jar writes:
The kids that are being brainwashed under systems such as ABeka Books have almost no chance of ever learning the truth about either science or Christianity and all too often, should they actually get exposed to truth the result is a total abandonment of their religious beliefs.
That is scary jar. ABeka is a very familiar name to me, and if it wasn't actually part of my curriculum, I must have certainly received much of their literature and catalogs. Are they the ones with the owl symbol?
The only other main option in homeschool texts at the time was Bob Jones U., and my mom refused to order from them. She also refused to socialize us with 'fundamentalists', although at the time I knew that this was because they weren't Catholic, and that was all. No homeschoolers were. I could also get a sense that they were 'different'..most were children of ministers and lived on church properties. 'Real' priests didn't get married. Some of the people we dealt with also were ex-Jews turned born again. A complete dogmatic war from my mom's perspective, but I have to wonder what she was teaching me that was not part of the CCOI anyway.
My mom does not believe in dinos, period.
She has entertained the idea of a sun revolving around the earth.
She does not believe in evolution, although I have not questioned to what extent she might go.
Perhaps one of these days I will get around to writing a Catholic COI topic. The literature is out there, even though it is not part of mainstream [Pope approved] Catholic thought. Generally it is put out by the same folk who believe the Pope is a false anti pope.
In an accidental way, the element of conspiracy and contention present in most of the conservative papers and periodicals is in itself enough to make people question or be aware of opposng views. During the teen years I didn't have the mental energy to sort things out, but at the very least, the rememberence that there was a 'war' between us and them eventually got my curiousity.
I honestly didn't want to be open-minded to new ideas at the time. I just wanted to know more about what the differences were between 'fundies' and Catholics, between creos anmd evos.
In my teens, especially when I worked as food prep manager at the notoriously Christian company Chic-fil-a, I saw many people my age abandon fundamentalism. It wasn't about science or truth, usually something like 'I got my girl pregnant while on a youth mission'. Sometimes reality jolted them out of the cult, but not reason. It would be rather all or nothing, because the fundie cults weren't making faith anything more than a clique and ingroup. If you were 'outside' you didn't even know there were other paths to take. Alienation is not particularly a phenomenon for Christian drop-outs, but the level that Christian cults/youth are cut off from society is probably much greater than in any other sector right now. The persistance of CCOI is a problem similar to inter-city violence and solved by getting kids to know there is another world outside of this. Religon being untouchable, it is hard to reach the kids.
P.S. Any particulars about Beka and ignorance?
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