I just want to clarify before I would reply to your post. Who is showing cold indifference and about what events? These events are coming in daily, so I can't speak to anything that is not specific. However, perhaps we're simply interacting with different kinds of people, but I don't recall seeing indifference from anyone I interact with about any of the recent or current events.
The song ' Imagine ',I believe that it is demonic.
Posted : 27 Jun, 2020 06:39 AM
Right, at the end of your post, I think you're describing secular humanism, basically: The idea that human beings are their own gods: having their own common values without ever attributing them to God or any other deity. It's basically an extension of the "hoped for" outcome of eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. However, Adam and Eve at least had the discernment to see that the outcome they hoped for was a lie and felt the shame of their mistake.
Secular humanism blindly plows forward believing essentially that it wasn't a mistake and that the fruit did what Satan said the fruit would do. For some, the Fall was apparently just the beginning of humanity's separation from God.
There are those who were murdered both leading up to the riots and during the course of the riots. The Bible says, "Thou shalt not commit murder." Protestors are also destroying property. This is a form of theft. You take something that belongs to someone else away from them, not for your own gain, like when looting, but to destroy it. The Bible says, "Thou shalt not steal."
Looting may actually be a double strike against the 10 commandments because some people might loot because they also covet that property. ("Thou shalt not covet...")
Why then, does the property destruction and tearing down monuments lead to a stronger reaction? I wondered about this myself for a bit, and I think I have two possible answers:
1: many times the people who we hear about getting killed in the protests were trying to fight the protestors, to defend their business or simply trying to be a hero. It comes as no surprise to us then, that they would lose the fight, and might even appear foolish to us. After all, we don't stand outside and try to fight off the tornado bearing down on our home. We just try to get out of the way.
2: It may be that whether it's a business we might all go to, or a statue, we feel that the theft is committed against all of us, so we take its destruction more personally. In the cases of some of these statues, many of us probably even feel like we know these long dead figures better than the business owner who gets killed for trying to protect his livelihood. Feeling this way isn't necessarily right, but when it's something that can affect us personally, we just tend to feel the loss more deeply. We don't typically weep over the obituaries unless someone we know is among them.
Whether it's the murder, the theft and coveting that accompanies looting, or the theft for the purpose of destruction of personal and public property, we are talking about acts committed in violation of the 10 commandments and therefore, the commitment of sins against God and against each other. It's interesting to note that I've encountered many Christians who believe that sin is sin: it's all equal in the eyes of God. It's interesting that there would therefore be issue taken with people who maybe feel more deeply wounded by one sin or the other. It makes me wonder, just how equal are all sins? Is it right that we should only feel outraged by sins that directly affect us? Should we feel more outraged by one particular KIND of sin than another? This thread raises some curious questions that I'm not sure I have a very good answer for.
The song ' Imagine ',I believe that it is demonic.
Posted : 24 Jun, 2020 07:39 PM
Hi David, you're definitely right about the outcome and that Lennon imagined a Godless (and small-g godless) world. However, I'm not sure it's exclusively demonic. In a way, it's much worse. He was also imagining the erasure of the differences and traits that make humans what they are. He's ultimately talking about an end to borders, one world government, socialism with no possession ("nothing to kill or die for...". I expect that he would have really liked the "sameness" described in Lois Lowry's "The Giver."
Mankind is forever in search of utopia: a means to eliminate war, poverty, conflict, suffering. What "Imagine" fails to see and what "The Giver" reveals is that the things that make us different, that may be blamed for conflict in the world are the very things worth living for, and worse yet, as Jonas (the protagonist of "The Giver") discovered, is that eliminating the good things that make life worth living (faith, family, talent, color, anything that makes you unique or stand out, possessions) does NOT eliminate the bad. Murder, slavery, oppression still exist, but under different names, like "release to Elsewhere," being appointed to one's place in society, and "sameness" (lack of choice).
People in the US and many other western countries live in a surprisingly decent society based largely on Christian principles. If you accidentally leave your wallet or purse on a public bench, there's a decent chance a perfect stranger will chase you down to give it back to you unspoiled (perhaps this is less true now than before). What people like John Lennon fail to understand, either by naïveté or by willfully ignoring is that when you remove the Judeo-Christian foundation a nation is built upon that the structure of decency collapses.
