I would hate to be a kid today

Last night, I finally watched the must-see documentary "Jesus Camp". I am sure many of you have seen it and even more of have heard of it. For those of you who do not really know what I am talking about, "Jesus Camp" is an essentially unbiased (yes, I realize that it cannot be completely unbiased) documentary pretty much about kids being raised in the Evangelical faith. It was heart breaking for me to watch this documentary, seeing how brainwashed these young kids are and how guilty they all felt about essentially being a kid because, from what I understand, no child is innocent in the eyes of Evangelicals, rather they must be reborn after being forgiven for their sins and accepting Jesus. While watching this movie, I had to continuously make jokes to try and lighten the anger that was settling on me. These kids not only had no real opinions of their own because their parents were so obsessed with the religion that most of them were home schooled (so that they would never hear any other opinions, 75% of kids who are home-schooled are Evangelical), but they felt the need to then push their beliefs onto other people because we must all be saved.

On top of all the brainwashing that is going on, kids seem to be having their youth stolen from them at younger and younger ages, for reasons not even including the ridiculous average age that people are having sex for the first time now and the horrible incidents that force a child to grow up too fast; abuse, irresponsible parents, etc. Instead I am talking about the what appears to be growing trend for parents to not only force their beliefs about religion onto children but teaching them about things that they just do not need to know about yet and teaching them to hate those people who disagree. I wish that I could say I was shocked watching the adults in this documentary preaching about how evil women who get abortions are and how gays are going to hell, telling this to kids whose average age was probably 11. I feel like the last thing kids need to learn about at that age or any age is to hate people who are going through things that they will hopefully never have to face (that is not me trying to say that being gay is horrible and they should not have to face it, but they shouldn't be taught to hate the unknown and different). Then to top it all off, these parents are dragging their kids out to clinics who perform abortions or to funerals of gay soldiers (most popularly), having them exposed to this grief and then protest and spew hatred at people that are different than them. And it really is that simple in my mind, they are different and that unknown scares the crap out of these parents, leading them to indoctrinate their kids into their twisted beliefs.

As usual, I did not write this in hopes of offending anyone but I would be very interested in hearing people's opinions of the documentary and other things that I talked about..

Thanks!