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Background
The Minimalist Group was founded in 1998 as a not-for-profit organization devoted to helping people become more independent and less dependent on the government.
Founding members realized our government was becoming too controlling and meddlesome in the daily lives of average citizens. Further, it wasn’t difficult to see our economic house was built on a stack of feathers with little to support it. Decent jobs were vanishing, health care and energy costs were rising quickly, college tuition costs were out of control…
Most Americans were at fault as well…living beyond their means, careless use of credit and afflicted with having a “I want everything” mentality.
Building a self sufficient lifestyle is the goal. That means finding ways of becoming self employed, using energy alternatives and the like. Through seminars, how-to expos and printed materials, we provide information on how to achieve this lifestyle.
Our members come from all backgrounds and faiths. However, as most of us have discovered, with more than 1700 Christian sects and numerous non-Christian faiths…each seems to believe their faith is the only true one. It’s our contention that far too many zealots and fundamentalists have only hurt mainstream religious doctrines.
Indeed, the thought of killing in the name of God is ludicrous.
Like the majority of our Founding Fathers, most of us are deists. We believe in a cosmic consciousness, a prime mover, a God. However, we don’t carry the baggage that most religious dogma calls for.
Deism is a philosophical belief in the existence of a God on the basis of reason, and observation of the natural world alone. Deists generally reject the notion of supernatural revelation as a basis of truth and religious dogma.
Deism in the United States
In the United States, Enlightenment philosophy (which itself was heavily inspired by deist ideals) played a major role in creating the principle of separation of church and state, expressed in Thomas Jefferson's letters, and the principle of religious freedom expressed in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. American Founding Fathers, or Framers of the Constitution, who were especially noted for being influenced by such philosophy include Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Cornelius Harnett, Gouverneur Morris, and Hugh Williamson. Their political speeches show distinct deistic influence. Other notable Founding Fathers may have been more directly deist. These include James Madison, John Adams, possibly Alexander Hamilton, Ethan Allen [32] and Thomas Paine (who published The Age of Reason, a treatise that helped to popularize deism throughout America and Europe).
Living the simple, yet abundant life.
Having grown up in the 1950s in a lower middle class area, it was rare for a family to have two cars, two televisions (owning a color TV meant you were well off), a stand alone freezer and most of the residents in our neighborhood had party lines as it was the least expensive phone service to have in your home.
Today, most people spend more on multiple phone and internet services than the amount of my parent’s first mortgage!
My mother was a stay-at-home mom and we didn’t have much money and so she would take in laundry, sell greeting cards and often became the neighborhood hairdresser – all to make extra cash. As a child of the Depression she knew how to squeeze a dollar from a dime. I still recall being fooled by her ‘mock’ Ritz Cracker Apple Pie!
The mothers in our neighborhood were telepathic. They ALL automatically seemed to know when one or more of us kids were up to no good. As soon as I’d walk in the door after performing some dastardly deed, the look on her face was an immediate sign I was in trouble. There was no Nanny State Police to keep a parent from administering corporal punishment – AND we kids learned our lessons well.
"The remarkable thing about my mother is that for 30 years she served us nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found."
A bag of 12 White Castle hamburgers was a buck; gasoline averaged 10 cents a gallon; a home - $10,000 (now you can’t build a garage for that); a pack of cigarettes (mother smoked then) was 25 cents! Most kids in our neighborhoods wore hand-me-down clothing and who knew what a designer label was?
To get money as children, we scrounged pop bottles to return for their deposit, we raked leaves, cut grass, shoveled snow, washed cars and so on. We didn’t need permits to work from the government; we needed money!
The moms in our neighborhood watched out for all the kids who played outside every chance we could. No one could afford daycare. We walked or rode our bike to school. We had gym class every day. It was a rarity then to see an overweight kid (or adult).
So what happened?
The government happened. Somewhere along the way, the government decided it needed to be bigger; monstrously bigger and that would cost all of us…except large corporations. It wasn’t long before having the American Dream meant both spouses worked outside the home just to have enough money after taxes to buy the stuff Wall Street pushed to us. This worked well for awhile until Wall Street got even greedier and began shipping decent jobs to offshore locations and eliminating health and pension benefits.
Living a life of abundance is still available to you if you readjust your priorities.
There is no need to deprive yourself and that’s what this site and the minimalists are all about. Be sure to see our links section for our sister site and other useful resources. Be sure to sign up for our free newsletter to stay abreast of new resources.
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minimalistgroup@yahoo.com
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"An American who can make money, invoke God, and be no better than his neighbor, has nothing to fear but truth itself."
--Marya Mannes