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Finally had the chance to see JESUS CAMP. Are these folks nuts or what?

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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 08:11 PM
Original message
Finally had the chance to see JESUS CAMP. Are these folks nuts or what?
The woman who ran the camp was especially frightening, I thought.

I wonder how many of these camps there are.

One's plenty.
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Neoma Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 08:13 PM
Response to Original message
1. I have some in my family.
We don't talk much though. :toast:
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 08:14 PM
Response to Reply #1
2. You run into a few on my family tree also, but the camp director
was extraordinarily unsettling.

Not to mention that one guy screaming to 9-year olds about the evils of abortion. I've never seen anything like that.
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Neoma Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 09:18 PM
Response to Reply #2
24. I'm not really surprised at all that.
It's not really new to me. Although the movie did show it in a different light that creeped me out.
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 09:20 PM
Response to Reply #24
25. Yes. It creeped me out too. Neoma, we should agree to be blurb
authors for the DVD of this film:

"It creeped us out." -- Neoma and Old Crusoe

______

Downthread, I threw in a piece from the Seattle papers which claims that the camp is being shut down after the Ted Haggard incident.

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bluerum Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 08:17 PM
Response to Original message
3. Cuckoo nuts. Flyin high on jesus as they say. eom
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 08:19 PM
Response to Reply #3
4. We had the Harry Potter-bashers in the film, braying about witchcraft
and sorcery, etc.

I haven't read the Potter books but anything that gets kids to read seems like a pretty good thing.

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proud2BlibKansan Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 08:23 PM
Response to Original message
5. yes they are nuts
How about that scene where the worship the cardboard cutout of the president?
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 08:24 PM
Response to Reply #5
6. Yes. That was kind of sickening. George Bush as an object of worship.
Bush as a sort of deliverer of God's will. It was hard to stomach.

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krispos42 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 08:27 PM
Response to Reply #5
8. That wasn't cardboard, actually.
He's just that shallow.

:rofl:
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 08:30 PM
Response to Reply #8
10. LOL!
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proud2BlibKansan Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 09:00 PM
Response to Reply #8
21. ROFLMAO
:rofl:
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NMMNG Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 08:27 PM
Response to Original message
7. Pretty much
:crazy:
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 08:29 PM
Response to Reply #7
9. It felt to me as if these grown-ups didn't have the right to
frighten kids like that.

And setting up camps, claiming it was the way to counter Islamic extremism... that was just over the top.
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NMMNG Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 08:43 PM
Response to Reply #9
13. "The way to counter Islamic extremism"
Yeah, by infusing them with Christian extremism. That's really good. :sarcasm:
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 08:47 PM
Response to Reply #13
15. Extremism seems to come in all flavors, doesn't it? This woman felt that
if Islamic kids are taught devotion to the point where they'd blow themselves up in the name of their cause, then the LEAST she could do was provide a camp to indoctrinate Christian families so that they'd be fiercely devotional also. She didn't carry it to the logical extreme of shaping them into suicide bombers, but the question kind of hung in the air.

Disturbin bunch of folks with a dark mission.
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NMMNG Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 08:56 PM
Response to Reply #15
19. Indeed it does
And though the Christian extremists may not become suicide bombers, they can make good little abortion clinic/gay night club bombers or, at the very least, good little frothing at the mouth demonstrators and mass e-mail/letter campaigners.
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 08:59 PM
Response to Reply #19
20. Very true. I watched the film and resented that the grown-ups in charge
couldn't make distinctions any better than they did.

As grown-ups, they're supposed to be able to do that.

I'm hoping the camp will meet with financial hard times and have to shut down.
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Applan Donating Member (435 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 08:31 PM
Response to Original message
11. What I found interesting
I couldn't work out whether the movie was trying to point out how nutty these people are or whether it was supposed to provide an objective study. It seemed like the people were quite happy to be filmed saying really stupid things. I guess some people would watch it and think wow that's great, where do I sign up.
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 08:33 PM
Response to Reply #11
12. Yes. There was that odd teeter-totter feeling between thinking they
KNEW these people would look like unstable nuts versus behaving in ways to win more converts.

