It's good to see there is some awareness of how TV is a detriment for children.
You know, poison is a bad thing too. How much of that is okay to consume?
The article is all about having the TV on all the time (background TV). If it never
gets turned off, then IT is what controls YOU. You have surrendered your children
to being raised by whoever it is that decides what is on TV, and they're largely
homos, atheists, materialists, Communists and degenerates.
Beyond that, the act of watching TV gives your thinking process over to control by
an outside mechanism. By the time you realize what you are seeing is something
you don't want to see, it's already in your mind. This happens continually, and so,
the more you watch any TV at all, the more you turn over your decision making
power to an outside influence. And this can be addicting. The more you do it, the
more you want to do it.
Fr. Pfeiffer mentions this in a recent sermon. He said that a spiritually dead man
likes to go to a bar or a casino or a restaurant where there is a constant din of
background activity and noise, because then he is under the illusion that he is
"alive." When in Scripture it describes a dead man being carried out to be buried,
it is describing a spiritually dead man in an environment of movement, but it is
only an illusion of "life," for the movement is the pall-bearers carrying his coffin.
Likewise, when we have the TV on or the radio, or we are among a crowd of
people, we can feel like we are "alive" and the distraction of this movement
around us takes our mind off of something that could be of great benefit for us,
like our examination of conscience, or contemplation of the teachings of the
Church, or the mysteries of the Rosary, or the lives of the saints, or something
that God would like to say to us. The voice of God is never loud, and so it is
most easily overridden by ambient noise.
It seems to me that cell phones are contributing to this as well. How often do you
go to a public place and someone is talking on a cell phone, in a volume of voice
loud enough for everyone nearby to hear them? Other people standing next to
each other, having a "real presence" communication cannot be heard, but the
lone person on a cell phone is audible by everyone at hand. And have you
noticed that they tend to talk on their cell phone turned to face the most number
of other people, any one of whom has absolutely NO interest in what the cell
phone conversation is all about? This indicates to me the selfishness inherent in
our fallen nature. I cannot imagine any saint doing this. If a saint were to use
a cell phone, he would seek a private place where no passers-by would be
disturbed by his private conversation.
Similarly, any saint would prefer to have no TV at all, due to the imposing nature
of its temptations to sin, even in commercials. A saint would be very concerned
that precious time is being wasted, time that can never be recovered, and we only
have a limited number of minutes in our lifetime, after which, we face eternity and
our particular judgment: What did you do with the time you were allowed? You
sought "entertainment?" And how did this "entertainment" affect them? Was it ever
a near occasion of sin? Or, was it always the occasion of sanctification?
Obviously, the latter is ridiculous. The converse is true. TV viewing is always
the near occasion of sin. It's only a matter of degree. The temptation for sin is
constantly lurking in the next second or two of what is coming, and you almost
never know in advance that it is soon coming. But if you have seen a particular
series program in the past and have found it especially full of sinfulness, your
decision to watch it again is nothing other than deliberately putting yourself into
a sinful environment, where you know you will commit sin, even if it is in thought
alone. Mortal sin by willful thought is quite common. The act is the conscious
decision to watch a program that you know will give you occasions for sin that
you will be unable to resist. It's like getting drunk. You know you might do
something under the influence you would not have done with clearer judgment,
therefore getting drunk in the first place is a mortal sin. Well, then watching some
TV programs is a mortal sin, too.
In a truly Catholic society, such TV programs would be illegal. But we can see the
path that our society has taken "under the influence" of TV viewing. Standards of
decency have declined. It is now at a kind of turning point, where the question of
"pornography" on TV is being raised, in the context not of the objective morality
of the thing itself, but in whether it is related to an adult perpetrating sɛҳuąƖ abuse
of minors. But this is just a phase, because if the sodomite activists get their way,
sɛҳuąƖ perversion will become the norm, and anyone opposed to it will be the new
so-called criminal.
