I was watching a documentary earlier this evening, its called Jesus Camp and is about how the evangelic christian movement is indoctrinating the children of its members. This is one amazing movie.
It shows how the kids are at a bible camp and how they are exposed to ultra religious believes without anyone to doubt for them. They seem to have been raised to not doubt what the pastors or preachers are telling them (but doubt what all the others are telling them) and so they believe it fully when they hear sentences like "you are the chosen generation", "I believe that you are the generation that will bring forth the second coming of Jesus" and others in the same category. This does scare me since the kids become susceptible to messages like "you are gods warrior", "go fight the good fight" etc etc, how are they supposed to interpret that message? Is there any difference from these teachings and what the people of Taliban teach their children?
I admit that there was nothing in this movie that told straight out to the children, go and kill the enemy, and the only enemy that was mentioned there were liberals that were pro abortion (this documentary was taken as supreme justice Samuel Alito was nominated and later appointed for the supreme court) but that doesn't really matter. The ground work has been done, these kids are susceptible to all kinds of ideas their teachers like to teach them. They are open to anything, they don't question what they hear from their teachers.
Personally I don't mind grown up people wasting their time in stuff like that, but when it comes to kids, there I say stop. Kids should only get their education from moderates, be they religious or not.
2 comments:
I guess we are all brainwashed from the first minute we were born - in a different way. I agree with you Oli - but I was wandering if everyone would go through this "Jesus Camp" - than everyone would be brainwashed in the same way - holding the religion conflicts at minimum...
Well, I am not sure we could talk about "normal" teaching as brainwashing. To a certain degree it is, but still I feel like there is a difference. Normal schooling (like I went through it) was about learning a few things by heart like some poems, the multiplication table etc etc. There was no indoctrination going on.
As for everyone having the same ideas and the same brainwashing, thats a pretty bad solution, I for one would not like to live in a society like that. Give me rather a society where the youth rebel in the streets when their house is taken away from them (the riots in Copenhagen the past few days), or one nation suppresses another one because of who knows why (Israel and Palestine). Conflict is good to a certain degree though the two above example are extreem examples that I think should be avoided if possible.
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