If you have been reading this blog or Brad's blog for any length of time, you understand how both of us feel about religious charlatanry and attempts to convert to any religion through lies, misinformation and trickery. Brad's latest foray into what he appropriately calls "woo woo" is a condemnation of Fox News for running what amounts to an infomercial for a guy who makes the dubious claim that he can cure cancer with moonbeams. I see this as not just a harmless feature, but a dangerous practice that could induce some who aren't strong mentally or who are merely desperate for some kind of help to eschew proven medical treatments for some charlatan who claims to catch moonbeams with large mirrors and then cure cancer with them.
Even more dangerous are the frothing fundamentalist Muslim fruitcake death-cultists who use a combination of what I would call nationalist brainwashing, cute children's programming and the ideals of religious and patriotic honor to induce a complete disregard for life in exchange for hatred and the murder of others to attain "paradise" in heaven. They will use everything possible to convince children as young as 12 that hacking off the head of a live victim is somehow honorable. They will use cartoon characters familiar to little ones to promote hatred of others. They will use respectably-dressed, Western-looking business types to promote murder. They will use lies and misrepresentation to promote religious zealotry.
Does this happen with just extremist Muslims?
I've seen the documentary "Jesus Camp." I found it to be creepy. Not because it espouses conservative Christian values. That doesn't bother me. Despite being Pagan-leaning, I share a lot of those values with these people. But the concept of turning children into warriors for Jesus bothers me. The concept of an "army of God" brings up not love, joy and forgiveness often espoused by my Christian friends, but blood and war against those who don't believe. Radical. Brainwashed. Visceral. A bit crazy, if you ask me.
Do I believe all Evangelical Christians are this extreme? Of course not! But do some Christians use brainwashing techniques, lies and fear mongering to promote their faith and grab converts? Yeah. They do.
The Redhead is in fifth grade this year. He's part of a program called DARE - Drug Abuse Resistance Education. My son is pretty smart. He knows and understands how dangerous and horrible drug abuse can be. I've sat down and spoken with him honestly about it. He knows why we adopted his sisters - because their parents chose opium over their children. But DARE reinforces this message at school, and the Redhead enjoys the program. I don't know enough about the program to gauge its effectiveness. I just know the Redhead enjoys it. The Sheriff's deputy who teaches them is pretty charismatic. The Redhead can't stop raving about him. The Redhead brought home some fun optical illusions that his DARE officer gave the class. He loves optical illusions. He loves figuring out how they work. They're fun, and he was excited to show them to me.
But there's something that bothers me. With the charisma and the important message and the terrific rapport that this law enforcement officer has with these kids, why does he feel the need to proselytize and play tricks on kids to get them to quite literally "see" Jesus?
This optical illusion is an afterimage. It is an image that continues to appear in one's vision after the exposure to the original image has ceased. What you see here is a negative afterimage.
Negative afterimages are caused when the eye's photoreceptors, primarily those known as cone cells, adapt from the over stimulation and lose sensitivity.[1] Normally the eye deals with this problem by rapidly moving the eye small amounts (see: microsaccade), the motion later being "filtered out" so it is not noticeable. However if the color image is large enough that the small movements are not enough to change the color under one area of the retina, those cones will eventually tire or adapt and stop responding. The rod cells can also be affected by this.
When the eyes are then diverted to a blank space, the adapted photoreceptors send out little signal and those colors remain muted. However, the surrounding cones that were not being excited by that color are still "fresh", and send out a strong signal. The signal is exactly the same as if looking at the opposite color, which is how the brain interprets it.
If you stare at the image long enough, and then proceed to look at a light surface, you will see the image of what the Western culture believes to be Jesus Christ. As adults, we understand the phenomenon of negative afterimages. We understand why they happen and we understand that our vision of Jesus in this case is an optical illusion.
But how many innocent, uninformed kids would look at this illusion and be duped into believing that they "saw" Jesus? How many of them would be tricked into a belief they may or may not otherwise have had? How many of them would walk away thinking they had somehow had a religious experience? The Redhead is pretty smart, and he has a mom who explains things to him. Frankly, I'm not worried about him being suddenly converted to Evangelical Christianity. He has recently shown an interest in exploring different religions, and I'm getting him all the information I can. He's certainly not dumb enough to be taken in by an optical illusion.
And for those of you who are about to knee-jerk into "how can you compare this innocent thing to fundamentalist Islamist indoctrination" mode... don't. I'm not comparing the faiths or the outcomes. I'm comparing the idea that somehow people have to be tricked and fooled into believing. Much like fundamentalist Muslims have started using seemingly innocuous cartoon characters to indoctrinate children into their culture of hate, some Evangelicals are using optical illusions to trick kids into "seeing Jesus."
Do I think it ultimately brings harm? I think it depends on whom you ask. Some kids, like my Redhead, realize that it's nothing but an optical illusion and accept it as such. But to me, religious faith is a personal matter. It's a very important thing to a lot of people. It's something they hold very close and make a very critical part of their lives. I am not comfortable with the idea of something that important being imposed on an impressionable kid with an illusion.
In a public school.