Some of what you say at the beginning makes sense, Marcouse. If you don’t question things you’re told, you are opening yourself up to brainwashing. It is the next step to wisdom after being willing to say “I don’t know.” However, when questioning the answers still leaves you not knowing the answers, it doesn’t always mean it’s a conspiracy to deceive you, and we need to say a “discernment” prayer, asking God to answer our most pressing questions, help us to accept what we don’t know, and the discernment to know when the latter is a deception.
Looking for allegory in film and TV is a journey that should be taken with great care because it’s too easy for our imaginations run amok, and I think that’s what’s happening here. Finding allegory and symbols in film is not hard. The film makers have to build a world of fantasy using components of the real world, and when looking for the tactics of evil in film, if the villain isn’t motivated by something we as the watchers can understand, the story itself becomes unrelatable. As such, we should maintain some self-control when drawing conclusions on the allegories and symbols we see.
A costume designer was asked to make a logo for a low budget science fiction TV show. The fact that it resembles 3/5ths of a pentagram or ½ of a Star of David does NOT mean that either was on the designer’s mind when they made the emblem. Likewise, the name “Kirk,” as in “James Tiberius Kirk” from Star Trek is also a Scottish word meaning “church.” However, these symbols are not necessarily confirmed by the franchise’s producers, so we can’t get too excited with either of these. On the other hand, the producers of the Matrix trilogy indicated that the religious hints and symbols they included in their films were NOT done by accident. When picking apart details of our favorite TV shows and movies, we have to have both wisdom and discernment to know what we can say with certainty, what we can infer, and what we simply imagine to be true.
I can’t say I much appreciate your statements about science. The field certainly has flaws and there’s good reason to question the answers it provides. However, if the universe didn’t work basically the way we understand it to work, the computers we all use to get on here would be paperweights, so obviously they’re doing some things right. Regarding the space race: When was the last time you designed and built a machine with over a million separate parts designed to use a massive controlled explosion to take people into space and return them safely? When was the last time you retired the designs, archived or destroyed the technology used to build it, had all the workers who helped you build it move on to other jobs and then 50 years later tried to bring them all back together to reproduce their success? Simply put, the fact that the technology no longer exists doesn’t mean it never existed. Rocketry is dangerous, and NO ONE would dare to simply throw a rocket together, say “3, 2, 1, liftoff,” and send it off while the machine’s development is still in “beta testing.” Science in general is painstaking and can be a dangerous venture, whether you’re engineering the next rocket or working in a chemistry lab, and the price for screwing up can be disastrous.
So you’re an expert on what things will do in space, huh? Flown a lot of flags in a vacuum and 1/6th gravity, have you? We can simulate the vacuum, but there’s nowhere on Earth to simulate the effect of 1/6th gravity on a hanging flag that’s being jostled during the setup. Have you taken a lot of pictures of a white environment on a starry night? Not sure if you noticed, but the contrast and frame rate typically means the faint light of the stars will generally get drowned out by the light from the lunar surface and the Earth if it’s in the frame, and the light saturation will typically interfere with the lens’s cross hairs.
Regarding the “flat Earth” garbage: “Do you not know? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood since the earth was founded? He (God) sits enthroned above the circle of the earth and its people are like grasshoppers.” Isaiah 40:21-22. The word “circle” here is translated from a word that also refers to a globe or sphere. “He (God) has inscribed a circular limit (the horizon) on the face of the waters as the boundary between light and darkness.” Job 26:10, AMP. The boundary between light and darkness (terminator) can only be a circular limit if the Earth is in fact spherical. “It is He who spreads out the north over emptiness and hangs the earth on nothing.” Job 26:7. This is an apt description of the Earth as seen from space. How would cardinal directions work on a flat Earth anyway? We also know the Earth is round from looking at a lunar eclipse. The thing I find most pathetic is that in an age where we all roll our eyes at the generations that have passed on before us as unenlightened Neanderthals who still practiced slavery, scientists have to continually justify their existence and try to prove the most basic truths that were known or could be inferred from days before Christ Jesus was born. If anyone reading this is so sure the Earth is flat, why don’t they go check out the “edge” and take a picture of it and show me? I’ll wait…
Oh, and one more thing: You say you’ve spent many hours in most churches, so you’re speaking from “experience.” It’s estimated that about 30,000 churches permanently closed their doors between the years of 2006 to 2012 (Christianity Today). My guess is that more churches have closed in those years than you’ve been to in your lifetime, so I don’t think it’s very fair to pass such broad judgments upon the churches as the individual churches are far more diverse than their parent denominations. Look, I sympathize with you about your concerns about indoctrination and control. There are a number of cult-like churches out there. However, it must be understood that part of the church’s PURPOSE is to offer guidance. The laws of morality in the Bible serve to provide a CONTROL on our behavior. When we turn our lives over to Christ, we relinquish CONTROL to Him.
