Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 12:36 pm
We’ve seen the disdain of Christian fundamentalists for science. They hate our education system. They hate higher education with a passion and hate public schools perhaps even more, to judge from the words of home school advocate Colin Gunn.
Gunn has made a propaganda film….er, excuse me….a documentary, “IndoctriNation: Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity in America,” in which he warns of our “totalitarian education system” and compares public schools to the Hitler Youth.
Right Wing Watch relates that Gunn thinks our public school system is sinful. And of course, he hates the teaching of evolution. I mean, if evolution is taught how will the GOP turn out more subpar thinkers like Todd Akin and Paul Broun? And who will believe their hateful swill if you educate everyone? For that matter, who will listen to Colin Gunn?
Right now there are enough dumb people to buy Gunn’s stuff, and I mean with actual money. You can go to Voice of Christian Youth America (VCY America) and listen or place your order, or load up on crazy goodies at Gunn’s website.
He did an interview on VCY’s show Crosstalk and said there that school busses were emblematic of our totalitarian education system. And here our Founding Fathers thought public education was emblematic of freedom. Who knew?
And here I thought they were big yellow vehicles that got our students to and from school. The ironic thing is, VCY America tells us, ” Colin and his family travel across America in an old yellow school bus exploring the origins and social impact of public school education.”
Ooops, I guess, huh?
Here is the trailer for the film:
IndoctriNation Trailer from IndoctriNation on Vimeo.
Or you can watch this interview Gunn gave on Alex Jones’ InfoWars early this year:
Both Alex Jones and Colin Gunn think the best way to combat declining grades in our schools is to keep the kids at home and teach them the Bible, and to avoid teaching them any science at all. In this they’re completely in lockstep with David Barton, who likes a book called “None Of These Diseases” by S.I. McMillen. McMillen, as Right Wing Watch relates, ”claims that everything we need to know about medicine and health care can be found in the Bible.”
Add to this what Paul Krugman calls Romney’s ”death by ideology”:
Last week, speaking to The Columbus Dispatch, Mr. Romney declared that nobody in America dies because he or she is uninsured: “We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.” This followed on an earlier remark by Mr. Romney — echoing an infamous statement by none other than George W. Bush — in which he insisted that emergency rooms provide essential health care to the uninsured.
I don’t know about you but as the father of a boy who would die without medical insurance to pay for his $5,000 per week dose of medicine, my pucker factor shot through the roof. I may not be able to shit for a week. Be afraid, America. Be very afraid.
The guy who interviewed Gunn for VCY America, Vic Eliason, isn’t the brightest bulb on the tree either, which as the Nazis he likes to talk about proved, doesn’t mean he is not dangerous. “According to Eliason,” RRW tells us, “the teachers in the public school system who do not uphold and instill Christian ideology are performing ‘mental molestation,’ which deserves to be recognized and punished alongside physical molestation.”
In other words, it ought to be illegal NOT to turn children into Christians. I suppose whatever their parents might wish.
Mental molestation, folks, is having to read this crap so I can pass it on to you. Trust me there. I’m calling “bad touch” right now.
Here, dig this:
Gunn: Draw a parallel between Nazi Germany where you have an authoritarian government that took over the whole nation, partially through the youth movement by co-opting all of the youth movement into the Hitler Youth, and therefore indoctrinating them into the class of this unbelief and this idolatry of the state. And so sadly that’s what we’re seeing very much today and we wonder why, why can’t people understand the abortion issue or these other issues that are political—well it’s because they’ve been indoctrinated. And we really can’t fix any political issue until we fix the public school system, controlling the future of America by controlling the hearts and minds of all the children that are sent there.
This idolatry of the state, he says. I thought that was a Republican thing, as much fundie as neocon.
Ironically, Hitler was a Catholic. A Catholic until the day he died. And another funny thing: Hitler believed in state-sponsored religion, saying, “I have need of the Church in exactly the same way as had the monarchy and other past forms of government.”
