miss djax

Hi,

For some reason, I have been thinking about this alot lately, and I haven't really had a place to discuss, so I thought I would start a thread here..

My parents are both pastors, so we went to church stuff 24-7. Assmeblies of God ministers, no less.

So one year at summer camp, we had to spend an entire day pretending that Christianity had been completely banned and punishible by death. We had to spend the day having secret church services, and hide from the Police who would come around and try to find you. If your cabin's story was not at all convincing, (ie honestly officer, we weren't reading the bible, we were doing laundry), they would drag you kicking and screaming to Jail, where you were basically told 'had this been real, you would have been tortured til you died'. you had to spend the rest of the day in jail, thinking about missionaries who had died because they had dared to preach the word of god...

i remember being scared shitless.....


So that nite, at the church services (i never understood that, i was hoping camp was a time to get AWAY from church services), we had a speciall prayer session to pray that america would stay christian, and reminded repeatedly 'this is what could happen to you if you allow the united states to turn away from god'....

how horrifying is that? what they did, is that even legal?

miss djax

Brahma's atheist

That is horrible.
I hope people like that don't gain real power. It would be like the middle ages or that Inquitsition no expects. They worry about not being able to practise xtianity but I think they would do similar things to people of other faiths or sects or atheists if they were in power.
As for the legallity of it, maybe it's child cruelty though the adults are willing participants. It's like those fundy xtians in America who beat their kids in church because the bible says something like 'suffer little children to come unto me'. You would know the passage I'm sure. (I wonder if Catlick priests misread it as 'suffer little children to cum ON to me').I think those people got done by social services.

Old Man

What's "legal" got to do with it? "Legal" is human law, set by one man to another (says John Austin, the founder of modern Jurisprudence). "Legal" has no necessary connection with morality - see the final solution of the Jews in WWII - that was legal, but not moral.

So I guess, every person has to make an election - do they allow their personal standard of morality to be determined by "legality", or by something else?

I guess for Atheists, "legality" is the only standard of morality there is. But that begs the question, how can "legality" be justified from an atheist perspective? I am sure I don't know.

I guess the point of your summer camp was to try to get you to appriecate some of these things, and that it is not irrational for morality to be sourced from things "non-legal".

Gregg

While I think they went a bit too far, and I don't think they presented their message in the right way (they should have taken the angle of the U. S. turning away from FREEDOM, not from God--they have that typical modern fundy misunderstanding that America is a "Christian nation"), I do NOT think it is wrong to try to help teens get a taste of what it would be like to live in a real police state, even if it scares them a little. We take our freedoms far too lightly. It took thousands of years to win them and they could disappear practically overnight.

The problem, again, is that these people have the wrong idea about freedom. I think the people who run this camp should be put through a scenario where Christianity is the state religion, but THEIR verson of it has been branded as "heresy" due to some doctrinal disagreements with the official denomination, and they're threatened with imprisonment, torture, and burning at the stake if they don't "recant" and accept the "true faith." Perhaps then they would understand that real freedom is being able to practice any religion you want, or none, without anyone interfering.

But of course, the real purpose of this exercise was to make you fear the atheist liberals, who are of course godless commies at heart and are just itching to burn all the Bibles, turn the churches into museums, and throw the freedom-loving believers in the gulag. There's no middle ground for these folks. You're either a Christian Patriot Defender of Freedom and the Faith, or you're out to destroy America.

Gregg

Bree

Whoa, miss djax, I remember having a similar experience at a Christian summer camp - only I went to a Baptist one, not an Assembly of God one.

Gregg - we had a similar exercise in a world history class, only we pretended we were Russians and that the KGB was coming after us. That was much more fun and I think I learned something - although being carted off for "interrogation" (i.e. the men's locker room) by my teacher was quite scary!

My freakiest fundy moment had to be undergoing an exorcism.

diana

Didn't the Church do the equivalent of that to people in the Dark Ages?

Fascinating how it's been twisted into something they're afraid people will do to all the good God-fearing Xn folk.

d

Talulah

They are delusional. They can't seem to look around them to see and appreciate all the freedom and support they have. But that is the line they are fed by their religion. I remember it being at least mentioned every Sunday in church that we should be thankful for our freedoms as Christians, the right to meet and worship God because the way America is going, we might not have these freedoms for long. They would point out 'persecutions' they thought were taking place and use is to say that obviously 'bad times' were coming.

I used to think I was persecuted because not everyone thought like me. Basically I felt different, because I had different doctrinal views than most people in my high school, but the flak I got, I got because I tried have one on ten debates in the cafeteria.

Amos

But it is their right to be deluded in a nation where error has its own right to be promoted.

lpetrich

Actually, Xianity has had vicious fights over what is correct doctrine from the very beginning -- even the New Testament itself contains hints of that, such as warnings about "false Christs and false prophets" and against "what is falsely called knowledge". Likewise, among Church Fathers, Ignatius(?) denounces as "mad dogs" those who reject the historicity of Jesus Christ.

Constantine's official support of Xianity did not end this strife; it only got worse. In addition to suppressing other religions, they kept on fighting doctrinal deviants. There were controversies like Arian vs. orthodox (is the Son subordinate to the Father or are they coequal?), Monophysite vs. orthodox (did Jesus Christ have only the divine nature or both human and divine natures?), the homoousia - homoiousia controversy (do the Father and the Son have the same essences or similar essences?), whether the Virgin Mary should be called the "Mother of God" or the "Mother of Christ", etc. Such matters were sometimes decided by one faction arriving at a meeting first and locking out other factions.

The Eastern and Western Churches split over whether the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son, or just the Father -- and also the authority of the Pope.

The Crusades were Xianity's answers to Islam's Holy Wars -- some more Holy Wars.

In Russia, a Tsar once decided to "correct" the liturgy of the Church, but some of his subjects refused to go along, becoming "Old Believers".

Western Europe also saw a lot of persecution of heretics, like the crusade against the Albigensians. Such persecutions were successful until the Reformation, where Catholics and Protestants fought each other to a draw in the Wars of Religion. Is the Communion bread and wine really the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ with the appearance of bread and wine? Or do JC's flesh and blood coexist with bread and wine? Or is it all symbolic? Or do we just forget about Communion? Is salvation by faith and works or just by faith? Can one merit salvation or it is all God's decision? And has God decided it in advance? Are saints worth venerating? Should churches have lots of imagery? Should the clergy be celibate? Is the Pope the legitimate head of Xianity?

lpetrich

I think that they are doing projection -- projecting onto others a willingness to persecute. It's almost as if the only relationship they can imagine is persecution.