You Are Being Played?

The Arab Spring, a series of revolutions in the Arab world, began with this man. 

A hero of the revolution.

But when the same thing occurs in America it gets different coverage. 

A man who died after lighting himself on fire outside the Cheshire County Superior Court House Wednesday had a history with local courts. Thomas J. Ball, 58, of Holden, Mass., was embroiled in legal battles over how much he owed his ex-wife for their three children’s medical bills, according to court documents.

My point is not about either of these cases. It is the difference in the coverage. Anyone who burns himself alive has mental health issues. Both were economically distressed. Both felt persecuted by oppressive governments.

But the emphasis in the American case is the goofiness of the man. One video I saw showed his cluttered back porch. This of course proves that he is crazy. I hope they never look at mine, at least I hope that no one has a video of my back porch before I got married.  

In the Tunisian case the emphasis is the economic hardship and the oppressive government. The stories are framed by the producers to achieve the desired effect.

Have you ever watched a news story where you had personal knowledge of the situation discussed? Was it correct? If it was not correct, then why are you assuming the stories you watch where you have no personal knowledge are correct?

The stories we watch and read are often not correct. This is not a left/right issue. All stories are framed, the question is who is framing them. If you do not understand that you are being played by the news, by both sides, you will not understand the news.

Note that I fell into a framing error in that last sentence. There are NOT two sides, there are many sides. Do not allow yourself to be manipulated by Babylon.

Frankly My Dear

As I mentioned in the previous blog post, I think that as long as we choose our TV viewing carefully, TV can be a valuable addition to our entertainment choices. But there is one obvious problem. There definitely has been a decline in standards with regard to language, sexual situations, and nudity on TV.

I like old classic movies, and one of my favorites is "The Philadelphia Story." There is one rather dramatic scene where Katherine Hepburn talks about "blank" indifference. I am not sure if this was censorship or a common idiom of the time to say the word "blank" when you meant damn.  But just a few years later there was a controversy on the ending of the movie "Gone With The Wind." "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn" seems humorously mild to my ears.

I see no reason to go to the extent that the Dick Van Dyke show did in the 60's by having the Petries sleep in twin beds, as the Bible can be earthy at times. But the general question is: "Have we as a society matured or have we been corrupted?" We collectively make our culture, and then the culture remakes us individually. Has the culture remade my ears to such an extent that I can no longer judge my culture correctly? Paul talks about this in Romans 12:

1-2 - With eyes wide open to the mercies of God, I beg you, my brothers, as an act of intelligent worship, to give him your bodies, as a living sacrifice, consecrated to him and acceptable by him. Don't let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-mould your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands and moves towards the goal of true maturity.

Babylon wants to squeeze us into its mold. If we fill our minds with mindlessness, how can God fill our minds, remold our minds from within?

While I used the boiling frogs analogy to describe our reaction to gradual inflation, it seems that we have culturally been boiling for some time. Soon all the water will be boiled away and our culture will begin to fry.

Pay Cable channels are at the forefront of this. I quit HBO 20+ years ago over these issues. I remember one scene quite clearly. A woman was being raped in a shower, pushed up against the glass shower door, leaving little to the imagination. There are some things you never forget. I turned the TV off and immediately canceled HBO.

HBO has a new series, Game of Thrones, I would probably watch as I am fond of medieval sword movies, but with the typically HBO philosophy they have inserted nude scenes and overt homosexuality. To be fair to HBO these types of scenes are in the book, but the emphasis HBO places on them is their choice. It does make a difference that this is visual video and not the printed page. Since Pay Cable channels are not regulated by the FCC, it is almost like as if they do it just because they can.

Each of us has a choice to be in Babylon or not. How can we leave Babylon? Not subscribing to HBO might be a start.

The Good Ole Days … Weren’t

We look back on the past with fondness, forgetting the bad but remembering the good. I was reminded of this when I recently rented a DVD from Netflix. The DVD was one of my childhood favorites. I had often wondered why it was not available widely in syndication. I found out why—it was terrible. "My Favorite Martian" was hokey, poorly written, and not at all as I remembered. Why then do we think that TV was better in the "golden age”? Part of the reason we think this way is that we are ignoring a principal first articulated by science fiction writer Theodore White who said:

80% of science fiction is crap.

This is true, and later "philosophers" have expanded it to: 80% of everything is crap. What we are doing is comparing the bad TV of today with the good TV of the past, not remembering that each of the networks had to fill 21 hours a week. Every era has its hits and misses. For example, "I Love Lucy" is a sitcom for the ages and it is still available in syndication. The later "Lucy Show" is in the bad TV category.

Instead of good TV we have, as one song put it, "mind numbing game shows." The song suggests that society wants us ignorant and mind-numbed and mind dumb. Just as ancient Rome kept the mobs under control with gladiator games, so our modern society is controlled by TV.

The song is called "Choose Life" because that is what society wants us to choose. The song points out that this life is not worth choosing. I suggest, as the song does, that you "chose something different."

 BTW this is the PG version. 

I am not saying that that TV should not be a part of your life. I remember with fondness my family's weekly ritual when I was young. We would watch "Perry Mason" and guess whodunit at the first commercial break. But I remember even more our Scabble games.

But I am saying that in order to leave Babylon, one must choose wisely. With 100 channels one is still faced with the problem of "nothing" being on. If nothing is on, leave the TV off. Do not settle for the best TV available, choose something different.

There is one area where there has been a decline in entertainment in general, but I will leave that for next time.

