I never saw YayaCanada’s site until today, but I think I’ll be visiting it (along with 21st Century Socialism) more often. This lady is SANE. Get a load of what she said about the scariest movie of the year, “Jesus Camp”:
If the “apostle” Paul lived today, he’d be an American TV evangelist. He’d have 33% of the population believing that Christ came to him in a vision and told him what to say. He’d rant on and on about hellfire and damnation, about how women need to know their place, and about sexual temptation and perversion, and he’d rake in lots of dough.
But Jesus didn’t dwell on any of those things. And he certainly didn’t sell fire insurance. He offered love and liberation from guilt; he described a means of personal empowerment through the mental process of “knowing” by which one could seek and find a path out of one’s own slavery to the opinions of others, and to false ideas and false views of self and God. He placed God’s Kingdom squarely in the present, within all of us and spread out upon the earth. He counselled living fully in the current eternal moment, leaving the future and the past to God.
And something else – something that Christians unaccountably don’t seem able to get through their heads – Jesus counselled praying in private, not in public in the manner of show-off hypocrites!
Sadly, Jesus is only a buzz word for Becky Fischer. Beyond that, she’s into enforce mode, big time. She’s into public prayer – as raucous and showy as possible – over everybody else’s sins. Rotund Becky tells the kids that most Christians are “fat and lazy” and aren’t getting their act together about abortion, gays, and “dirty talk”. The only answer lies with training children to sacrifice their very lives for the ruthless extermination of everything Becky hates. “This is war” she hollers. “This is war.”
She trots out a lifesize cardboard cutout of President Bush and encourages the kids to bless him. Technically, they don’t actually worship Bush, as some people are saying. The kids’ arms are raised toward God. But the message of loyalty to the state as well as to Becky’s fanatical goals are brought home in the oaths she orders them all to swear loudly on the Bible.
Yes, the same Bible wherein Jesus said, “Swear not at all.” Matthew 5:34.
I bet Becky Fischer thinks that phrase just refers to four-letter words, not to making absurd vows you are guaranteed to break. Guaranteed, not because human nature is so inherently sinful as she would have you think, but because those vows are out of step with reality, humanity and above all, the selves of the children whose will she is there explicitly to break.
Becky Fischer is a sinful woman. I mean that not in the sense that she is some kind of harlot (although there is certainly something kinky about what she does for money; she’s a dominatrix without the fetishy trappings, for sure.) I mean she is sinful in the sense expounded by the Toltec healer, don Miguel Ruiz, in his book, The Four Agreements:
Religions talk about sin and sinners, but let’s understand what it really means to sin. A sin is anything you do which goes against yourself. Everything you feel or believe or say that goes against yourself is a sin. You go against yourself when you judge or blame yourself for anything. Being without sin is exactly the opposite. Being impeccable is not going against yourself. When you are impeccable, you take responsibility for your actions, but you do not judge or blame yourself.
From this point of view, the whole concept of sin changes from something moral or religious to something commonsense. Sin begins with rejection of yourself. Self-rejection is the biggest sin that you can commit. In religious terms self-rejection is a “mortal sin,” which leads to death. Impeccability, on the other hand, leads to life.
Emphasis added.
You see what I mean by sinful? Becky Fischer is committing mortal sin with every child she is encouraging to reject him- or herself. With every brow-beating, guilt-instilling sermon, telling the kids they are sinful and wicked and must atone by being washed with bottled water in the name of Jesus (and preaching to strangers in bowling alleys), she is sinning up a fire-and-brimstone shitstorm.
She is certainly not being impeccable with her word; she can’t tell the truth to herself. And so she peddles some outrageous lies to the children, including this one:
The fact that Bush lied to the American people is not an issue for Becky; his professed born-again status is paramount. She never stops to wonder if he might be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the evil one who only pretends to receive instructions from God. In full confidence, Becky makes it clear to her kids that if they don’t support presidents like Bush, they will fall victim to Satan who has unimaginably horrific plans for them.
Becky talks about how Bush appoints judges that will save the country from gays, abortionists, and other evil beings. In no time, she has the kids screaming over and over, with upraised fists and tears running down their faces, “Righteous judges! Righteous judges!”
And in case you wonder whether that really happens in the film, it does. Watch:
This is certainly not impeccability with one’s word, for those “righteous” judges are actually word-twisters themselves. In other words: sinners in the first degree, according to don Miguel.
Yaya goes on:
As a special treat, Becky introduces a man who cheerily opens a box of tiny, pink baby dolls, each one smaller than the other, and he places them in the hands of Becky’s key kids while the other kids look on in awe, to illustrate all of the potential playmates they have lost through abortion. How crafty to make abortion into a personal loss for these children. How diabolical.
Then he places red tape over the kids’ mouths, with the word “Life” written on each piece, to demonstrate the silent screams of the fetus.
