"jesus camp"

well shagoodness, it has been ages. i have lots to say about puerto rico, but it is all still a big blur and i'm trying to process it in a succinct way. two words

lies and luxury!!

so anyways i just got back from sf. I flew a stunt kite which was awesome! ok but onto topics i want to discuss. Last night when i got home my mom had rented Jesus Camp and told me to watch it since it might have some relevance in my life. for those of you who don't know despite the fact that my mom is an athiest and my dad a bad catholic they decided to send me to what we now realize was a fundamentalist evangelical christian school. My mom just liked the fact that they taught the bible and had day care. So anyways I became relatively involved in the youth ministry as it was called and even did 1 or 2 week long "christian camps." this experience kind of fucked me up for a good part of my life for various reasons and i'm sure i am still recovering. Obviously i am no longer a fundamentalist evangelical christian but that is not the point. So anyways i had heard lots of terrible things about this movie. Not that the movie was terrible but rather that it depicted some really crazy, scary shit: children being raised to be literal "soldiers for christ" etc etc. The people who told me this had not been raised around such things so what they were describing sounded liek this awful satanic movie about evil people.

About 5 minutes into the film i started to become really disgusted but not for the reasons you would think. What disgusted me was how familiar the whole set up was. The christian flag flying high above the church, pledging allegiance to the bible, physical science books based on creationism, being taught how "logically" evolution cannot be right, people speaking in tongues (i never did and they made me feel bad like i was not close enough to god or some shit like that), the fucked up way that they teach about abortion and make you make "commitments to christ". that was my life!!! and i am totally freaking out!!!!!

what makes it even more strange is that i can see how from teh outside looking in this seems totally creepy and cult like, and i even find it a bit nauseating but at the same time i totally understand what they are saying. I had this flashback of our teachers telling us how despite the fact that darwin had thought up this whole evolution thing, on his deathbed he recanted and was believed to have said "i was wrong" and asked for god's forgiveness. ahh! does this give a little glimpse into why i am so crazy now!

but all of that aside i confess i watched these people and didn't think they were evil or crazy. They were really real to me and they just believed what they believed. They reminded me alot of my friends' parents growing up, and i feel like if you were to show a radical liberal family from berkeley raising their kids it would seem just as foreign as being taught that the bible is the truth. so what is scary is how can you change a persons ideas when they truly in their hearts believe that they are right? what if what i believe isn't right? it was just a truly uncomfortable experience all around for me. so if you all rent this movie, rent it with an open heart. all this stuff may seem weird but it's just as weird as you telling me that you weren't raised learning anything about god or knowing anything about bible stories and such.