Vacation Bible School Is Bullshit

(continued)"Body" and "blood" of Christ is bad enough of a step toward heathen cannibalistic pagan rituals, and now we indoctrinate kids to eat the eyes of a blind man? I mean maybe I'm too forgiving of a person (what a concept in a religion that is based on forgiveness), but it's one thing to blind someone as "punishment" for his misdeeds, and it's quite another to eat his eyes afterward. It seems a little gruesome, retaliatory, and desensitizing to me as an adult, much less to the subliminal unconscious of children.

Oh don't worry, it gets better:

"When I went to vacation Bible school, half the time I was in my Sunday clothes," recalled Jack Terrell, minister to children at First Baptist Church of Euless, Texas. "Now, it's more like a camp atmosphere, except it's on the church campus. We encourage them to come ready to play. And we have Motion to Music, where kids move to contemporary Christian music.

Some psychologists use a similar tactic called integration in order to help clinical messages become more salient in a patient's life. That is, by removing atmospheric markers, such as the cliche "psychiatrist's chair" and the atmosphere of the psychiatrist's office, patients don't merely associate their treatments with only the doctor's office, but with their daily lives. The Christians realize this, and more and more are encouraging church activities to be less and less formal and increasingly "fun," particularly as the society as a whole becomes less formal.

They've realized that with the creation of the youth group about 25 years ago, church attendances for the now-adult kids has proportionately increased, which naturally implies that donations have increased as well. Effectively, if they can subtly inject bits of Jesus into a person's life at a young age, then they figure they can hook 'em early so they can keep 'em late. I think of it like a laced heroin addiction. If you want to get someone to really like a certain activity, food, or drink, you slip a little "happiness" in with it, and without even knowing it, someone will find themselves longing to engage in the same activity that originally gave them the happiness high, even long after any physical withdrawals have passed.

Vacation bible school's aim is exactly that. It's simply giving kids happiness through food, song, and dance-- all endorphin "feel good" releasing activities-- while attaching a normally neutral stimulus to it, such as God and Jesus. In this manner, children will find themselves unknowingly drawn to God, when in reality they're drawn to the chemical high God, or more specifically, "Saul's eyes," produced for them. The article touches on the history of this, as well:

It's a switch, too, from when baby boomers were tykes who marched in an orderly fashion into church auditoriums to say the pledge of allegiance, pray and hear Bible stories, church leaders say. Then it was on to perhaps make crosses of Popsicle sticks and munch on basic snacks like sugar cookies and Kool-Aid.

Hmm... giving physical rewards for physical actions. I hear Pavlov's dog salivating in the background. One could even argue that the reason why revivals are popular and why people like Benny Hinn draw such large crowds and huge donations is that people are drawn to the high of the experience, and not the high of God.

In the crudest sense, Churches have become similar to drug pushers, except that they're more evil. After all, most drug dealers don't sell to kids until they hit their teens, but Birchman Baptist Church can't be bothered:

A week before vacation Bible school begins, staff members at Birchman Baptist Church in Fort Worth trot out the Big Red Truck ( a red ice cream truck equipped with a sound system ( and it travels in nearby neighborhoods, giving out ice cream and fliers about the school, said Christy Aguillard, Birchman's minister for pre-school and children.

Now that's just plain evil. Going around neighborhoods and recruiting kids for your religious agenda? Sometimes... just sometimes... I really don't think that people think things through fully.

Here's my question: would this society and the neighborhoods through which these chuches work be as permitting of this sort of activity--the people going around and targeting kids with ice cream treats-- if they were of a different faith... say... Islamic?

You can't tell me that a brown guy going around a suburb recruiting white kids for the local Mosque's Vacation Koran School wouldn't turn a few heads.

... but why? Because deep down, parents and society as a whole realize Vacation [religious book here] School is indoctrination, and classically conditioning kids with physical rewards for spiritual action is just plain dirty.

"Churches have to compete with television and sophisticated graphics and appeal to kids," he said. "If you look at it from a marketing point of view, you have to make it so the customer is more eager to be there. When you deal with children, it's hard to get them to sit still."

Naw! Churches marketing? This just goes to help prove the point that all churches, virulent or not, should be taxed once they reach a certain size. They're getting out of control, and if you don't believe me now, just wait for these little shits to grow up, and you'll see just how dangerous indoctrinating kids in hyper-religious environments actually is. Oh wait, they already have, and we already do see the dangers. What's worse, is this is only the first wave.

Food for thought? The average 8 year old will reach voting age 10 years from now, and if you've got him believing in an invisible man in the sky, who knows what backwater yokel he'll vote to elect to the presidency, particularly if his church, whom he's trusted for years for his source of faith-based fun, friends, and food tells him they endorse their religion-advancing candidate.