  People don't know what they want or what they think.  Most people couldn't explain why they believe what they do.  In the main, the great majority of people feel their way through life.  They are easily manipulated, their appeals to conscience are fleeting (look at the sodomite marriage issue or feminism in the workplace -- always appeals to some imaginary moral principle one might discover in one's heart if he searches enough), they justify what they want, and they want only what they cannot have.  People who get sick thinking of women being banned from voting now would have been getting sick at the thought of women voting if the discussion were taking place one hundred years ago.

Reasoning with the unreasonable is like pulling teeth, since reason is usually only incidentally present in such meetings.  Very few men really think.  Most just rationalise their feelings.