Forgive me if someone has already posted about this – I can’t get the SDMB search function to work.
As I understand it, a court decision has recently enabled a hardcore fire and brimstone type of Christian group to start offering after school programs in public schools. Their stated goal is to convert and evangelize kids, and get them to start proselytizing their family and friends.
So, in the schools that have these Christian after school programs, the Church of Satan will be offering an alternative, the After School Satan Club.
They will not be talking about Satanism at all, but rather about science and our fascinating world.
Their website mentions that the Christian programs are luring kids with treats such as cookies. I just want to emphasize that the key to success here may involve** better cookies.**
Years ago, there were a lot of schools offering after-school clubs in various subjects/interests. But many refused to allow religious clubs, being afraid of violating the Constitutional prohibition against favoring religion. So religious conservatives flexed their voting power, and got the government to pass a law stating that if a school allowed any after-school clubs, they had to allow all of them that students asked for.
A few years later, with kids coming out at younger ages, gay-straight student clubs became a big thing, and were started in many schools. But many schools disallowed them. Which promptly got lawyers to show up. pointing to the law requiring schools to allow all student clubs. The schools that fought this in Court almost always lost.
So this law, pushed by religious conservatives, was used a lot by gay-straight clubs. I expect it’s the same law being used by these Satanist clubs. I imagine they’ll be well attended – could a teenager imagine any better way to shock their parents than joining the after-school Satanist club?
I’d have been more shocked if my kids had joined the evangelical club, personally. Instead, my daughter worked on forming a gay-straight alliance at her school, as her show of rebellion.
Qadgop: I think that is so cool. I had a gay friend when I was in high school back in the 1980s. There was nothing like any kind of a supportive environment back then. Then when I moved to San Francisco a few years later, so many of my gay friends had been actually disowned by their families. Makes me happy to see level heads prevail.
t-bonham@scc.net: I’m a black clothes wearing punk type. Ha ha, my kid rebelled by wearing bright colors.
A friend’s teenage son (horny straight boy) went to a meeting of the schools Gay-Straight-Alliance, to support a teammate who was coming out. He brought home some handouts, which his parents accidentally found.
The kid said it was one of the luckiest things that happened to him. Afterwards, there were almost no restrictions on his dating (of girls). When he mentioned taking a girl to a dinner & a movie, his father would offer him money to pay for the data, and his mother would say that he could stay out past his normal curfew time, etc. He thought that was great.
Satanism is just as silly as Christianity to me. I wouldn’t want my daughter to join either.
Wish they’d come up with something that would actually benefit the students, like an after-school science club. In my daughter’s school they had a “beach club” where kids come for “fun and prizes” and a snack. I let my daughter go once. She was not impressed with the trickery. She wanted beach fun, not the story of how God drowned an entire planet of people and animals because they were wicked unbelievers. The prize was a print-off coloring book about accepting Jesus and confessing your sins to get to go to Heaven when you die. I understand this is legal but there was no mention of religious instruction being offered at this “beach club”. There was nothing remotely beach club about it other than an inflatable palm tree and a beach ball they bounced around for about two minutes while they waited for the crew to assemble.
What exactly would a Satan club be teaching? How to wait for a “signal” before mating or the proper way to torture mercilessly someone who annoys you in your lair?
I’m Christian and if I had kids, I wouldn’t want them going to a club like this either, mainly because they weren’t honest about their intentions. How old was your daughter at the time? And this was at school?!?
Ca. 1980, my high school had a chapter of Fellowship of Christian Athletes which met once a week before school. It was just a prayer session with some Bible study that kids could attend if they wanted to, or not. The teacher who ran it, who was just a few years out of college, was well-liked and he had a great rapport with teenagers, but truthfully, he really wasn’t a very good teacher, and several years after I graduated, he left education and went to work for FCA full time. He’d be around retirement age by now.
See, I would be perfectly happy with my nephews joining the after-school science club, ‘cept the one old enough to do it already has. But I wouldn’t be happy with having science sold under the Satan brand (gee, thanks guys, you’re reinforcing the assholes’ position!), and that nephew’s mother would be Extremely Not Amused. That shtick they could have done without.
Sounds like a way to get kids interested in joining the after school ‘science club’, but instead of appealing to the pocket-protector-slide-rule-crowd, appealing to the ‘rebels’.
See? Just as I suspected! Science is satanic. And all these people espousing science and rationalism are really just trying to lure our kids to the Devil!
