Father Furniss & Jesus Camp
Excerpt from Supernatural Hypocrisy:
The Cognitive Dissonance of a God Cosmology
by Kelli Jae Baeli
Available February, 2011
“We are the pure and chosen few
and all the rest are damned.
There’s room enough in Hell for you—
we don’t want Heaven crammed.”
~from an old saying of smug Jehovah’s Witnesses
A popular booklet for children in the late 19th century was authored by Father John Furniss, an English priest who wrote “books for children.” But his material will never share the same shelf as The Velveteen Rabbit, Alice in Wonderland, or Winnie the Poo. That’s because Furniss delighted in describing the horrors of Hell. And not as fiction, but as a scare tactic to indoctrinate youngsters into the Christian fold:
…his eyes were like two burning coals. Two long flames came our of his ears…sometimes he opens his mouth, and breath of blazing fire rolls out. But listen! There is a sound just like that of a kettle boiling. Is it really a kettle boiling? No. Then what is it? Hear what it is. The blood is boiling in the scalding veins of that boy. The brain is boiling and bubbling in his head. The marrow is boiling in his bones. Ask him why he is thus tormented. his answer is that when he was alive, his blood boiled to do very wicked things.[1]
and,
A little child is in this red-hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out! See how it turns and twists itself about in the fire! It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor. You can see on the face of this little child what you see on the faces of all in Hell—despair, desperate and horrible.[2]
Father Furniss was paradoxically dubbed the “Children’s Apostle.” Some kind of horrible irony.
To illustrate the collusion present in hideous garbage such as this, one only has to glance at the top of this booklet, where there is the following statement:
Approbation: I have carefully read over this Little Volume for Children and have found nothing whatever in it contrary to the doctrines of Holy Faith; but, on the contrary, a great deal to charm, instruct, and edify our youthful classes, for whose benefit it has been written. (William Meagher, Vicar General, Dublin, December 14, 1855).
Charm? There is nothing charming about this publication, unless you’ve taken leave of your senses; and to deem it so is a blatant lie, and an insult to every compassionate person on Earth.
This publication is the most horrid, manipulative, fear-mongering collection of words I’ve ever seen. And it’s all designed to frighten children into honoring the church. Any child, I imagine, who read this abhorrent sewage was vexed with nightmares and hopelessly trapped in foreboding. It is nothing less than psychological child abuse, the likes of which few social workers have ever seen in this age or any other. The damage it offers to inflict is criminal, and I can only hope its author experienced at least a portion of the torment he describes.
Hopefully, this information requires no further comment from me.
“I want to see young people who are as committed to the cause of
Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam…
I want to see them radically laying down their lives for the Gospel,
as they are over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine.”
~Pastor Becky Fisher
Another example if insidious indoctrination?
Jesus Camp.
In 2006, documentary filmmakers Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing recorded the goings-on at a Pentecostal summer camp, wherein children could practice their “prophetic gifts” and were taught how to “take back America for Christ.” The documentary, Jesus Camp, was nominated for an Academy Award, but lost to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The damage was done, however. Jesus Camp shut down in response to the negative outcry against them from all types of Americans, including Christians. The charge—rightly so—was that Jesus Camp was nothing less than a camp to train juvenile Christian jihadists.
Pastor Becky Fischer ran the camp. She called on American Christians to become more radicalized. “Pastor Fischer equates the preparation she is giving children with the training of terrorists in the Middle East,” an article in The Guardian states. “I want to see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam,” she tells the camera. “I want to see them radically laying down their lives for the Gospel, as they are over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine.”[3]
David Byrne described the camp as “the Christian version of the Madrasas[4]…both sides are pretty much equally sick.”[5] These children are told, via common methods of brainwashing, that they will be part of “An Army of God.” The film shows many scenes of emotional breakdowns wherein the children cry and pray over issues like abortion, war, and the unacceptable number of unsaved souls.
The “Kids On Fire School of Ministry” near Devils Lake, North Dakota, is also run by Becky Fischer and her Kids in Ministry International. The film focuses on three of the children at the camp, all three self-described “devout Christians.” Many of the kids at the camp are home-schooled; their curriculum includes “Creationism Science,” the belief that global warming is a hoax, and that a theocracy should be ushered in as soon as she succeeds in ushering democracy out. In “training” sessions with these Jesus Camp children, all manner of cultish mechanisms are employed, to include the old Christian chestnuts, guilt and fear. Children are reduced to sobbing lumps and only saved by accepting the tenets of Fischer’s theocratic fascism. Her tactics are nothing less than psychological, emotional and verbal abuse of children. She should be brought up on charges.
As an aside, did Fischer forget the verse in her own Bible that says “A woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness. But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet”? Is this why she tries to corrupt the children instead?
On the Message in a Matrix blog, the blogger, Terry, elaborates:
Fischer, of course, believes that the Earth is decadent and that it doesn’t matter if we abuse it or use up its resources because the Rapture is coming when Christ will rescue us all. The planet isn’t forever (in a sense) in her eyes! She continues: “Muslims train their children…so must we!” When the children are on their feet (she uses the ‘crescendo’ method like Hitler) she gets the children to chant: “God, I’m here to be trained. I’ll do what you want me to do. I’ll give my blood for Jesus.”