For everyone that takes a step in a direction, there’s someone to take those ideas and run a mile. As Christians we’re supposed to exercise a bit of self-control (part of the Fruit of the Spirit) and not get carried away with ourselves. We’re supposed to be the ones with the cool heads; the voice of reason in the chaos that the atheists think the universe is in, not running around like Chicken Little declaring that the sky is falling. Why? Because we know what they don’t: God’s in control. I think this conversation has crossed that line into chaos and I’m hopping off this train before it goes any farther afield.
Hi Moonlight, I fear you might be misunderstanding some of what we are saying here. We aren't talking about letting Hollywood lead us. We are talking about how Hollywood gives us a glimpse into the mindset of society, like a window into the imagination.
Sometimes this can be a good thing. For Captain Kirk's imagined communicator, there was someone to imagine how a telephone could really fit in your pocket and call anyone from most anywhere. In this way, Hollywood can be the first step turning an imagined convenience into reality, inspiring the inventions to come.
However, it can also be a window into seeing how evil can find power. It can tell us its tactics and its plans, sometimes drawing directly from the Bible in forming them. Then, when people who are in power or in Hollywood begin using those tactics against us or for their own gain in reality, we are ready because they have already revealed their tactics and the rationalization for their actions to us. In a sense, Hollywood can be used like an early warning system to tell us what kinds of obstacles we are up against.
Whatever their protagonists are doing that we would be against (e.g. Maude having an abortion, Trapper John from M*A*S*H having extramarital affairs, the characters of Big Bang Theory engaging in one night stands and flippant relationships while poking fun at conservative Christianity, doing morally repugnant things for "good" reasons, like in Breaking Bad and other numerous shows and movies): these are the things that Hollywood is trying to rationalize.
The Bible tells us our nature, the nature of evil, evil's tactics, how we can fight that evil, and most importantly, that God still has the last word in all of this, but a close examination of Hollywood can help to tell us some things about what evil is afoot in the world in the here and now so that we are not blind to its actions and can take action against it.
Does that help to clarify what we are talking about a little bit?
I've seen some very "vocal" support for de-funding the police, but from what I've seen this vocal group makes up only a small percentage (around 16% I think was the number I heard?). It's still a surprising portion, especially if it's 16% of all Americans, but not enough to accomplish that goal, thank God. Nevertheless, I'm a bit shocked that such a ludicrous idea even has that much support.
Definitely; life often imitates art. Star Trek had communicators that flipped open. The inventor of the flip phone, as I recall, was indeed a Star Trek fan.
George Orwell's 1984 predicted telescreens that had cameras that collected information about your whereabouts and activities. Today, we carry smart phones that have two cameras, a microphone, and a GPS locator that frequently asks us how we liked the places we just visited, and there are concerns about their security and whether they are or could be used to spy on citizens. The movie "Enemy of the State" dealt with the government's ability to monitor the movements of citizens without even the need for smartphones.
From Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey we now have Alexa.
Film and TV have also shown how human nature can work and how dictators can rise to power:
The Star Trek Episode "Plato's Stepchildren" showed how extreme boredom often results in an increase in cruelty and a loss of humanity. Having the luxuries of life at our fingertips and the social media to consume entertainment at a rate never before conceived has led to boredom and there is still no end to the cruelty we see on social media.
The Star Wars prequel trilogy shows how a manufactured crisis and the deception of innocent people can lead to knee jerk reactions that make room for a dictator to rise to power, as Padme remarked, to the "thunderous applause" of the people about to be subjugated. This reflects much of how Hitler rose to power in Germany.
The Book of Eli shows us what a world who has completely forgotten God might look like. With no God to believe in, humanity is left with only its most base instincts to motivate it to any action. Society hasn't even completely forgotten God, but we already see the potential for humanity to sink to that level.
Like I said, sometimes Hollywood has known the truth, even if they don't always follow it.
Obviously this is a bit off topic, but I find that sci-fi and fantasy are often just places for people to express their dreams for the future as well as their fears: to show how atrocities have been done, and how they can come to haunt us again.