There was a news item on the radio just yesterday, when a police detective was
being interviewed on the air. The case at hand was (and is) the situation where
some pre-teen girls, apparently about 10-14 years old, had made a video with
their friends, and had posted it on YouTube. The video was garnering a lot of
attention, so this particular radio station, a major entity in radio without question
with millions of listeners ("...more stimulating talk radio!"), posted a link for the
video on their website. They would never have done this without legal counsel,
of course. The video depicts these children moving and "dancing" with each other,
fully clothed, but in a manner that obviously imitates the movements of sɛҳuąƖ
intercourse.
The primary concern of the police detective was not that the video was immoral or
"pornographic" - and she said it in fact did not meet the test of pornography, and
therefore is not pornographic - but that due to the content, it seems likely or at
least dangerously probable, that some adult is somehow involved, such that this
video becomes evidence of the aftereffects of child sɛҳuąƖ abuse. The crime,
then, has nothing to do with what the video portrays, but is only some other thing,
something else that may be going on, something for which this video is
circuмstantial evidence.
The detective mentioned that the police department would like to see parents
aware that this kind of thing is going on, and that they should teach their children
that making videos like this and posting them on the Internet is "not a good idea,"
but the whole issue of the morality of behaving, like the video shows, in the first
place, whether or not it is recorded on any medium, is entirely missing from the
discussion.
Can you imagine any chaperone of our youth countenancing such behavior?
Now, this is Internet we're talking about, not TV, but it is very much related, for we
now have TV "on demand" which allows the viewer to select what items to watch
from an enormous list of available movies, shorts, cartoons, newsreels,
docuмentaries, or whatever. I hope I don't have to convince anyone that there is
no man alive, or boy of the age of reason, even pre-pubescent in our age, who
would not be tempted to impure thoughts by setting eyes on such a video. As
such, the video might belong to a middle category of "quasi-pornography" which
could be all the more pernicious by the fact that there is no laws against it, even
though it is entirely just as likely to induce acts of willful and serious sin in the
hearts and minds of its viewers as is full-on X-rated fare. In one way of thinking, it
could be MORE dangerous to souls because it "flies under the radar," and since it is
not legally objectionable, the fallen nature of man will likely take that as an
excuse to watch it without scruple, because it qualifies as "entertainment."
WESTERNS
We already have the morally deplorable "Westerns," where Godless murderers
treat human life with utter disregard and of no value. People get shot with lead
slugs almost a half inch in diameter (0.45 inch is .45 caliber, as in Colt .45) and
their dead bodies are usually left on the ground while the camera drifts away
to follow the charmed life of the murderer. Viewers excuse the whole thing
because they know that on the set, after the camera turns away, the "dead" rise
again, dust themselves off, and go to Makeup to prepare for the next "scene."
All the while, viewers are convinced that "good, old-fashioned values" are all
over Westerns, making them feel like they are performing some kind of holy
act by watching them. The devil wins big time on that one.
So, as a culture, we are well-prepared (by the devil!!) for this new wave of events,
in which fully-clothed pubescent girls and lurid boys move and act as if they
were engaging in "sex" (our oversexed society has dropped the rest of the letters,
"-ual intercourse" probably because, "sex sells"). This is happening on TV shows,
at school talent shows, "fundraiser events," pop music "concerts," and TV sitcoms.
Our children are being slow-cooked in a moral cesspool, just by the act of being
involved with society at large, in a new degree that would make your
grandparents turn over in their graves, even if they were Protestants!
And it is inherently linked to the reality of what goes on when a viewer watches
a TV screen, or a movie screen, or an Internet computer screen. The images go
into your mind's eye before you have the chance of deciding whether it is
something you want to see, or not. Therefore, the act of watching TV in the first
place is the problem. And the more people watch TV, the more immoral our
culture will become.
I haven't even mentioned violent video games ........................................
Topic: Kids watching ridiculous amount of TV (Read 1500 times)