Apathy Sketchpad

A few days ago, a reader sent me a link to this Channel Four report. It’s a five minute video, so here it is:

There are some scary quotes in there, but the stats are worse. From their own survey, 80% of 50 Muslim, Jewish and ‘accelerated Christian education’ schools taught Creationism as fact and ignore evolution. Of those, five were state-funded schools. That’s 74% of 19 Jewish schools, 100% of 21 Evangelical schools and 50% of 10 Islamic schools. None of these schools is breaking a law*, although of course Paul Kelley would have been had he been reckless enough to educate in a secular way. The law, as has been mentioned, is an ass.

Personally, I think the best argument for teaching evolution in schools is that it’s the only way I know that you can make biology into a passably interesting subject. I for one always found it crushingly dull — because it was mostly a list of information presented in a “here’s what happens; don’t ask why, just learn it” kind of a way. Throw in evolution and you can explain why these things happen. You can talk about DNA and all the weird ways genes try to get copied. You can tie biology in to all kinds of other subjects much more effectively. I’m sure you can teach vast tracts of biology without mentioning genes or evolution, but I defy you to make it interesting.

That aside, the best reason I know of not to teach Creationism is simply that it’s patently false. Of course, Creationists won’t accept that, so a better argument is that there is no evidence to support it (because it’s so false). The only argument in favour is the whole stupid “parents’ rights” thing. And I do accept that parents have a right to educate their children in whatever way they want — but I think they should be made to look up the word “educate” before they start paying someone to preach at them, because filling impressionable young minds with damaging lies to promote an ideology is nothing more or less than exploitation — and it’s not even for personal gain: we’re talking about exploitation for the sake of an abstract concept. And I think it’s utterly abhorrent that the government would fund this.

I blame the parents for this. They should be outraged if their kids are being taught such bullshit, and they should get something done. The government are also in the wrong, of course, but you can hardly expect the government to act if the people don’t care. (You know, because the government only ever does what the people want.) People listen to parents. God knows why.

I’m not against the ides of schools being different and parents having choice. I’m not against the idea that some of those differences might be based on a religion — a school aimed at Muslims that makes sure the textbooks don’t have illustrations in articles about Mohammed, or a school aimed at Jews that only serves kosher food, that’s fine. And hopefully the genuine followers of those religions would be able to get places in those schools, because since all schools would be required to teach the same curriculum non-religious parents presumably would just pick the nearest school, or the one the kid’s friends were going to. The moment you let them teach different things then the idea of “choice” becomes an illusion: when you’re presented with one good school and one bad school, you don’t have a choice. Everyone with a brain will try to get into the good school and then you’re back to pot luck (or selection, if it’s a faith school). It’s just the same as the ridiculous claim made by the Department of Health the other day, that “operation success rates help patients choose treatment”. Their theory is that by publishing statistics on survival rates at different hospitals, they give patients a choice. No, you don’t. You just make life difficult for everyone, and worry people who can’t get into the best one. The stats should be public, certainly, but not for that reason. I think that all schools and hospitals should be good enough that you don’t care which one you use, and I think that if they’re not then you should fix it rather than shifting the onus onto patients and parents to find an acceptable one.

More to the point, if it’s legal to teach Creationism, that must mean there is no requirement for schools to teach facts that are true.

But of course, I don’t get a say. Because I don’t live in Normanton. If I did, I’d be allowed to vote against Ed Balls’ continuing reign of lunacy over the Department of Children, Schools, Families and Kittens, or whatever they’re calling Education now. (Honestly, the system of government we have here is utterly mad if you look into it for any length of time.)

---

* According to the video, anyway. My understanding is that the teaching of evolution is compulsory in publicly funded schools, but I don’t know where I can find an authoritative source of information.

“America is supposed to be God’s nation.”

Not Israel, then? Okay. Makes sense, I suppose, a country 1700 years younger than Jesus. Sure.

I’m watching Jesus Camp on More4. It follows a group of Evangelicals: they’re exactly how you expect they are. you see them on their awful camp and in their awful churches, and they’re brainwashing children in the sickest way I’ve ever seen — and sometimes rather stupidly. At one point, one of them had a load of mugs with the word “GOVERNMENT” scrawled (really, scrawled — sometimes upside down) on them, and after a short rant about how “corrupt” (read: ‘too secular for them’ — scary) government was ruining America, shouted “who wants to smash this cup?”, then the kids would come up and hit a mug with a hammer. Very strange. At another point, Fischer analogises sin to a cute little tiger cub, explaining how it seems attractive, but one day, “you got yourself a tiger by the tail” — while she swings around what is very obviously a toy lion.

