i watched the documentary jesus camp the other night, and the only word to describe it is terrifying. it is a surreal experience to see a ten year old say with a smile on their face that they want to become a martyr for christ...guuuhhhhh. if the kids' names were hesham and mohammed you can guaran-goddamn-tee that this camp would be raided by a team of federal agents faster than one can say "allahu akbar." instead, these kids have nice (ugh) christian names like levi and rachel...wait, did i say christian? sorry, i meant hebrew...their bad.
anyway, these little angels of fire and brimstone are just full of rote parroting of how jesus hates sinners and abortion and evolution and dancing and harry potter...these kids say the world is going to shit more than a crotchety septuagenarian. but, i am pretty sure that they (or even their parents for that matter) could not tell you in rational terms why. of course, i will give them the benefit of the doubt because they are impressionable children...because another thing these kids also seem full of is loneliness. they are always filmed alone and they don't seem to really connect with other kids, even the other kids at jesus camp...perhaps because they are so damn afraid of going to hell. and, one reason i know that it is the adults who deserve to be ritually beaten is that these kids are full of something else: tears. lots and lots of tears. these people love to make children cry!!!
while violence can be cathartic in the mind, i am not prone to violence. besides, we all know that christians will just turn the other cheek so you are tempted to smack that one too. so, i thought let's use a little science...evangelicals really hate that shit.
one thing about evangelical service is channeling the holy spirit by speaking in tongues...which essentially sounds like a 6 month old gurgling strained gerber peas. hell, i remember making those same sounds as a kid when i was trying to impersonate someone speaking a foreign language. but, the prayer warriors will tell you that this is the holy ghost speaking through them...perhaps, but let's put it to the rigors of the god-hating witch's brew that is the scientific method.
idea for a research paper or longer study:
have a linguist and a neurologist to examine the cognitive formation of language skills in individuals to see if they favor certain sounds, words, and syllables in their adult speech patterns based on how they learned language. in other words, do the language parts of out brain develop pathways for certain words and sounds in a way that we become more predisposed to these sounds and therefore patterns of word use over time? if so, can we then record someone "speaking in tongues" to distinguish whether or not they are really channeling a higher power or randomly selecting the sounds and syllables around which their use of language has been formed?
this may be a difficult or impossible study to conduct, but that's why it is on a blog and not in a refereed journal. but, for god's sake, stop making kids cry, and knock off all that jibber jabber.
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