Month: May 2009

Let’s find out what the Child Evangelism Fellowship believes and presumably teaches to very young children immediately after school, on school property.

That the whole entire bible ‘is given by inspiration of God’ and ‘that it is inerrant in the original writing and that its teaching and authority are absolute, supreme and final.’ So if something is in the bible (the translation of the bible into English, that is, though of course they don’t bother to say that) then it is absolute, supreme and final – so no matter what it is, no matter how harsh, no matter how unjust, cruel, tyrannical, interfering, none of anyone’s business, pointless, reactionary, stupid – it cannot be changed or rejected or refused. What a nice little recipe for the abdication of human reason and reflection and thought, and what a great system for anyone who wants to impose the morality of a few Mediterranean goatherds on people living 5 thousand years later. We’re not allowed to think, we’re not allowed to fashion our own laws on the basis of human needs and wants, we have to obey whatever is written down in a very old book, because a bunch of fools take it to be absolute, supreme and final.

And that’s only the first item. This doesn’t bode well.

They believe in

the infallible interpreter of the infallible Word, who indwells every true believer, and is ever present to testify of Christ, seeking to occupy us with Him and not with ourselves or our experiences.

That’s sick. Being occupied with someone who’s been dead for two thousand years and not with ourselves or our experiences is sick, it’s diseased. I can see being interested in someone who’s been dead for two thousand years; I’m interested in a lot of people who’ve been dead for a long time; but I’m not interested in them to the exclusion of my experiences. The hell with that.

I saw a hummingbird a couple of hours ago, close up. I was walking down the street thinking about something or other and I don’t remember what alerted me – I think I heard the high-pitched little vocalization that hummingbirds make, without really registering it (so now I don’t remember it), but it was enough to make me stop walking and look (for I didn’t know what, until I saw it) – and there it was, maybe six feet away, hovering in front of some flowers. That was my experience. It was a good experience. I find hummingbirds enchanting. Why the hell would I want to occupy myself with Jesus instead? Jesus can at least wait until a duller moment.

That no degree of reformation however great, no attainment in morality however high, no culture however attractive, no humanitarian and philanthropic schemes and societies however useful, no baptism or other ordinance however administered, can help the sinner take even one step toward Heaven…

Calvinist trash, devaluing everything good. A pox on it.

That He was made a curse for the sinner, dying for his sins according to the Scriptures, that no repentance, no feeling, no faith, no good resolutions, no sincere efforts, no submission to the rules and regulations of any church can add in the very least to the value of the precious blood…

Good stuff for very young children (or anyone else). Nothing good is good, it’s all crap crap crap, except Jeezis and his god damn blood.

That the souls of the lost remain after death in misery until the final judgment of the great white throne, when soul and body reunited at the resurrection shall be cast “Into the lake of fire” which is “the second death,” to be “punished with everlasting destruction”…In the reality and personality of Satan, “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world”…

Bad stuff. Bad, bad, bad stuff. Cruel, vindictive, frightening, punitive – ugly. The ugly product of the ugliest part of the human mind. And, fortunately, false. Just a bunch of nonsense that a surprising and depressing number of people take pleasure in believing – and trying to get other people to believe.

But whatever else it is, it’s not something that should be taught to young children on school property. (Or anywhere else, in a better world, but churches have rights.)

This is the scariest thing I’ve read in awhile, at least locally. Schoolgirls being gassed in Afghanistan is much scarier, but locally the Child Evangelism Fellowship is scary as hell. Good News Clubs are terrifying.

Remember the little girl who told her classmate that she was going to hell? Well that was a Good News Club at work.

Their teacher overheard the increasingly heated exchange. When class resumed, she asked everyone to pay attention. People from different religious backgrounds, she explained, have very different perspectives on certain kinds of issues. Emma, feeling good that she had stood her ground, seemed content with the result. But Ashley was crushed. “You mean they lied to me right here in school?!” she began to cry. “Because that’s what they taught me here! How can they lie?”

Because they aren’t actually part of the school but they seem to be, thus giving small children the impression that they are Teachers telling The Truth.