I thought the scenes of the neon ghettos -- the hotels, gas stations, fast-food places -- were effective, and I liked the technique of the one radio host kind of talking us through some of the hot points.

But by the time we got to the camp itself, I was cringing the whole time. Really creepy stuff.
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southerncrone Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 08:45 PM
Response to Original message
14. Guess I'm out of touch, but what is JESUS CAMP? A movie?
:dunce:
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 08:52 PM
Response to Reply #14
17. Yes. A documentary about a camp in North Dakota given over to
a kind of hyper-evangelical interpretation of the Bible.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0486358/

The original website doesn't come up when I click on it:

http://www.jesuscampthemovie.com/


The director's name is Becky Fisher. A very unsettling sort of person.
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southerncrone Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 09:56 PM
Response to Reply #17
26. Looks like one we all should see, so we know who our enemy is...
I just wonder how many screwed up kids this will produce. :shrug:
How many suicides, mass murderers, prostitutes, drug addicts, runaways, wife-beaters, serial killers......
:nuke:
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 10:01 PM
Response to Reply #26
27. Good point. From the looks of things in the film, it was very close to
brain-washing.

Frightening stuff.
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Hawaii Hiker Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 08:52 PM
Response to Original message
16. They played a clip from "Jesus Camp" on
Howard Stern's show last week (during Robin's news)...I don't think I could stomach that movie, the clip they played made me angry enough...
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 08:54 PM
Response to Reply #16
18. Your instinct is probably right. I had trouble sitting through it.
Some of the things the followers say are chantlike and sound as if they'd come from the mouths of someone at Jonestown, 2 or 3 days before the Kool-Aid party.
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 09:07 PM
Response to Original message
22. Here is a review of the film from the New York TIMES:
Edited on Sun Mar-18-07 09:13 PM by Old Crusoe
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/09/22/movies/22camp.html

--and an interesting capsule review from the Bay Guardian in San Francisco:

http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=1739&catid=110&volume_id=147&issue_id=253&volume_num=40&issue_num=52

with some interesting comments by readers afterward.
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-18-07 09:17 PM
Response to Original message
23. This piece from Seattle says the camp will shut down "for several years":
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003365311_jesuscamp08.html

--evidently as a result of the Ted Haggard incident in Colorado Springs, where several of the families attended Haggard's mega-church.

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gbate Donating Member (900 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Mar-19-07 06:32 AM
Response to Original message
28. I would go so far to say that these kids are being abused.
The scariest part of the movie was when the kids were learning about abortion and then crying over the millions of "friends" that are not there now.

Scary, sad and disturbing.
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trixie Donating Member (696 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Mar-19-07 07:44 PM
Response to Reply #28
29. just watched it
I am with you. Very disturbing.

I was taught that we should be wary of those speaking as if God but are really Satan. This woman seems the case. Is it coincidents that the camp is at Devils Lake? I think not!!!! I found that they are desensitizing the kids to violence. Having the kids smash pottery with a hammer is clearly a way to get them used to violence. To have a little girl go up to a group of men on the street is really horrifying. How did you all like their homeschooling? Pretty bad.

The evil woman clearly states that children are easily manipulated. Nice! She also wants to emulate radical extremists in other religions. How does she think she is any better?
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Mar-19-07 07:45 PM
Response to Reply #28
30. At that part of the film, I kept asking myself if the younger kids even
knew what "abortion" was.

They could hear that crazy old guy up on the stage wailing about how bad it is, but some of them were, what, 7 or 8 years old?

It just didn't seem to me that they even knew what they were crying for, but they were all crying just the same.

Spooky and then some.
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Old and In the Way Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Mar-20-07 11:30 AM
Response to Original message
31. Creepy comes to mind.
I watched this...it was very disturbing. I think we are seeing political indoctrination disguised with a Jesus cover. Can you imagine the Right's problem with a similar subset of atheists/agnostics who would promote the Democratic Party while brainwashing kids who are too young to know better?

Really shameful...a lot of these kids will outgrow this, but many are going to be a mess in a decade or so.
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