Breaking the Images of Our Worship Part 2: Striking at the Root

When considering man, the Israelite first seeks his qualities…He recounts to us his impression of him and it is never reported how a person looked. There may be a brief description that a person is handsome, but the beauty is not expatiated… –Thorlief Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared With Greek

When considering removing the television from our home entirely, it was not without about six months of hesitation.  What about family movie nights?  What about workout DVDs?  What about when momma is pregnant and can’t walk without vomiting?  What about all that great educational programming?

First, we needed to think Hebraically.  We applied this way of thinking to our media choices:

Noah’s ark is discussed in detail in Gen. 6:14;  it is striking in this description that it is not the appearance of  the ark that is described but its construction.

What interests the Israelites, therefore, is how the ark was built and made. He talks of this the whole time, and the appearance is not directly alluded to by a single word…Additionally, Scripture accurately describes how Solomon had the Temple and the palace in Jerusalem built (1 Ki. 6:7), but Scripture is silent about the actual appearance of the famous temple and its furnishings.

Boman continues, “The silence of the sources with regard to the appearance of famous edifices and furniture can be explained in the following way: when an Israelite sees an edifice, his consciousness is at once concerned with the idea of how it was erected, somewhat like the housewife who cannot be satisfied with the taste of a cake but is particularly interested in what its ingredients are and how it was made. –Hebrew Thought Compared With Greek

We realized that, especially with extricating ourselves from media, we had to look not at the finished product, but how the finished product came into being and examine the ingredients of this media in our lives.

Family Friendly Movies

Let’s take, for example, family friendly movies/media.  Just a quick glance at that industry will tell you that while some movies may indeed be family friendly, their origins are not.

The root of the largest name in family friendly entertainment is decidedly the opposite.  Disney is probably one of the most awful companies I have ever researched.  Here are some things I have discovered:

On May 1st, Jodi Hoffman, a Weston mother of three, sued the Broward County school district for teaching inappropriate sex education to over 220,000 children in public schools in direct violation of Florida Statutes and Broward County School Board policy. This is the first time in American history that a major metropolitan public school curriculum has been so extensively challenged in the courts.

The video portion of the course was produced by ABC/Disney network. The video teaches children that hard-core pornography has First Amendment protection. It also teaches them how much abortions cost, where and how to get one, what states are not enforcing abortion laws, and how to keep their parents from finding out they are getting condoms, contraceptives and abortions…

This is also interesting:

In 1989 Disney became a partner, and the one to own the largest % of shares in, Viewer’s Choice “Hot Choice” – a leader in Pay-Per-View cable soft porn. Until Disney showed up, Viewer’s Choice had only played action films and comedies. The profits were decent but Disney wanted better, and decided to launch the “soft porn” division in 1993. To develop original programming for their creation, Disney offered porn star Becky LeBeau a $7-figure deal and share of the profits. She appeared in many films herself and hosted a…modeling program which showed explicit footage if women, some as young as 18.

Disney’s Donald Duck is also featured in Planned Parenthood videos for children. And, remember part one of this series  in which I recounted a local incident in Tucson, Arizona during the 2009 Superbowl in which a 30-second excerpt from an adult cable TV channel featuring one of America’s most famous pornographic film actresses during the actual game?

Well, guess what happened in May 2007 in New Jersey on Comcast’s cable airing of Playhouse Disney?

On May 1, some thousands of New Jersey children were sadistically violated by Comcast’s screening of pornography on the Disney Playhouse cable channel….

The Children’s On Line Protection Act, or COPA, would have Internet sites require age identification cards for their content – just like store owners require to sell beer or cigarettes. Disney, an E! Playboy distributor until late 2006, has aggressively opposed COPA’s efforts to penalize sites that give minors access to harmful material….

In effect, these media predators broke into private homes and force-fed children pornography. After irate parents complained that their children had just been assaulted by their pornographers, parents got a spry “sorry” from the Comcast sex traffickers.

If I had more time, I would dig in to research other family friendly offerings to look at who produces, writes, directs, and pays for these movies.  These are the people you are letting into your home when you turn on those family friendly offerings. Regardless of how “clean” the movie is, the origins are filthy.

ClearPlay Filtering

Many people I know have something called ClearPlay, which is a DVD player that uses software to filter out whatever content a particular viewer might find objectionable.  This still requires the viewer to rent or purchase the offensive movie, thus sending a message with purchasing power that we enjoy objectionable movies. (The movie executives don’t take into account that you may have a ClearPlay player.)  That is not the crux of the problem, though.  Let’s look at how ClearPlay makes a filter.

