While driving home from a shopping expedition this Memorial Day we passed a stone church displaying a huge banner, demanding:
“Come to Vacation Bible School”
I said to my wife, “The poor kids wait all year for summer vacation, and are no sooner let out than they’re whisked off to bloody Bible school. What are they trying to do to them?”
My wife responded by telling me she was aware of it, because I’d made the same comment when driving past that same banner, every summer vacation-time since arriving from England six years ago.
Yes, but hang it all, what are they doing to the kids?
Are they teaching them that Jesus loved everybody and taught that we should do the same? Do they emphasise “our neighbor” is not just weird Mister Huckleberry from the house next door, but Africans, Asians, Muslims, and Atheists living in other lands all around the globe? Do they teach violence against others is wrong, even if the ‘other’ is not an American citizen?
If the answer to all these questions, and a few dozen others, is ‘Yes’, then fine – send the kids to Bible school. Unfortunately, the answers all tend towards a resounding, “No!”
They’re taught that God is an American God who looks down with benevolence on the United States as His chosen nation (hang the Jews) and anyone who dares say otherwise can be rapidly exterminated and will spend the rest of eternity burning in Hell. It may not be spouted in so many words, but this is what the kids eventually learn from it all.
Bible schools everywhere don’t teach anything, because ‘faith’ is blind belief with no basis in substantiated truth. What they are amazingly successful at achieving is the indoctrination of fertile minds ready and willing to believe anything told them by those they accept as all-knowing adults.
The marketing of Christianity in America is controlled by vast organizations, just like most other commodities. The creation of wealth and power is at its root just as surely as at the heart of any banking organization or insurance group. If banks and finance houses targeted young kids with the cold, calculating, vigor of the churches, there’d be an outcry. Yet no-one objects when their pride-and-joys are whisked into the care of the local pastor and his minions for a lesson in superstitious nonsense.
It doesn’t stop there, of course. One vital function of the Bible school is manipulating young minds into ‘correct social behavior’. Part of that behavior is learning the requirement to rush off and get killed, or maimed, in some foreign land at the whim of a crazed politician. Never mind that the guy you’re sent to fight is ‘your neighbor’, as well-defined in the Bible by the son of your god.
The churches have always considered themselves the bastions of morality and social harmony. It’s a façade behind which has long lurked the sins and corrupt practices of the clergy. During the Middle Ages of European history they did little to hide the fact. Popes and bishops cavorted with prostitutes and rent-boys a-plenty, causing the populace no more than an occasional smirk. Today, skulduggery is deeply hidden, often only surfacing after many years, as in the recent cases of rape, buggery, and general child abuse committed by numerous priests of the Roman Catholic church.
Vacation Bible School goes a step further than the standard Sunday school. It offers five day week indoctrinations of kids while Mom and Pop can continue earning their ‘daily bread’ without the responsibility of bringing up the offspring. It’s a nice get-out, in line with American society generally; the idea of giving birth, then after a couple of years handing the child over to a state or church authority, allowing parents to continue their social and economic life free of the binds of full-time parenthood. When similar schemes are highlighted in communist countries like China, the full scorn of American church, government, state, and populace is poured forth in a flood of outrageous self-righteousness.
One of the most noticeable aspects of child education, at least here in the ‘Heartlands’, is the plethora of church-run schools. They probably outnumber public schools. Even those kids who manage to escape the ‘church education’ and attend a public school may find themselves collected in the afternoon by the local church bus and whisked away for an hour or two of good religious indoctrination, before Mom or Pop finally makes a re-appearance in their lives.
Perhaps the most hypocritical of all falsehoods in America is the alleged separation of church and state. The churches are so heavily involved in politics, at every level from federal government to local town council, that one has to question whether this nation is a secular democracy, or a democratic theocracy.
No politician will make good without the backing of the church. No US president will ever be elected without first displaying prominently his Christian credentials. More than one ordained Christian pastor has stood for the presidency, though to date none – thank God! – has achieved it. It’s probably just a matter of time before one does.
When it happens, there’ll be little doubt he or she will be a socially acceptable, clean-cut, clean-living, all American boy or girl, who spent all their summer vacation studying superstition and socially acceptable behavior at their local Vacation Bible School.
Filed under: Biblical bullshit
