Here’s a terrible thing you can look at.
It’s a compilation of bits from training videos by The Good News Club, so you can see what absurd frightening wrong things they tell children…on school property.
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The first one quotes Romans saying there is no one who is right with god, no not one. The instructor says no one is right with god because sin. What is sin? It’s anything you think, say, or do that does not please god. She says it twice, to make sure it sticks and frightens the children. Then she lists some of those things – disobeying your parents or teachers, lying so you don’t get caught, or taking something that doesn’t belong to you, are all things that do not please god.
You know what she doesn’t say? How she knows. How does she know disobeying the teacher does not please god? Hey what if the teacher tells the child to disobey her parents? What pleases god then?
Then she says god say sin must be punished. The punishment (breathlessly) is to be separated from god.
Sounds good to me!
It’s basic fundy bullshit, the small fraction I’ve been able to make myself watch so far. Just mindless rule-reciting and pretending it all comes from god and that the people saying this actually know it when they don’t know it at all. But it’s an outrage that they’re shoving it at children. (And much of the material, I know from Katherine Stewart, is much worse than this.)
Oh, looky! Jesus loves them so much that not only does he want them not to go to Hell for being Sinners, they got some free t-shirts!
Held after hours in public schools?? Somehow I wonder if those schools are allowing after hours satanic get togethers. mmmm?
Scary. I can remember learning this shit when I was little.
I wonder if the Good News Club v Milford Central School court ruling means that they have to if a satanic group asks.
This mention of ‘pleasing god’ keeps making me think of a thread subtitle sometimes used over on rpg.net called “Pleasing To the Ebon Dragon” – the Ebon Dragon being essentially the spirit of malicious fuckery from the game Exalted. Pretty much anything done through malice or ignorance that raises the aggregate total of human misery is considered Pleasing To the Ebon Dragon.
The Ebon Dragon must be happy, indeed.
Well, there are plenty of explicitly-religious schools around.
I was schooled within a Catholic system, for example.
(And there are weird ones around, too)
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Personally, I think people have it easy these days; the internet is an abyss of information.
Sometimes I think if there is a god, it’s the Ebon Dragon.
“It’s basic fundy bullshit, the small fraction I’ve been able to make myself watch so far. ”
You were lucky Ophelia. I pressed the play button and got a soundtrack on of this eager young woman in a pink sweater who is infected with this bloody viral mindrot, and it took me a while to figure out how to turn it off.
Sin and redemption; scary bullshit as fed to first-graders. Great start to the day.
One big problem is that these Good News Clubs are aimed at children too young to make a distinction between “school” and “after-school club”. People try to defend these programs by saying “It’s not part of the school curriculum, it’s just a fun little AFTER-school club, not part of SCHOOL at all!” For kids this age — the early primary grades — “school” is a place, but “school” is also what happens in that place. They can’t make the distinction that after the 2:30 bell rings, what happens in school is somehow no longer school. To their minds, “God says that sinning is like being in darkness, because you are apart from him and cannot find your way to him. Sin has blinded you from seeing the truth about yourself, and about God. What is sin? Sin is anything you think, say, or do, that does not please God” is something they’re learning in school: they’re not going to think “It’s not school, it’s a little fun afternoon club that just happens to take place in the school building, in no way connected to actual school!” If you ask a child in one of these clubs, “What is sin?”, zie will say, “Sin is anything you think, say, or do that does not please God” — and if your next question is “Where did you learn that?”, the child will respond, without an instant’s hesitation, “In school.”
It is child abuse. No less.
Hi kiddies … today we are going to install your fear and shame chip so that you will never again be entirely right with yourself because you will never be entirely right with an imaginary supernatural being that doesn’t accept you as a human being.
The thing that always gets me is that god is said to be punishing you for being exactly as he made you – which is roughly equivalent to throwing your laptop across the room in frustration because *you* screwed up installing a program. Talk about ‘do as I say, not as I do!’
Well, look on the bright side. A whole bunch of those kids are going to see right through her bullshit. It’s practically a skeptics training class.
I pretty much became an atheist at age 8 when the nice lady told us a story about the big boat and all the animals. No way, I thought, placing credence in all the tales told in that book on the same level as stories about Santa Claus.
Kids aren’t stupid. And they talk outside “club”.
I love the repeated emphasis on how disobeying your parents is sin—and yet for some odd reason they never mention the “stoning to death” punishment part. Then, the last story is about a little girl who disobeyed her parents and went to the indoctrination anyway, like it’s the greatest thing EVAR.
Don’t we need an after-school “Bad News Club,” where kids learn the bad news that unfortunately some adults will lie to them and how to figure out what’s true for themselves? At least the t-shirts would be way cooler.