According to Deseret News, in an interview with Matt Jarman, former BYU student:

In a back room at ClearPlay’s headquarters, Jarman and a handful of employees peruse each newly released movie, categorizing possibly offensive content into 14 different filter settings, including categories for violence, sex and nudity, language, and drug use.

And from ClearPlay’s own website:

The ClearPlay DVD player seamlessly skips and mutes content based on 12 categories that you can set. ClearPlay Filters are hand-crafted by at team of Filter Developers who watch the movie and masterfully select where the player will remove content.

Apparently, examining these movies, many of them explicitly violent and pornographic, sometimes takes 20 hours.  So, in order for you to watch a violent, pornographic movie in your home, you have paid for BYU students and others (presumably members of the church, since the company is based in Murray, Utah) to watch, daily, in intense attention to detail, the pornography and violence you don’t want to see.   I find it interesting that the ClearPlay website has this testimonial:

I have four children, all in their teens, that I have tried as long as I can to prevent them from hearing or seeing anything that I think will pollute their minds, especially from watching TV. I discourage them even to watch the PG movies. With your invention, I know that we will have more movie selections to watch. I thank you very much, and I pray that God will bless you always for what you have done.

This happy customer is praying that God will bless the ClearPlay team as she pays for them to watch smut and filth so she and her children can enjoy an edited version of a movie that is strictly for entertainment.

So, that is why ClearPlay is a moot point in our family.

Educational Television

Let’s move on to educational programming.  Again, we must look to the origins of the programming, not the finished product.  Do you believe lemmings commit mass suicide?  Read what Snopes has to say about it:

Disney’s White Wilderness was filmed in Alberta, Canada, which is not a native habitat for lemmings and has no outlet to the sea. Lemmings were imported for use in the film, purchased from Inuit children by the filmmakers. The Arctic rodents were placed on a snow-covered turntable and filmed from various angles to produce a “migration” sequence; afterwards, the helpless creatures were transported to a cliff overlooking a river and herded into the water. White Wilderness does not depict an actual lemming migration — at no time are more than a few dozen lemmings ever shown on the screen at once.  The entire sequence was faked.

Do you know who is filming, scripting, and producing your educational programming?  Another thing to consider with regard to educational programming comes from a study at The University Of Washington regarding Baby Enstein videos:

Led by Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis, both at the University of Washington, the research team found that with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos.

The study concludes that there is no substitute for momma.

And another study done in the U.K.:

The report which refers to children and adults, concludes that regardless of the type of programmes people watched, even a moderate amount of viewing (from one to two hours a day): slows children’s metabolic rate,   leads, from childhood, to a greater vulnerability to cancer,  may damage brain cell development and function in the neural circuits underlying attention and impulse control, is the only adult pastime from the ages of 20 to 60 positively linked to developing Alzheimer’s disease.

Continues Dr. Sigman:

Even interactive media such as computer games [think educational computer games, here] have been associated with limited neurological activity. Watching television has been found by neuroscientists to be a “non-intellectually stimulating activity” for brain development. This was not found to be the case for reading.

By the way, Dr. Sigman would like to see younger children not watching television AT ALL.  A similar study was conducted at Johns Hopkins:

Dr Richard House, a lecturer in psychotherapy at Roehampton University, and a researcher into the effects of television in young children, said he was not convinced that children who cut back on television would be immune from harm.

He said: “Human behaviour is far more complex than these measures of behaviour and social skills – there may well be some more subtle form of harm that is undetected.

“Every child is different, and I’m very sceptical about the notion that it is appropriate to give families blanket recommendations about the amount of television their children should watch.

Let’s now consider the other arguments I had within myself as I was contemplating saying goodbye to this television idol.  What if I were pregnant and throwing up, having a really tough day, or something like that.  What would I do without the television?  Elder Jeffrey R. Holland’s words (also included in January 2010 Ensign) applied so well:

…it isn’t just that she looked back; she looked back longingly. In short, her attachment to the past outweighed her confidence in the future. That, apparently, was at least part of her sin….So a more theological way to talk about Lot’s wife is to say that she did not have faith. She doubted the Lord’s ability to give her something better than she already had. Apparently she thought—fatally, as it turned out—that nothing that lay ahead could possibly be as good as those moments she was leaving behind.

If you and your husband have both had intimations that it was time to get rid of the television completely, then don’t look back.  There is something better for you and your family.  Remember Lot’s wife:

Surely, surely, with the Lord’s counsel “look not behind thee” ringing clearly in her ears, Lot’s wife, the record says, “looked back,” and she was turned into a pillar of salt.

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Tagged as: idolatry