Village Life in the United States

Since my reply to you in the other thread, I explored your website some more and found info on the various community businesses. So my question now is, did you form the community and then start the various businesses, or did your members bring their businesses with them when they joined? Because it would seem that success of a business is very dependent on location...Either way, I guess I am kind of jealous because my career has always dictated where I had to live - first Florida, now Kansas.
Quite like it here though, strange as that may sound coming from an atheist.

I guess what fascinates me about your community is that it is founded on people actually sharing some sense of what they want from living together. They are all neighbours by choice. I think many of us in modern society can seem alienated within our communities simply because we have little in common with our neighbours - and we are mostly not 'neighbours by choice', but 'neighbours by necessity'. That's one reason I choose to live out in the country with my nearest neighbors half a mile away. I don't feel I share much in common with the average citizen in this state.I think I would enjoy a community like yours, but I doubt there is one where I would fit in. I suspect such communities can only be tied together by similarity of religious belief (of which I have none), and this may reflect the true adaptive value of religion in the evolution of human societies: community coherence and commonality of purpose. In contrast, our present-day communities are structured more by commerce than by commonality of values such as religion. The only problems with religion arise when communites of different religions come in conflict with one another. Within a community, all seem to have generally positive influences.
Now if I could just believe...Edited by EZscience, : No reason given.

That's a good question and I think I have seen versions of that sentiment before."Christian is as Christian does", for example.As a non-believer, I am going to have to leave that for TL to answer. I don't think I have the qualifications to venture a guess.
(I feel a little out of my element over here in 'Faith and Belief' and I don't want to offend anyone )I guess it's a credit to TL that I am over here at all.
He is the first 'devout' Christian I have met on this board who has managed to put forward vision of Christian society that actually appealed to me, and an apparently functional one at that.
I wonder what Faith's village would look like if she had one

There's a whole lot of truth in that, jar.For an outsider like myself, its always dangerously tempting to lump all christians together (and religions, for that matter) and judge them on the basis of the actions of their extremist factions - kind of how Faith thinks of all muslims - but that isn't fair. It takes a concerted effort to restrain oneself and retain a more realistic perspective of the whole spectrum that exists within a religion.On the other side of the coin, it is the extremist factions and the 'sellers of religion' (could we call them 'pushers' ) that are really doing the most harm to their own religion.

Well I must say I like your interpretation of Christianity.
You have a way of making it sound a lot more appealling than most who go around preaching about it. (High praise coming from a confirmed old atheist like myself )
I think your town sounds a like a great place to live and good luck to all of you.