Riptide

I was reading though Jim Powell’s April newsletter (current issue was free) and he made an interesting analogy about a riptide and investments. This same analogy applies to us leaving Babylon the Great. Wikipedia describes a riptide or rip current:

A rip current, commonly referred to by the misnomer rip tide, is a strong channel of water flowing seaward from near the shore, typically through the surf line. Typical flow is at 0.5 meters per second (1–2 feet per second), and can be as fast as 2.5 meters per second (8 feet per second).

I was caught in a riptide when I was in the 4th grade. It was a great time for me as we lived across the street from the Wind ‘n Sea Beach in La Jolla, California. I spent a lot of time at the beach.  I was swimming and suddenly realized I had a problem. No matter how hard I swam I was making no progress toward the shore. I did not know what to do but keep swimming toward shore. I got more and more tired and finally began to make some headway. Eventually I reached the shore exhausted. It was exactly the wrong thing to do, as Wikipedia tells:

A swimmer caught in a rip current should not attempt to swim back to shore directly against the rip. This risks exhaustion and drowning. A rip does not pull a swimmer under water; it carries the swimmer away from the shore in a narrow channel of water. The rip is like a treadmill which the swimmer needs to step off. The swimmer should remain calm and swim parallel to the shore until he or she is outside of the current.

In later years I was caught again, but this time I knew to swim along parallel to the shore. Once out of the riptide I was able to swim to shore. In the same way as swimming directly against a riptide can lead to death by drowning, if you fight directly against Babylon the Great it will crush you. A common interpretation of Revelation 18 is that Babylon is a religious symbol. Martin Luther for example, saw it as the Catholic Church, emphasizing the great Whore that rode the Beast. But it is much more than a religious symbol. It is the epitome of everything that is wrong with our world.  

Babylon the Great is too powerful to fight it directly. Instead you need to be subtle, do the equivalent of swimming parallel to the shore, do not fight it. Then gradually make your way back to the beach and safety.

For the next few posts I will discuss the various aspects of Babylon the Great and how it affects us—politically, economically, culturally, in entertainment, and yes, in religion. 

Uniforms for Jesus?

We were in line for lunch. Suddenly I had a revelation. No, not a vision from God, but a realization that I had observed something about the two men in line ahead of us. They were Mormons. But with such a revelation I needed confirmation. So I walked around the line to look at the food to choose, looked out of the corner of my eye, and saw they had name tags as Latter Day Saints. Mormons have a period in their lives when they are missionaries, and no doubt these young men were in that period. 

I thought all day about the uniforms the boys were wearing, and the uniforms we all wear in life. I thought of two incidents in the church where I used to serve. One of my self-appointed jobs was to help a certain type of visitor we used to get. I was a member of a particular denomination, and our main “competitor denomination” met down the street. There were great differences between us—or so it seemed at the time. Each denomination was founded by man with the same last name, a father and a son who no longer spoke to each other. Sometimes there was confusion about who met where. Both congregations met in Union halls on the same street a short distance apart. But I could always tell when we had a visitor that had made that mistake by the uniform the man wore: suit, tie, and most importantly a brief case. The brief case was “the tell”—the dead give-away. Most male members of the “other” denomination carried them. I imagine that they had an element of practicality, but the main use was to give the member an aura of business-like seriousness. Yes, those in my denomination were serious about our religion too, but oh, how my friends and I made fun of their uniform! 

The second incident was when the founder of our denomination, the son, gave a message about proper attire for church. While he planned to introduce no requirements, he wanted to encourage suit and ties among the men. We in leadership were pleased because many members of our congregation did not dress as well as would have liked. Coincidently my wife and I had received a care package from my brother in law. He was a pastor for the other guys, the father’s denomination. He felt that he needed to have a fresh variety of ties, and as a result he had many ties he no longer needed. So we took the ties and gave them away free to anyone who wanted one. We were totally surprised that this was offensive to a portion of the congregation. The one the most offended was also the best dresser in the congregation. No doubt he saw an attitude condemned in James 2:

 1My brothers and sisters, believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism. 2 Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in filthy old clothes also comes in. 3 If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, “Here’s a good seat for you,” but say to the poor man, “You stand there” or “Sit on the floor by my feet,” 4 have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? 5 Listen, my dear brothers and sisters: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him? 6 But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court? 7 Are they not the ones who are blaspheming the noble name of him to whom you belong?

I did not understand why the man was upset at that time. I understand better now because I realize that I too had a uniform I wore. The uniform included a suit and tie, but also meant a uniformity of thought. I would look in the mirror and see the outward uniform, and be glad. But the mirror could never reveal the interior, the man who made fun of others and their uniforms while pretending he had none.

Jesus taught about the dangers of our uniforms.

Matt 23:27 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. 28 In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

While I am sure that Jesus wore the culturally-correct clothing for his time, including the distinctive phylacteries, He advocated a different way of looking at things. Earlier in this chapter he said this:

23 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. 24 You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.

What I had done with my uniform was to strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. Our uniforms, in themselves, are not wrong. There was nothing wrong with the uniform the Mormon boys wore that identified them: the dress pants, the very white shirt, the tie, and the very very short hair. The danger is when we rely on these uniforms as crutches to support our religiosity. Instead we need this:

Rev 7:14 I answered, “Sir, you know.” And he said, “These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

If we are transformed within and from above, the uniform may still appear, but it will be the outward expression of an inward truth. Not a religious garb designed to deceive. We cannot make anything white by dipping it in blood, but God can.