As those few of you who follow my adventures know, I recently went to be a volunteer counselor at a camp for disabled kids. I knew this camp was Christian-based. I knew they were conservatve. Whatever, I thought, I just want to help kids, do my part, and grow personally and spiritually. Hah.
The van ride was two days of fun religious debate with my fundie pals from the church (yes, I know I brought this on myself, never raise your beliefs with fundies). When we got to the camp we were greeted by a boombox playing fundie rap songs (“Come on listen up 'cuz we got the story straight, we know there wasn’t nobody was descended from apes”. No kidding), T-Shirts with fundie slogans (“This Earth Is Not My Home”, “True Love Waits”, “Project Something: Bringing The Gospel To Las Vegas” etc.") and other fun stuff.
I was still thinking, this is cool, the people will be nice, I can grow here. I will serve the community of Earth, and be happy. The people were genuinely excited about the chance to help these kids have some fun. The campers arrived, and I met mine, a kid named Tyler with severe Cerebral Palsy that left him with virtually no speech, no functioning legs and one working arm. He also had severe behavioral problems too. Each night he would pound the wall and scream as loud as he could for attention, which led us eventually to sedating him so the other kids in the cabin could sleep. He also swore like a sailor, and liked to fight you while you dressed him, showered him, changed his diapers, etc.
Anyway, showing the good taste fundies are famous for, this camp did their very best to brainwash these poor little kids who had just come for a week of fun. One of the more offensive things was a song that consisted in part of this:
Everyone: I wish I had a little black box to put the devil in. I’d take him out and
Kids: SMASH HIS HEAD!!!
Song Leader: What?
Kids: SMASH HIS HEAD!!!
Song Leader: What?
etc.
I would just like to brag for myself a little bit, and say that I was told by the directors that I had the most difficult kid in the camp, and that I was doing a great job. Yay me.
After a week of me not really being able to connect with my camper, being aggravated by the fundies, and generally being exhausted (think 2 consecutive 20 hour days) I got to go back on the vans with the fundie pals I came with and argue yet more philosophy. I was treated with such gems as:
Why we should all hate gay people
How the world is obviously only 10,000 years old, and in the beginning, people lived to be 800 or whatever.
How genetics is “just a bunch of scientific lies”
How there is no accurate way to date any fossils of any kind
How Wiccans are actually unwitting Satanists.
How the placebo effect doesn’t exist
How “the big bang goes against every theory of biology, astronomy and physics”
And naturally no backup was offered for this except the fact that the Bible says so.
The fun thing about this was that I was referencing Thomas Aquinas, Renee Descartes, Tim Keller, Ayn Rand/Anton Lavey (they wrote the same stuff. I swear!) and these religious scholars hadn’t heard of any of it. Hmmm.
I went to serve. I wanted to help. I wanted to grow personally and spiritually. The fundies fucked it up.
I won’t be mad if the mods move this to the pit, it came out more ranty than I planned.
Lucky Charms