Obviously, in these times of professed sensitivity to child abuse, hitting kids is not allowed, nor is sexually exploiting them, but psychologically abusing the hell out of them in Jesus’ name is sanctioned and/or ignored by both church and state.
Emphasis added.
Aside from the questionable morality of indoctrinating kids with one’s own prejudices about abortion at an age when most of them haven’t the first clue as to what sex is or how babies are made (shouldn’t those be discussed first?), there is the hideous immorality of silencing them. Could anything be more sinful than gluing kids’ lips shut so you can put your own words literally upon them? Not only are they making kids go against themselves with their own words (i.e., making them sin), they are actually shutting the kids up so that no authentic, impeccable words can come out. Talk about a literal condemnation to hell on Earth!
And apparently, Yaya agrees that this is hell too, for she goes on:
At a time in their lives when they ought to be carefree and having fun, Becky’s kids are constantly on the alert, having been told that children are Satan’s prime targets, and that he will trick them into sinning. You should see the looks on the faces of the kids when they heard that. They were not having a fun time at camp; they were horrified. They were not learning anything; they were shocked into obedience, and set up for for Becky’s antidote to their inherently evil natures.
[…]
One of Becky’s key prodigies says on screen that he has accepted the idea of literally “dying for Jesus”. One wonders how many of these kids will eventually commi
t suicide, or murder an abortionist, or beat a gay person to death.
Souls in torment. Quod erat demonstrandum, baby.
Yaya has a parable for us, by way of dire warning, of the way such people really do end up. For being sinful–for being inauthentic, untruthful, for going against themselves with their word, this is what these people get:
Becky at one point orders the kids to “speak in tongues”. Tongues is another lie. I’ve been there and I know that it’s fake, fake, fake. Pentecostals are expected to do it, so they comply.
When I was a kid there was a simple farm woman in our church who liked to sit near the front, and if the minister got on a good roll and worked up the congregation enough, she would give a shout and stand up and begin babbling incomprehensible syllables. Then the pastor would pretend to translate what she said – usually dire warnings from God about the wages of sin. He was a prolific tongues speaker himself, saying over and over the same set of syllables which I recall to this day included (phonetically) the “word”, “Sha-goon-dria”. Anyone out there know what language that is? If so, I’d love to get a translation.
By the way, the farm woman eventually lost all of her marbles, as do many religious fanatics when they begin to age.
If I may hazard a guess, that poor woman probably lost her first marble when she was taught to speak in a “tongue” not extant on Earth. She probably had no idea what she was “saying” when she first learned that to babble gibberish is to find favor with God–or rather, his self-styled intermediary the preacher-man.
Now, that is a truly tragic case of sinning with one’s word. For that matter, it also goes against the words of the New Testament. Christ explicitly tells people NOT to pray in public like hypocrites, but rather in their own little rooms (Matthew 6:5-6). Not only was this sound safety advice at a time when his followers were likely to be persecuted by the centurions of imperial Rome, it was also sound spiritual advice, as it guarded against vanity and the urge to show off one’s righteousness before others. (Bet Becky Fischer forgot all about that in her frenzy to appear holier than thou.)
Not only that, but in the book of Acts, the gift of tongues was only given to the disciples so that they could travel throughout the world, teaching others what Christ said (to pray in their own little rooms!) in their native tongue. I gather that they were able to understand what they were saying; they would have to, if they were to pass along the good word accurately. And they would have to have been speaking in a language spoken somewhere on Earth. So the gift of tongues was not the gibberish that the farm woman babbled in church! It was surely never granted for the purpose of displaying one’s own righteousness in public like a hypocrite.
It’s not surprising, either, that the farm woman who spoke gibberish went mad. Scientists have found that glossolalia (as “speaking in tongues” is also called) is a state very much like madness, or some organic disease of the brain. There is decreased activity in the frontal lobes, which are normally involved in voluntary self-control. This may be why the kids in Jesus Camp are seen falling down and having what appear to be convulsions, in which their bodies thrash uncontrollably. Perhaps they are suffering from a kind of religiously induced epilepsy–brought on by surrendering their self-control to something outside themselves. In this case, they have surrendered indeed–to what they think is God, but is really only a frightfully nasty woman named Becky Fischer, who is trying for her own selfish glorification to turn them into the Christian American Taliban. Those convulsions we see are not evidence that God is in control of those kids, but rather that they have gone to the extreme of going against themselves. They have not been possessed by Christ; rather, they have surrendered their bodies and souls to the terrible intoxication–literally a poisoning–of a hell on Earth that is created by the likes of Becky Fischer. Who have been poisoned themselves, incidentally, and who mistake it for their divine mission to pass that poison along!
Thank Goddess, then, for the antidote–uppity women like Yaya, who claim to speak for nobody but themselves. Ironically, in so doing, they speak for so many others, who have lost their voices to the madness of Jesus Camp. Maybe one day, all those poor souls will again feel free to speak for themselves, to become impeccable with their word once more.
Let us pray.
