Evangelical Christianity sucks!

Yesterday while waiting for Bill to get home I found Jesus Camp on Channel 4 on demand. I'd heard of this on the LJ atheist community I'm on so decided, in a move I realised was rather foolish, that I should watch it. I only saw the first 20-25 minutes but what I saw there didn't surprise me at all. It was obviously set up to make people think that it was rather horrendous, but all I could think watching it was. Yup, that's Exactly what it was like growing up! (With the exception of the Bush link, and global warming and the added joy of homosexuality being a result of demon possession). It didn't shock me, or surprise me, but was exactly what I remembered, it was refreshing to see that most well rounded people would find such fanaticism to be Very Very Wrong.

I stopped watching and had a lovely evening. Then before I feel asleep I suddenly found myself in floods of tears. Clearly I'm still quite traumatised by the religious upbringing. (For which, for the record my dad has at least apologised for and has also become an atheist, no such luck with mum though). In the end the only thing that could stop me crying was to think of Velvet Goldmine and go through the film in my head and that made everything beter. I don't know how I would have made it as a teenager without Bowie and Angie's autobiography where it was ok to bi. Glamour banishes god! Horray!

On a related note: (nicked from bookofchange
http://www.thisibelieve.org/dsp_ShowEssay.php?uid=34

Peony Pavilion by Tang Xianzu translated by Cyril Birch

This was an enjoyable translation. It seemed accurate enough that when I went to look up a translated passage in the original Chinese I found it immediately. It was nice to read the whole story and find out what happened in the scenecs that were missing from the production that I saw the week before. It turned out that my favorite night, in addition to being about ghosts and hell, also had the fewest missing scenes, and the night I found the weakest, the last night, had the most. I got this copy from the SOAS library, but will buy my own so I can use it to help me read the original, as it is such a poetic piece it really does need to be read in the original language.