ThinkingTeen Goes to Jesus Camp

So why was I gone for so long after Brother Jeff’s “reconversion”?  Did I reconvert too?  Did I go back to Wicca instead?  Did I get kidnapped by Tuomas Holopainen and Emppu Vuorinen (I wish!)?  Did school start?  Did I die?  Did I have extreme writer’s block?

Don’t worry, guys, I’m perfectly fine.  I didn’t reconvert or turn to Wicca.  Sadly, I didn’t get kidnapped by Tuomas or Emppu.  School still hasn’t started (whoohoo!) I’m still alive and I no longer have writer’s block… which is why I’m writing now.

All I have to say is… it’s very odd that my near-reconversion almost coincided with Brother Jeff’s.  It’s always far easier when someone you know is going through the same thing… sorta.  So for now I am still an atheist.

When trying to get back to blogging I got quite confused as to what to write about.  At first I was going to on about how if the homophobic and sexist laws in the Old Testament were outdated and symbolic, why follow Genesis then?  But no, I got sidetracked and started on other stuff… I forget what I was finally going to blog about, but it got changed.  You see, I was goofing off on X-C and came across a video of Jesus Camp highlights.  This quite disturbed me.

So now I’m blogging about Jesus Camp.

I should admit right now that I have never actually seen Jesus Camp.  I’ve heard about it nearly non-stop from the atheist/non-Christian circles I’ve been in.  However… I never once saw it.  I never even saw so much as a clip of it.  Well, the video on Youtube quite educated me.  Here’s the link:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LACyLTsH4ac

I’ll comment on the separate parts.

“It is our firm belief that there are two types of people in this world: those who love Jesus, and those who don’t.”  This is…actually true.  “But what about those of us who are indifferent?!” Well, if you’re indifferent, you don’t love him, now do you?  I don’t love him– I’m indifferent.  The crazies in the video are a tad obsessed with him.  On one hand it sounds crazy and hateful-it’s probably meant that way too- on the other hand, it actually makes a bit of sense.

The second part freaked me out a little.  Most of the kids in the video look about 10-11.  To my understanding some are as young as 6.  I don’t know how old the oldest ones are, but they seem about 13-14.  (Wikipedia says nothing of their ages!  gah!)  the main thing that stuck out to me was that they were praying in tongues.  I should re-state that I come from a somewhat-Baptist family, and Baptists generally don’t do the whole “speakign in tongues” thing.  It was a bit unsettling to see a bunch of 10 year olds crying, raising their hands to the sky, and shouting something to the effect of “ALSOIRWMMLASDODMV AOEIPOQWMVLF SLDFKSOSF!” (I now have a very evil urge to “translate” what they’re saying… but I won’t.)

The part about Harry Potter is frankly, bullshit.  “Harry Potter would have been put to death!”  Okay, Jesus tried to get people to listen to him and did a bit of magic (water to wine, resurrecting people, killing fig trees) and he got put to death in a very horrible and painful and bloody manner….but that’s the New Testament.  But what about Moses?  Moses spoke to a burning bush, parted the Red Sea, struck a rock with a stick and made water flow out of it… and he’s a hero.  In the Old Testament, no less.  Harry Potter waves a  stick around, yells stuff in Latin/Greek/Aramaic (same languages the Bible is written in!)  and shoots water at people, dangles people upside-down in midair, stuns his enemies, and changes the color of his eyebrows.  And get this– if you look at the Harry Potter story, it’s actually about the struggle between good and evil and is in fact quite Christian.  Dumbledore=God, Voldemort=Satan, Harry=Jesus.  If somebody ever runs into Fischer, please tell her that I said she should get her head out of her arse and actually READ THE FREAKING BOOKS.

(Sorry about that– it’s jsut that reading Harry Potter is the main reason I stopped going to that last church.)

Then there’s the part where Fischer says “If you’re one way at church and another outside of it, you are a phony and a hypocrite and you have no place in God’s army!” Yeah, way to go, BITCH.  Just tell a bunch of 10 year olds they’re fakes and phonies and sinners and God hates them.  That’s a lovely thing to beat into children’s heads!  She then commands them to be washed in the “water of Your [God's] Word” which she pours from their hands from a freaking water bottle. How fake is that?!  Once I got over the utter silliness of the water bottle, I became deeply unsettled.  These kids were absolutely sobbing– curling up on the floor bawling their eyes out.  It’s scary what these kids are taught.  I nearly cried with them.  In about 15 years these kids will either be in therapy for horrendous self-esteem issues, anorexia, bulimia, depression… or worse, dead because they committed suicide.  It’s terrifying and appalling.

I watched the video twice.  the first time I just couldn’t watch past that part.  I don’t think I’ll be going to see the full documentary anytime soon.  I’ll comment on the rest of the video later, so that nobody dies of tl;dr… or so I don’t wind up further depressing myself about this.

~ by thinkingteen on August 16, 2008.