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]

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.)