Apathy Sketchpad

I didn’t see Baby Bible Bashers when it aired, because it was Valentine’s Day so of course I was out, er, at the pub with several friends. After three unrelated people recommended it I watched it on Google Video, and it was more-or-less what I was expecting. A load of pushy parents exploiting their children for varying levels of financial gain.

It’s a good video for anyone who thinks religion is a good thing to watch. (Parse that how you like.) These kids are home-schooled (I may never understand why that’s legal) and so they’ve basically been given nothing but religion down their throats from birth. Here’s a typical quote:

When he was three, he came in the kitchen and asked me, would he go to hell if he died and I said, “have you sinned against God?” And he didn’t say nothin’, so I said, “have y’always obeyed your mother?” And he said no. I said, “well, you’ve sinned against God.”

–Kendall Boutwell (11′25″ in)

Nice answer. I mean, say what you like about atheism, but it’s never terrified someone that much. What happened to shielding your kids from the terrifying reality of the universe until they were old enough to take it? That’s what I would do. I’d evade questions about what kind of awful things might befall the poor kids until they can understand the situation properly. Inventing extra dangers is just needlessly cruel, surely?

One kid’s grandmother says she’s never seen him preach and there not be at least one miracle. But then, she also thinks

Most babies say “dad”, first word. Terry’s first word was “hallelujah”.

–Sharon Munroe (9′20″ in)

No. No, it wasn’t. Nobody learns to say four syllable words before one syllable words. That’s almost necessarily false. That would be like solving quadratic equations before you’ve learned to count to ten.

My favourite quote is this, from one of the young preachers:

I know God is talking to me because I can hear it. Sometimes it sounds like me, but I say no: it’s God.

–Terry Durham (23′10″ in)

And the problem is that I can’t fault these people’s motives. I just can’t. They genuinely believe that preaching is the highest possible calling and that their children should be doing it — despite Samuel’s particular beliefs causing him to burst into tears when people have the sheer affront to be reasonable at him (43′45″ in) and causing a highly bizarre argument between a policeman, who is arguing that the Boutwells are on private property and are compelled by the law to leave, and the the boy’s father, who is arguing that the policeman should repent whatever unspecified sins he may or may not have committed as if this will alter the law (25′10″ in).

How is that poor kid supposed to lead anything like a normal life after that upbringing? He needs a proper secular schooling and he needs it now. And he needs proper secular therapy too, because if he goes crying to his parents, they’ll say something like “you see, they’re hostile. That’s what they did to Jesus. That’s why they plucked out his beard and whipped him with a cat o’ nine tails. They hated him,” and that won’t help even a bit.

This is child abuse, there’s no question about that. People like this shouldn’t be allowed to have children. These kids should be put into care.