Because the Good News Club seeks to reach children who in many cases are not old enough to read, a centerpiece of its program is the “wordless book,” a simple picture book intended to convey different Evangelical doctrines…The Good News Club aims to use afterschool facilities as soon as possible after the bell rings. Aside from adding to the convenience for students and parents, this maximizes the possibility of contact with non-participating students. It also has the effect of making it difficult for very young children to distinguish between the Good News Club and the other classes they take in school.

And that’s not just a by-product, it’s part of the point.

The club’s best promoters, as the CEF well understands, are the children themselves. Participating students are instructed to invite their classmates to join the group, and prizes are often given to those who succeed. The group’s focus, indeed, is concentrated on the “un-churched” children more than it is on those already in the fold. “If every public elementary school student in the United Sates could join a Good News Club,” the CEF Web site states, “we could revolutionize our culture in one generation!” In short, the confusion Ashley evinced on the playground about just what her school was teaching her was no accident. It is built into the design of the Good News Club program. The average six-year-old cannot reliably distinguish between programs taught by his/her school and those taught in his/her school; and the CEF may be determined to make use of this fact in order to advance its religious aims.

Bad…but at least schools can say No, right? Parents can say No and the schools can say No. Right?

No.

In 2001, in Good News Club v. Milford Central School, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that to exclude the club on the grounds that it is a religious group is to discriminate against its particular religious viewpoint, in violation of 1st Amendment protections on the freedom of speech. The court also went out of its way to say that it could conceive of no basis for concern about a possible violation of the clause of the 1st Amendment that prohibits the establishment of religion. The author of the court’s majority opinion was Clarence Thomas. It is perhaps interesting to note, in that respect, that in a recent speech before a school group, Justice Thomas reminisced fondly about his own school days when he would see “a flag and a crucifix in each classroom.”

Fucking hell – where have I been? How did I not know about the Milford decision? What a nightmare…

“Milford is a bad decision,” a lawyer for Americans United for Separation of Church and State wrote to my husband. But it “is not going to be overturned right now. The lower courts will all follow it and the Supreme Court in its current configuration is not going to reverse itself on this issue.”

Help help.

Fuambai Ahmadu is really quite creepy.

I am not surprised that the women of Kailahun have taken to the streets to protest what is now becoming a brazen attack by anti-FGM activists against female initiation and excision in Sierra Leone…I have witnessed first-hand the proliferation (and invidiousness) of this alarming multi-million dollar “development” industry, financed largely by western countries and international agencies such as UNICEF, WHO, UNFPA and so on. Faced with a global media onslaught depicting the most insidious and racist types of representations of African men and women witnessed since colonial times and the downright force of anti-FGM campaigns to shame, more and more circumcised African women have come to see and define themselves through these media lenses as “mutilated”.

Lots of emotive language there, along with a fair amount of trendy code. Anti-FGM activists are ‘brazen’ – as if there is something shameful about opposing the mutilation of girls. And then there’s all the sly nonsense about money and scare-quoted ‘development’ and industry and financed and western and international – as if it were Walmart and McDonald’s and Coke teaming up to make a profit from saying girls shouldn’t be mutilated. The disdain for UNICEF, WHO, and UNFPA is odd too. But no problem, just pretend it’s all racist and colonialist and there’s no further need to explain. So her position is that international agencies are, by definition, invidious and racist/colonialist and anti-FGM campaigns are brazen and corrupt (being financed by all those invidious international agencies), while people who mutilate girls are all that is good.

[T]here ought to be some respect and sensitivity to Sierra Leonean women and our culture. The term FGM is offensive, divisive, demeaning, inflammatory and absolutely unnecessary!! As black Africans most of us would never permit anyone to call us by the term “nigger” or “kaffir” in reference to our second-class racial status or in attempts to redress racial inequalities, so initiated Sierra Leonean women (and all circumcised women for that matter) must reject the use of the term “mutilation” to define us and demean our bodies…For those of us who take pride in our culture, our ethnicity, and our female ancestors, which Bondo represents, we must continue to stand up for ourselves and defy any attempt by others, however powerful they may be, to rewrite their own histories onto our bodies, to negate our particularities as they universalize their own.

That ‘as…so’ is completely bogus, obviously, because ‘nigger’ does not work the same way as ‘mutilation’ does. Ahmadu calls herself a scholar but her way of ‘arguing’ is not very scholarly.