When it is late but you are not sleepy, that is the time a television documentary about a bunch of religious nutters is very welcome.
Last night was such a time for me and luckily Channel 4 obliged with a program titled Jesus Camp.
Was Jesus camp? you might well ask. Well he did spend a lot of time with a bunch of male buddies, but that proves nothing.
Jesus Camp is a Guantanamo style institution where American parents of the fanatical tendency send their kids during school holidays. The children are indoctrinated, threatened with an eternity spent burning in hell, and for all we know waterboarded for not being able to recite The Book Of Leviticus word for word. Leviticus is all that crap about God kicking the living crap out of people who put on a woollen sweater while wearing cotton guzzies, eat shrimps or lobster, or commit The Sin Of Onan (knock one off the wrist to you and me. All these and a million other things are abominations to God and unless children are taught this they will be tempted by Satan.
Satan is everywhere according to Pastor Becky as Jesus Camp, but most of all he is in Harry Potter books.
“If Harry Potter had been in the Old Testament, he would have been put to death,” rants Becky, conveniently forgetting that Moses hit a rock with his shaft (oops, pardon,) and water gushed out, Ezekiel “connected dem dry bones” and Jesus was into tricks with water and wine, bread and sardines and raising revitalising stiffs. just think, if he had confused himself and turned the water into sardines history might have taken a different course.
Had Harry Potter been in The Old Testament he would have been put to death before he ever got his wand out to impress The Daughters of Israel. He is a gentile, a non Jews and the Jews were on a mission to prove they were God’s chosen people by killing everybody who wasn’t a Jew.
Nothing much changes in Israel.
I digress however, back to Pastor Becky and he team of fruitcakes. They were all mad as a box of frogs except for the cook, Pastor Bake. The staff of Jesus Camp were on a mission to reclaim America from Satan who has taken over and is everywhere.
Pastor Becky likes preaching to children because “they are so open and useable to Christianity.”
Now where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, who said “Give me the child to the age of seven etc.”
No marks for originality Pastor Becky. No marks for anything in fact, especially not science. Becky believes Satan is responsible for children being taught evolutionary science, physics, biology and liberal arts (all of which are abominations to God we assume. Yes, Satan has control of everything according to the Jesus Camp team (this may come as a surprise to Warren Buffet we think) he is even in the computers and had caused the network to crash during a previous Power Point presentation.
So Becky led the kids in a prayer asking God to protect the system.
Satan in the spreadsheets is an absolute embuggerance of course but the system crash or anything else that brought a Power Point(less) presentation to an early conclusion might be seen as proof of the infinite goodness of God by some.
Others, like myself, would simply see it as further proof of the crappiness of Microsoft software.
TODAY WE COMMENTED ON:
We Lost This Thing In February
Deliberative Democracy and the scientific method go together like chocolate and vanilla.
Teacher sacked in USA after showing class a simple conjuring trick. An article by Amanda Marcotte at Pandangon, very relevant to the article I posted today.