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A&E is to be given plaudits for airing the "JESUS CAMP!"
Simply put, I am horrified at the madrassa style techniques used to shape childrens' young and impressionable minds into the acceptance of what can only be described as Pope Leo x said, "This myth of Christ has served us well."
Religion, or the choice not to be aligned with any revelatory religion should be made by the individual during the process of maturation.
We obviously make the mistake, as do all "organized" religions, to enforce a particular religion on our children, just as we force them to accept a first name that might in later years become a burden.
Organized religions all across the planet breed separatism and elitism, sometimes resulting in extreme violence, as history well demonstrates. Today,we preach tolerance, but in fact, though the words go unspoken, the victims of the type of brainwashing shown in the Jesus Camp, and the victims of Islamic madrassa training in fact create an unspoken intolerance, resulting in extreme violence against professors of a different faith.
Thomas Jefferson had his own version of the Christian bible form which he had excorcised all miracles, all "supernatural" allegations and events, and boiled it down to those tales and statements of positive human value. In truth, in the writings of any prophetically revealed religion there are some great moral truths............most of which couldhave been arrived at without the benefit of revelation from some false prophet.
Thomas Paine, one of the founders of this great Nation said, "All that man needs to know about god can be observed in nature." He was a deist of sorts, as were many of his co-authors of our Constitution, and hence the emphasis on the Jeffersonion wall of Separation of Church and State.
The great tragedy in the Jesus Camp approach is that the highly malleable minds of our young are being shut down and denied the right of free inquiry and free choice with respect to the moral and philosophical principles that will guide their future lives.
As we move from childhood to adulthood we lose our belief in the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and other mythical belief systems, only then to have another myth burned into our brains via this type of religious brainwashing.
In search of the historical Jesus finds no evidence of his existence. Only the bible is used to substantiate the myth, and we know well that Nicean Council in the mid 300's under the direction of Constantine was constructed as a political tool, embodying the many myths of the many belief systems of Rome at the time to bring the citicens of Rome under control. Christianity was used even up to this modern day as a mechanism of political and mind control.
Islam, founded by another so-called prophet has been used for centuries to control the minds of a billion people who live in abject poverty, ignorance, and violence which now, again, threatens those who believe in the other false prophet called Jesus whose reality cannot be substantiated in true historicity. Mohammed was a thief, a liar, a murderer, a raper of women, and yet his "so called" revalations are believed.
Joseph Smith, the so-called prophet of the Mormon faith was another low-life, scam and con artist peddling a line of faith that would label most of his followers as complete lunatics. He became such a threat in Illinois that sixteen people from the surrounding area, and perhaps some of his own, descended on him and shot him to death!!!!
The christian bible and the koran belong on the fiction shelf in your local library, along with Mary Poppins, Grimm's Fairy tales, etcl.
Hindus, Taoists, Confucionists, Shintoists, and other believers all over the planet have belief systems,as do christians, jews, islamics, and any number of other believers. Why is this??????? The answer is quite simple. At some point in every human being's life we cross through a portal, open a door, have a vision, seek and answer to the unanswered questions about where did this marvelous creation come from and why are we here. These questions, unanswered, make us immediately vulnerable to the first prophet, preacher, church, that comes along, and we are then sucked in by promises of heaven in the hereafter if we accept the premises put forward, and further motivated by the promise of a "hell" from which nobody has returned. In exchange, all we have to do is surrender our minds, our pocketbooks, our bodies for sacrifice in terrorist suicides! Does this make any kind of rational sense to anybody?????
This planet is populated by people who have more in common than differences, if we would stop and think with rational minds not influenced by divisive, hatred, influences.
It is worthy of note that our species is, with reference to the age of our planet and the universe, in a position of being "early on" on the path of evolution. We have much to learn, many unanwswered questions, and we are impatient so we fall prey to the purveyors of false knowledge from false prophets.
A Unitarian minister, whose name I cannot recall at the moment said, "God is the stuff of creation, perhaps better to be defined by that which is yet to be created, and by the answers to questions we do not yet know how to ask." I find this to be an acceptable answer to our basic human questions.
As centuries pass our communal circle of knowledge will increase. Mayhaps "God" is just another way of saying, "We just don't now yet, but we are working on getting closer to the ultimate truths." This is the way it should be, and we must learn to be patient, and to use the Creator's gift of our own human minds to each and every day move us closer to the understanding of the basic questions..............it will not come in this generation, or the next, but each day, each month, each year will bring us closer, but only if we can unshackle our minds from those archaic religions and belief systems that tie us to the past.
We don't, by definition know what god is, where this creation came from, and why we are here..........or do we? People like Ayn Rand defined a morality that makes some kind of sense. The Golden Rule comes naturallly to our minds.........Thou Shalt not steal, lie, murder, covet thy neighbor's possessions, his wife, his goats, his sheep,and so forth..............this is pretty common sense stuff that any communal society under any kind of leader/ruler could have encoded into law, and was not, therefore, a divine revelation.
Things "supernatural" do not happen by the hand of some mysterious god figure. God does not come down to earth and speak to man and man does not speak to god. Virgin births do not happen! Turning water into wine does not happen.
The bottom line here is that we each and everyone must rely on the unenhampered human mind that creation has given us............and we must not let it be hampered by false prophets and their preachings. At the end of the day we must learn to live as one with all the other human beings on this planet through a naturalistic view of this creation. At our first years we are taught falsehoods that create so much pain and mayhem. We have to learn to grow past those, to free our minds to enable us to understand the differences in cultures, religions, and ideas and philosophies that separate us, and then to try to find common ground to enable all of us to grow away from the horrific, terrifying, mind controlling beliefs of past centuries.
Me? I don't know how to define "god" because it lies outside humankind's circle of knowledge, but maybe that is to be our ultimate goal, with each generation expaning our circle of knowledge. We'll see as time goes on, if we have the patience.
For me, heaven, hell, prophets, revalations are simply not within the realm of real human experience, and all the supernatiural writings belong on the fiction shelf.
For me, morality and ethics are derived from within the mind/body that creation has bestowed upon me if I am any kind of rational thinking human being with self interests, and I sometimes mistakenly assume that others have the same priorities.
We simply have to change the way we think, the way we raise our children. The Jesus Camp is all about mind control and in that regard is no different than the horrifying scenes we see about the Islamic madrassas. Simply put, it is tantamount to what Hitler did with the german youth. We have to change this to a teaching of questions about the nature of things, the origings of creation, why are we the way we are, what are our fears and questions, and how they can only be answered through the evolution of time (as in growing up). The last thing we need to be doing is putting fear, doubt, anxiety, false promises, and irrational answers into the minds of America's future leaders.
Taliban??????? Seems to come in different flavors, and we sure don't need a christian taliban in Americal.
Well, I've waxed overly long, but this is such an important issue, mayhaps in these days determining our success our failure, or survival, somethings have to be said to help us survive the challenge of the coming decade.
Again, let me congratulate you for airing this most important documentary on the "jesus camp."
You may print, publish, air, or otherwise use anything I have said here on this most important issue.
Thank you.
Terry T. Pierce
1300 Harkness Lane
Redondo Beach Ca 90278
EMAIL: TERRYP7624@AOL.COM
PHONE: 310-379-4707
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