On BoingBoing Gadgets, an almost-entirely-random but excellent essay from John Brownlee about a particular Christian edutainment series, which in retrospect is pretty creepy and philosophically squishy and maybe a bit scary when you think about it. I don’t think I ever saw the video franchise in question, but I definitely got a lot of exposure to that sort of thing growing up. (“McGee and Me” anyone?) My parents are anything but fundamentalists, but no congregation is ideologically uniform – and so I was subjected to more-conservative-than-at-home Sunday School lessons maybe 75% of the time. (I’d say my family falls into the leftmost quartile of most of the churches we’ve attended.) This phenomenon probably reached its apogee in early middle school, when I was recruited, along with all my peers, into a “Children’s Sunday” service culminating in an elaborate choral number – performed in front of the whole congregation, with one of us* dancing around in a gorilla costume – about how silly and nonsensical and fundamentally un-cool it is to believe in evolution.

I guess I can’t really claim to have been brainwashed.

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* Not me.