Sure, he got upset at preachers badmouthing the Third Reich, but he also axed some of the harsher stuff coming from his own people, according to his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. And when it came time for Hoffmann to find a school for his 9-year-old son, Hitler told him, “I strongly recommend you send him to a convent school. For young people, the convent school is the best educational institution we have.”
He even personally drove (in other words, Hitler’s chauffeur drove) Hoffmann and his son to the religious school. Hoffmann relates that it was Hitler who presented his son to the Mother Superior, saying, “See that you make a decent man of him.”
That hardly sounds like the scenario Gunn is painting. Hitler celebrated Christmas and went to church (if not regularly) and as Hoffmann also relates, “At every New Year’s reception the representative of the Vatican, Monsignor Orsenige, was invariably present to give Hitler, as Head of the German State, the good wishes and blessing of the Pope.”
But Gunn isn’t done murdering the truth:
Gunn: The nature of the public schools is it allows your child to be subject to those philosophies, whether it is gay rights or the progressives or evolution, if you send your child there be aware that he’s open to all of those views which he wouldn’t be if you kept him home or you put him in a private school.
Eliason: Right now the news is a blare with a man who molested children, and he’s going to prison for the rest of his life. That’s physical molestation. But folks, there is mental molestation going on in the public school, and the people are getting by scot-free. And I’m not criticizing many fine Christian teachers who are trying to do their very best as they are employed in the public schools, but the molestation is a philosophy that is being pushed over all that literally is a molestation of the mind and nobody has a penalty for that.
Somebody needs to read the U.S. Constitution. But if the Constitution goes out the window, science goes out with it:
Eliason: I was talking to [Creationism advocate] Ken Ham about a pastor who was telling his young people, he said there are some people who believe in Creation in six days and some people who believe in the Big Bang Theory, but whatever you like that’s fine, and Ken put it this way, he said, if you can’t be sure about the miraculous power of God to create as the Bible says it, why should a kid believe anything else that’s in that book?
Gunn: Absolutely, I think the faith of many children are undermined very quickly in the science class when they’re taught and the Bible is literally discredited in front of them rather than it being an understanding of real science, which is creation science.
Creation science is real science? How does that work, exactly? The world-knowledge of the Bronze Age is more valuable than what we know now with the benefit not of divine inspiration, but of science?
And Eliason can’t go without parading the aberrochristian lie about love:
Eliason: The godless mentality of the issues of lifestyle, we’re talking about homosexuality being diversity, and pressing for diversity training to kids. And of course we’re not talking about hating people, but when you have abnormal, aberrant lifestyles that are being paraded as normality, isn’t there some wonder that parents would be upset?
No, he sure doesn’t hate anybody, does he? Certainly, not those abnormal, aberrant people he wants to reduce to second-class citizen status. But hey, slave owners loved their slaves too, right? I mean, slavery was the best thing that ever happened to blacks. Isn’t that what they tell us?
These people stand to win if the Republicans are not stopped in 2012. Already, we are seeing instances of state sponsored religion in various states and of support by that state sponsored religion for religious home schooling. More and more children are going to fall pray to this backward-thinking ideology that will destroy America forever as any sort of influence on the world.
Mat Staver was unintentionally correct when he said on Friday, “I’m Not an Alarmist’ but this Election Will ‘Literally’ Determine ‘the Survival of Western Civilization.” I realize he is thinking like Gunn and his buddy Matt Barber, but though wrongly applied, his words are spot on.
This election could well determine the survival of Western Civilization, or rather, American civilization. I think Europe is probably safely free from fundamentalist Christian influences to struggle on. Their problem is Republican economic thinking.
Our own problem is Republican religious thinking. And I’m afraid we’re on our own. We will not be able to get any help from Europe there. They’re too busy laughing. But boy, if they think America is funny now, wait till they get a look at it four years into a Romney presidency.
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