i went to Catholic school ....

I didn't grow up quite like the kids in Jesus Camp, but close. I also knew a lot of kids that were like the ones portrayed, especially the homeschooled kids. I grew up in North Dakota, too.

I went to Christian schools and I was taught creationism to the extreme. I remember my 7th grade history teacher practically worshiped George W. Bush. I was taught that Christianity was the only true religion and that Fox News was the only channel worth watching. One kid jokingly said he was gay while I was in high school and he ended up being practically suspended.

I'm not trying to bash Christianity. I know a lot of wonderful people who are Christians and they are some of the nicest and most accepting people I have ever met. But the religious right is full of extremist hypocrites raising their kids to be extremist hypocrites. I was raised that way.

I think everyone should have the freedom to believe whatever they want to believe, if they want to believe anything at all. It's much more sincere. A lot of the testimonies on being "born again" that I've heard have been anything but sincere. It's based on fear, mostly. A lot of people will say, "I want to go to heaven instead of hell," so they became a Christian. Ultimately, it's fear that drives them. Fear and peer pressure. If you're raised by Christians and all of your friends are Christians, you're most likely going to be a Christian.

"I must express myself." - Delia Deetz

I went to a Catholic elementary school in the midwest, and it's a Catholic thing. I was exposed to lots of science books and nature shows when I was a kid (thanks local library and PBS). When we were young, they taught all the bible stories and what we could learn from them the same way we were taught Aesop's fables. I was never disciplined or ignored for being overly curious about Noah or creation, but I'm sure I added a few gray hairs to a nun or two when I started doing the math and bringing history and science books to school to show them. Even then, I could tell they were backtracking and over-explaining to keep me Catholic, but not squash my love of learning and reasoning. I can only imagine what a kid growing up today can find out in just a few mouse clicks.

I went back and forth for years whether I believed or not, but I considered myself a good Catholic all the way though public high school. That's what I was and thought I should be because practically everyone I knew was one. Ironically, it took meeting a few other types of Christians my first semester in college and going to bible studies with some hardcore Evangelicals that turned me away from it in a heartbeat. I had compartmentalized religion far away from science into separate but overlapping dimensions in my brain, but I remember thinking "holy crap, they actually believe this *beep* That sent me off on a research bender, and I haven't looked at anything the same since.

I always assumed other Christians were similar to Catholic - we were just the original. It never dawned on me that other groups had taken the bus that far into crazytown. Your "coasts" theory has some merit, more people live closer together on the coasts, so people see more of other religions and philosophies just by osmosis. I know I sure didn't see much variation in my small town.

I'm Catholic, but I didn't go to Catholic school. Your description of what you learned is pretty much the same experience I had in church and religious ed classes. We were taught to respect other religions. We were never told that our church was the "only" church or the "true" church. Nothing negative was ever said about gay people. People were free to have their own opinion about abortion. All in all the takeaway message that I got was to treat others the way you would want to be treated and that we are all part of the human race and should work together. I remember that the priest would mention holidays from other religions and compare them to holidays that we celebrated. One example was Ramadan. Fasting is a big part of Ramadan and fasting is also a big part of Lent. His point was to show us how similar we are to each other.

I have heard of other people who had bad experiences in Catholic church. It seems to really depend on the priest and church staff. If the church I grew up in had ever preached prejudice, my parents would have yanked us off of those pews so fast and run outta there!

Catholics are light years away from Evangelicals. I was raised Catholic and my parents were very devout - my father in particular exceptionally so. What I've noticed about Catholics is that almost everyone who proclaims him or herself a "devout Catholic" doesn't stick to the rules of the Church much at all. Catholics are not supposed to have sex before or outside of marriage; almost all of them do. Many only attend Mass on holidays like Christmas and Easter - my dad, by contrast, went to Mass every day of the year. Hell, a lot don't even bother to give up anything for Lent anymore. They're CINO - Catholics In Name Only. My dad, as devout as he was, loved the Discovery Channel and PBS, especially nature and animal shows. He had no beef with horror movies or science, and while he wasn't quite a gay rights activist, he knew a couple of our family members were gay and loved them anyway, saying it didn't matter because they were good people. And when I abandoned Catholicism as a teenager he never claimed I was gonna burn for it. The ONLY areas in which he was really, really strict were abortion and premarital/extramarital sex, and he still wasn't about to go picketing over them. Evangelicals, and particularly Pentecostals, are a whole different breed of crazy.

Saying "I apologize" is the same as saying "I'm sorry." Except at a funeral.

Didn't go to Catholic school but I was raised Catholic and went through confirmation. Went to weekly Sunday meetings after church etc. My experience was about the same as the OP and others here.

I was sent to both public and catholic schools in the US and later attended a Jesuit high school and university in Belgium.

From what I remember of the US catholic schools, all they seemed to seriously worry about was that pupils learned the catechism, the catholic prayers by heart and wrote neatly in the Palmer method. Otherwise the scholastic achievements were virtually nihil. In US public schools at the time (New Jersey in the 50s-60s) we were taught very different and more useful skills like public speaking, how to conduct science projects and the practical use of dictionaries and encyclopedias.

I can't say much about how Catholics taught evolution or other things because it seemed they were simply not interested very much in those subjects at all.

Once in Belgium though, with Jesuit teachers, it was like being immersed in a program of pure practical science. No religious nonsense was taught, in fact what I most remember were the admonishments to use Reason and Knowledge to the best of our abilities and not be taken in by what they considered to be the distractions of the masses, things like believing in miracles, worshiping saints or being generally credulous when it came to religion. In fact, the later years in High School there were spent using the hours allocated to religion, to teaching us about ancient and modern philosophical movements and basic Marxist terminology. I surmise the idea was to prepare us for higher education where religious ideas do not hold much sway.

sounds like yer standard Catholicism to me...

I wonder if the not taking the Bible literally might be a Catholic thing. I also went to Catholic school (10 years) and was raised by Catholic parents. It was clear in both generations that the Bible was mostly allegory, so it doesn't seem like it was my generation (or the teachers of my generation) being more liberal.

I didn't realize until I got a little older, maybe high school, that people took it literally.