But it’s as alarming as it is stupid: the pastor shouted “who here believes that God can do anything?” and you see a woman raising her children’s hands — one of whom was young enough he didn’t even get his own chair. She has them chanting and clapping and generally acting like she runs a cult.

Which she does.

The terrible bit, though, was in private, talking to the cameras. They say things like “[children] are so usable in Christianity” and don’t realise what that sounds like — and indeed, what it is. The thoroughly shitty Becky Fischer explains how Islam trains its children from the age of five, that they’re trained to use grenades, rifles and bomb belts, then says she wants to see children that willing to “lay down their lives” for Christianity. She understands perfectly that she is pushing an almost military campaign to get Christianity running the world — she believes that Christianity is true, but she uses that not as her chief weapon but as her justification. And she can’t see the hypocrisy. Here is a speech of hers from near the start of the film:

I can go into a playground of kids that don’t know anything about Christianity, lead them to the lord in a matter of just no time at all, and, and just moments later they can be seeing visions and hearing the voice of God, because they’re so open. They’re so usable in Christianity.

If you look at the world’s population, one third of that 6.7 billion people are children under the age of 15. One third. Where should we be putting out efforts? Where should we be putting our focus? I’ll tell you where our enemies are putting it: they’re putting it on the kids. They’re going into the schools. You go into Palestine, and I can take you to some websites that will absolutely shake you to your foundations, and show you photographs of where they’re taking their kids to camps like we take our kids to Bible camps and they’re putting hand-grenades in their hands, they’re teaching them how to put on bomb belts, they’re teaching them how to use rifles, they’re teaching them how to use machine guns. It’s no wonder, with that kind of intense training and discipling, that those young people are ready to kill themselves for the cause of Islam.

I want to see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam. I want to see them as radically laying down their lives for the gospel as, as they are, er, over in in Pakistan and in Israel and, and Palestine and all those different places, you know, because we have — excuse me — but we have the truth!

She also talks to a young boy called Levi, asking him what he is expecting God to do for him at camp, and he says “get [him] used to meeting other people”, as that’s always been a problem for him. Well of course it fucking has — he’s an evangelical, which is incredibly annoying, and his mother’s pulled him out of school to teach him a strict diet of creationism, anti-global warming propaganda and bad haircuts. (”If you look at Creationism, you see that it’s the only possible answer to all the questions.”; “Did you get to the part on here where it says science doesn’t prove anything? And it’s really interesting when you look at it that way”.) What did you all think was going to happen there? And sure, he probably will meet people on camp — but they’ll all be as obnoxious and evangelical as him. Real people will still think he’s a dork.

Levi’s mother justifies this “education” by saying

God didn’t say have children and give my kids to someone else for eight hours a day. And if I can homeschool them as well as the school can public-school them, why would I send them somewhere else for eight hours a day? Our nation was founded on Judaeo-Christian values. We know when things started changing, you know, prayer got taken out of school, and erm… oh! The schools start falling apart. And now the rest of us are going “Wait a minute! Where is my country?”

Our firm belief is, there are two kinds of people in the world: people who love Jesus, and people who don’t. And I want my kids to grow up knowing, you know what, it’s, it’s a good thing to be a Christian.

One child, Rachael, is so far gone that she prays over her bowling ball (which promptly goes straight in the right gutter) and then wanders up to the woman in the next lane and says

Hi, erm, God’s just telling me that he… You’re on his mind, and he just wants to take you and he just wants to love erm you, and he has special plans for you and your life, and he just wants you to be able to follow him with your whole heart and–

–and then the woman says “thankyou” and she wanders off, leaving a little booklet.

Fischer also spend a good solid minute praying over her PA equipment, just to be on the safe side. That was just surreal. She was listing potential electrical faults and commanding God and Satan to lay off for that night. You can listen to a clip at Kidology, as well as the cup-smashing madness. (Kidology is a Christian group, and it’s hard to find an opinion about the content of the film on the site.) Also she says that President Bush “has really brought some real credibility, erm, to the Christian faith”.

Yeah, that’ll be it. He’s got credibility in spades, Bush. She even has a cardboard cutout of him that she talks about as if it’s real. To be fair, it might as well be for all the useful input either one gives.

The bottom line is that I don’t really think there’s anything in this film that I didn’t know was going on — I’m just shocked by how openly the perpetrators will admit that they’re using the same tactics as their “enemies”, that they’re “using” children because what they learn at that age is pretty well stuck there for life, and so forth. Sometimes I think that these people are deluded but basically trying to do the right thing, albeit in their own wrong-headed way — but now I’ve seen this I’ve no sympathy at all. They know what they’re doing.