Monday, August 03, 2009

Having fun.. for Jesus

Something related to my last post on education popped up on the BBC today about "Christian" skateboarding parks you can read more about it and watch a video here. The idea is clearly to combine worship with something that will attract kids although there is a lot of strenuous denial in the video and clearly some sensitivity around this idea not being about enticing children with the "bait" of something they clearly enjoy doing, only to hit them up with Christianity as soon as they are through the doors.

As the preacher says to the kids, we thank God for wheels and ramp 48.. amen!, but since both ramps and wheels were invented by people a long time before the Christian God this seems somewhat presumptuous to me, but then even from this short clip it is clear that rational thinking is not what such establishments are focused on.

Now I can't get too excited about Christians doing whatever they like to facilitate physical activity for children, we have such a camp near to where I live and all the local schools pay to use their climbing wall now and again, the only beef I have with this is the lack of transparency about the objectives of the endeavour, to claim it is entirely altruistic is simply untenable, so, nice try chaps but pull the other one, it has (church) bells on it.

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