Jesus Camp

I guess I should apologize for being missing in action lately. I think I blogged more often while I was on the road to Arizona. Things have been catching up with me. Yet another rental property to turn over (not a new one, an eviction), lots to do at work (currently running a background process to update records as we speak), and a bunch of biking (I've been trying to find someone who will go on RAGBRAI, the ride across Iowa, with me next year. Kyle...? Hmm? Come on...you know you want to, and you have 8 months to train).

But in the midst of all of that, Pooteewheet and I found some time to go to Jesus Camp at the Lagoon this weekend while Eryn was up at Grandpa's and Grandma's. If you're not familiar with Jesus Camp (I think I blogged the trailer quite a while ago), it's a documentary about Pentacostal Christians and, in particular, their summer camp in Devil's Lake, North Dakota. What do Pentacostals do at summer camp you ask? Oh, I know you're asking...don't deny it. For starters, they pray over their Powerpoint presentations. Yep...they actually voice, out loud, a prayer to God to protect their power and, in particular, their Powerpoint presentation. A righteous God would despise Powerpoint presentations...at least most of them. I'm certain he'd despise those where worshippers use a font that looks like dripping blood to scare children.

After all, if praying over Powerpoints worked, then praying over C# and Java code would work. Rather than unit testing, I could just spend 10% of my time praying that no bugs would surface and that my interfaces and WSDLs would know the blessed peace of optimal interoperability. And you know if prayer over C# and Java enterprise solutions actually worked, there would be a business in hiring offshore contractors to do the praying so the developers could focus on development. You'd be busy coding away and the code would move to QA...and there'd be a bug. Tracker! I'd call offshore, or contact the onshore liaison,

"Hey...I got a tracker. Someone isn't praying hard enough."

"That is a very difficult feature, Scott. Perhaps you should increase the priority so it receives more prayer."

"Do I need to request prayer for both the original feature and the tracker?"

"If you provide a detailed prayer and testing plan, perhaps we can get them both in under the same Hail Mary."

"This seems like a showstopper. Maybe we should just add a few more people."

"We can't escalate to showstopper-level praying without VP approval."

"Yeah...I'll pray for that. You just keep praying for my tracker. I bet you get an answer first."


Hyperbole, by the way. My VP is very friendly and responsive.

I think Pooteewheet's favorite part was when the preacher was telling the kids how sin was like grabbing a tiger by the tail, and then she started swinging around a stuffed lion. And both of us agreed the main kid in the documentary needed to shave off his mullet. He's not Sampson - that crap has to go (it was a little shocking to see his idol, a famous preacher, actually talk down to him...I couldn't tell if it was jealousy of youth, jealousy of preaching, or what - it was just backhanded mean).

Well worth watching, though I wish they had stuck to just letting the camera run rather than cutting back to Air America now and then. They didn't really need to drive home any point - the whole camp praying for a cardboard cutout of George W. was more than any talk radio host could pull off.