Today's Stupidity For The Day

[hkellick]

And when your parents asked you what you did at church today, tell them you experience what life might have been like during the Inquisition
Yeah. Inquisition on little children. What a bloody WONDERFUL idea. :p
Children's entertainment at it's best!

Comments

[phoenixsong]

Two points I would make:

First, I don't think this activity was targeted at "little children." The age of the girl is not mentioned in the article; however, in my experience, most similar "youth groups" to the one mentioned are made up of high school students, possibly down to the junior high level. I also don't know many "little children" that have unspecified knee injuries -- such things are generally associated with competitive team sports. Another clue to this is the claim that "her future earning capacity has been diminished." The family is also saying the activity was presented to them as a "car wash," which doesn't sound much like an activity for "little children" to me without much more parental involvement.

Second: While I was at Geneseo someone put on, as their senior thesis (theater department), what was essentially a miniature recreation of a WWII concentration camp in the black box theater. I did know what was going to happen, at least to a point, since I was hanging out with those folks at the time. I couldn't say for certain what expectation most audience members had, though I do remember the posters for the performance having very strongly worded warnings that this was not exactly something for little kids or a "family show." I still attended the performance, and I still got sucked right into it. (Maybe even more so because I knew what the point was.) It ended with approximately half the "audience" behind a fence in one corner, and the other half, having been penned in a transparent box on the other half of the room, being "gassed" in full view of pretty much every one else in the room.

My opinion, based on the above, comes down to this:

If the participants are informed and willing, and the actors know how to look for someone who is in over their heads and can remove them in a way that does not disrupt the "performance" for other willing participants (key word being "willing"), I have no problem with this sort of thing.

If this girl and/or her parents truly had no idea what was going on, and therefore no way for any of them to either agree to it, or be able to opt out, then the organizers should not have forced her to go through it.

I don't disbelieve the suit itself, but someone isn't giving the full story here. IMHO, there are holes on both sides of the story as presented in the article. Someone dropped the ball, but I don't think there's enough information here to prove whether it was the church leadership deliberately misleading the family, or not having the sense to recognize the girl's extreme physical and emotional condition and remove her, or if the parents were simply accidentally left out of the information loop due to the girl's surgery. If only for the sake of curiosity, I'd be interested in a different take on the events, whether by means of another article or seeing some of the evidence presented to the court by both sides.

[lite.livejournal.com]

Your points are valid.
What I have to wonder is why have this sort of experience to begin with?
I was born a jew and we never NEVER "experienced" life in a concentration camp, or in Israel today, or a number of times throughout Jewish History.
What we were was educated.
I may be a lousy jew, but I knew more about the holocause than the average American. Which is part of why I butt heads with mom every time a new holocause movies comes on. I just don't wanna see it anymore. I don't know every gory detail, but I don't WANT to anymore.
What bothers me is the tone that somewhere in the world Christians are being persecuted. This leads to anger and hate of other religions and other races.
Maybe it's an "eye opener", but I'd argue that there are better ways to get a handle on the horrors of the world without "experiecing them first hand".
And yes, there are some things you just need to experience to understand. And there are many things you don't, where a well elucidated story (again.. holocause.. Anne Franks.. or possibly even movies such as Schindler's List, to a point) does, if not a better job, at least a less traumatizing one.

[phoenixsong]

I may be a lousy jew, but I knew more about the holocause than the average American.

Replace "Jew" with "Catholic" and "Holocaust" with "Catholicism" or "Christianity" in general -- I understand s:) Not everything by any stretch of the imagination, but when I'm in middle school and explaining the Immaculate Conception (in the context of RC dogma) to my parents, and having to prove it by hauling out the encyclopedia... *g*

For some people, watching or reading about something is enough to understand. For others, especially when dealing with teenage (or adult) group-think, some people just won't get it unless it's turned against them. And for others, probably the reason I wanted to go to that performance, it's because we understand that discrimination is such a horrible thing, and that watching or reading about someone else's experience can only do so much -- it's a very different thing to understand this intellectually, and to actually grasp even a fraction of what it actually felt like.

It's partly a matter of different learning styles, and partly, I think, a matter of some people refusing to learn. "Those who do not learn from the past...," etc.

I do object to the point being Christians are persecuted. Lots of people are persecuted because of what they believe or who they are. But if you can apply it to a broader view of persecution and discrimination being wrong, no matter who the victim -- especially when dealing with the aforementioned group-think, I can see an exercise like this being much more effective than "you should read this book or watch this movie."

Books are written by a single person and can be subject to interpretation; movies can be dismissed as fantasy, or a Romanticized take on a subject. A group of people all going through the same experience and being able to discuss it afterwards as equal participants can be something more of a wake-up call. (I'm specifically thinking of some of the *cough* people who claim that things like the Holocaust and the Inquisition never happened, or are exaggerated accounts. People died, horribly and in large number, simply because of one particular label attached to them. What is there to exaggerate about that?)

[lite.livejournal.com]

. o O ( Help! Help! I'm being persecuted!
Bloody Peasant!
What a giveaway! You hear him? You her him persecuting me?!?! )

I agree that all sources of knowledge: books, movies, history, lectures.. are all biased and it's really up to the individual to determine his own truths.
You get, for example, a fairly different view point on the civil war from listening to a lecture or two in class (in the North) and, say, reading "Gone With The Wind"

That's what led me away from Judaism and towards Paganism, really. I went looking for answers to certain questions and Judaism could not answer them to my satisfaction.
But that's not really here nor there.

Yep, definitely moved beyond the original topic...s:)

[phoenixsong]

*dingdingding!* I've had some kind of balance between Catholicism and some decidedly non-Catholic perceptions of the universe for a few years. It's only recently that Someone Up There more or less hit a reset button. Hence my current state of "I don't know what to call myself anymore, but I'm more and more certain it's not Roman Catholic."

Which, true as it may be, is kind of scary.

Re: Yep, definitely moved beyond the original topic...s:)

[lite.livejournal.com]

I don't know what to call myself either.
I'm not a particularly religious wiccan (don't do circles, don't dance are naked in the pale moonlight chanting "Oh God, Oh Goddess" etc.)
I do believe in the tenets of Wicca, but also, to some extent, the tenets of Taoism and, to some extent, the tenets of Shamanism.
If hard pressed, I say I'm a Witch.
Just not a practicing Witch (unless by Practicing you mean practicing magic in which case I am.)