The hysteria begins, and seeing this, Fischer instructs: “Let’s pray in tongues” as she bursts into a chorus of Hebrew. The children join in and many begin to cry, apparently overwhelmed by the ‘power of the Lord’. The room is eventually filled with screaming, crying and gesticulating wave of hysterical children eagerly joined by their parents.
Fischer later brags about how she can lead children to the ‘Lord’ in minutes and how they train converted kids to influence their friends. There’s repeated use of the verb (an action) ‘to train’.
Fischer makes all the “phonies”—those who pretend to be normal, or behave as themselves, at school—stand at the front. This is a ‘name and shame’ tactic that causes the kids to cry with guilt. The supervisors monitor the crowd looking for those who are not getting fully involved in the brainwashing. You can see the utter confusion and anxiety in the children’s’ faces. This anxiety is a recurring feature: it’s as though the false version of the world preached (forced?) into their heads clashes with the reality that they occupy, and so, they are constantly battling internally with their own identities and their own world view. Is this not the beginnings of psychosis?[6]
Another blogger chimes in on this subject:
Satan is everywhere according to Pastor Becky at Jesus Camp, but most of all he is in Harry Potter books.
“If Harry Potter had been in the Old Testament, he would have been put to death,” rants Becky, conveniently forgetting that Moses hit a rock with his shaft (oops, pardon,) and water gushed out, Ezekiel “connected dem dry bones” and Jesus was into tricks with water and wine, bread and sardines and raising revitalizing stiffs. just think, if he had confused himself and turned the water into sardines history might have taken a different course.
Had Harry Potter been in The Old Testament he would have been put to death before he ever got his wand out to impress The Daughters of Israel. He is a gentile, a non Jew and the Jews were on a mission to prove they were God’s chosen people by killing everybody who wasn’t a Jew. Nothing much changes in Israel.[7]
In the Jesus Camp documentary, one of the children, Rachael, calls non-evangelical churches “dead churches” and says that her particular establishment is a church “God likes to go to.” Wonder where she got that? If there is a more blatant example of a brainwashing, anthropomorphizing, religious elitism cult, I’d like to hear it.
The documentary also shows one of the children in the film attending New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to hear a pastor they admire. The pastor’s name was Ted Haggard. You might recall him as the pastor who was caught up in a scandal involving soliciting a male prostitute and purchasing methamphetamines in 2006, only a few months after the release of Jesus Camp. Haggard was jettisoned to special counseling with four of his minister-friends, and they later pronounced him cured of his homosexuality. Once again, this misses the point repeatedly. Somehow Christians always manage to blame anything immoral or unethical on their version of dark outside forces such as homosexuality, lack of faith, the Devil, or other various and sundry religious scapegoats.
Regarding Jesus Camp, David Edelstein of New York Magazine said,
There is far more demagoguery on display in Jesus Camp, a frightening, infuriating, yet profoundly compassionate documentary about the indoctrination of children by the Evangelical right. The directors, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, bring the same rapt attention to the faces of little Christian campers that they brought to the subjects of their wrenching The Boys of Baraka. Except that these impressionable children are “saved” by being bombarded with the rhetoric of holy war and commanded to blow up that wall between church and state. Although the film tracks several kids—among them the adorable, snub-nosed Rachael and the dapper budding evangelist Levi—its dark heart is preacher Becky Fischer, who tells children that in the Old Testament a warlock like Harry Potter “would have been put to death.” Oh, sure, she believes in democracy, she says to Air America host Mike Papantonio, but “we can’t give everyone equal freedom because that’s going to destroy us.” Jesus Camp makes the best case imaginable for atheism.[8]
Papantonio also asks the burning question: “Why does a 5-year-old feel like it is necessary to cry about their spirituality?”[9]
The answer is, that five year old was brainwashed by an adult with an agenda.
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[1] John Furniss. “XXVII. The Fourth Dungeon: The Boiling Kettle.” The Sight of Hell (PDF). http://www.saintsworks.net/books/Fr.%20John% 20Furniss%20-%20The%20Sight%20of%20Hell.pdf.
[2] John Furniss. “XXVIII. The Fifth Dungeon: The Red Hot Oven.” The Sight of Hell (PDF). http://www.saintsworks.net/books/Fr.%20John% 20Furniss%20-%20The%20Sight%20of%20Hell.pdf.
[3] Dan Glaister. “They Cry, Pray To Bush And Wash Out The Devil—Welcome To Jesus Camp.” The Guardian, 29 September 2006. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/sep/29/usa.danglaister.
[4] Madrasa – A building or group of buildings used for teaching Islamic theology and religious law, typically including a mosque.
[5] David Byrne. “American Madrassas.” David Byrne’s Journal. 2 August 2006. http://journal.davidbyrne.com/2006/08/american_madras.html.
[7] Ian R Thorpe. “Satan in the Spreadsheets: Fundamentalist Christianity Just Gets Crazier.” 7 May 2008. http://www.authorsden.com/visit/ viewArticle.asp?id=39214.
[8] David Edelstein. “Wake up Fall.” The Movie Review, New York Magazine, 25 September 2006. http://nymag.com/movies/reviews/21366/ index1.html.
[9] ABC News. “Jesus Camp Pastor Says She Does Not Manipulate Children.” 28 September 2006. http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/ story?id= 2501819&page=3.
(c) Kelli Jae Baeli
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