[Note: Sorry I’m late today. I decided that if I didn’t do my bike ride early, I’d never overcome the temptation to skip it later in the day.]
Patty and I have been watching Primeval, a hit science fiction series from the BBC. We watch if for Tim Haines’ dinosaur and monster effects, really the best in the business–the closest you can come to really seeing these animals. We also enjoy the sometimes very goofy characters, and the fact that these fictional people are, with only one or two exceptions, extraordinarily chaste.
But what astounds me most about it is its deep and total atheism. Not that they speak a word against God. He has simply been written out of the show. In the whole series, there’s only one brief–and really a little bit touching–scene in a church, and that’s all it has to show for the non-material side of things. I mean, they don’t even take the Lord’s name in vain: which is a good thing, but it’s also like nobody in this show has ever heard of Him.
Ah, science fiction… See, there are these holes in space and time, called “anomalies,” and dinosaurs and other creatures pop out of them to wreak havoc in modern England, and this little crew of amateur scientists has to shoo the monsters and close the anomalies… You get the idea.
There are good-guy scientists and bad-guy scientists butting heads, and what we wind up with is a clash of two 100% atheistic world views. One (the good guys) would be “Let Nature/Evolution take its course.” The other (the bad guys) is, “We must control Evolution.” Both envision the ultimate extinction of the human race. Sorry, no salvation. Well, there can’t be any if there isn’t any God, can there?
As the series builds to its climax, the thing that drives the bad guys is the Quest for the Ultimate Free Stuff (and nobody is to make a profit! isn’t that great?). I kind of like that part of the story–you see where the untrammeled lust for Free Stuff gets you, and it ain’t good.
If your Christian faith is solid, this series will not hurt you. Won’t turn you into a pagan, a New Ager, or an atheist. At the end of my workday I’m tired and want to veg out. Dinosaurs romping across my TV screen helps me relax. I enjoy Primeval–but–but–
But a steady diet of Godless science fiction, beginning in childhood–no, that I wouldn’t recommend. Not for anyone. At best it’s a handicap to be overcome. At worst, it gets lodged in your brain and you can’t get it out, and you wind up worshiping false gods and idols.
Mark me, I don’t say the solution to this is to slap on a lot of “Christian” decals and call it “Christian science fiction.” That won’t fool anyone.
Consumption of “entertainment” is a form of self-education, and we really need to learn to be more careful with it.
It used to be that entertainment would tell wholesome tales of right and wrong with a strong underling moral message, but those days are gone for the most part. Now its just mindless entertainment devoid of anything edifying or virtuous. There’s no redeeming qualities, it only glorifies every sin known to man. I find myself watching less and less of it these days.
I’m with you on that, Watchman.
For perspective, I live in a relatively isolated area and before the advent of on demand movies over the Internet, it was actually cheaper to buy a DVD than to rent one (because of the travel costs of picking up and returning a rental). So I have a large collection of DVDs, well over 1,000. While most, if not all of these are innocuous and harmless, very few of them have any spiritual element whatsoever.
Older movies, say from the mid-sixties or before, seemed more likely to acknowledge God, at least in some minimal fashion, but newer movies tend to present an evermore Godless and amoral view of life, culminating in the current worldview where even the concepts of “good” and “evil” are increasingly nebulous.
What has changed for me, in the last few years, is that I find most of even the “good” movies have lost much of their appeal. The world around us is descending into chaos as its Godless nature becomes evermore apparent. Watching movies that are centered upon the Godless world just doesn’t seem appealing these days.
I used to love The Right Stuff, which recounted developments in aerospace from the first supersonic flight in 1947 through to the last Project Mercury space flight in 1963. I love the subject and agree that the real life characters were a study in both courage and technical competence. But even these achievements seem pale when we look at the state of this Godless world. We eventually went to the moon, but the world as, as a whole, is farther than ever from its Maker.
You don’t see us going again, though, do you?
The prior administration effectively ended the US as a spacefaring nation when it canceled development of the the Ares I and Ares V. The Orion spacecraft continues, relying on privately owned launch vehicles, but the first manned flight isn’t scheduled until 2023, if even then.
The problem isn’t technical. We went to the moon on slide-rule calculations and the computer in an Apollo spacecraft was far less powerful than the average computerized wristwatch of our day. The problem is lack of resolve. We aren’t going back to the moon because, collectively, we don’t want to. If we even tried their would be endless handwringing about how this money could be better spent on social programs.
The problem with this, of course, is that the money spent on the space program is spent right here on earth. The last time I was there, Los Cruces, NM was a booming city. It was much smaller before the space program made it into a boomtown. The space program required testing White Sands Range was put to frequent use. Los Cruces is the city nearest White Sands and grew rapidly as a support center.
Go south of Houston and the various neighborhoods surrounding Clear Lake, especially El Lago, came into being because of the space program. It wasn’t just astronauts and NASA engineers whom benefited, it was shopkeepers, construction workers, paperboys and vacuum cleaner salesmen. Space-bucks attracted investment and entire communities grew as a result.
I visited NASA in 2010 and was astounded by the effect it had upon the entire Houston area. Houston had a robust economy based upon petroleum before NASA came along, but the area specific to NASA was little more than a swamp at the time. There is a visitor’s center there and it’s well worth the time to drop by. Just seeing a 363′ Saturn V, especially the business end of the main engines, is an amazing experience.
There is talk about returning to the Moon and possibly even a Mars mission, but I’m not holding my breath. I’ll be impressed if they ever regain the ability to launch manned flights into low earth orbit without having to pay Russia to get them there.
Also done by the previous administration, NASA concentrating on imaginary Global Warming and Climbit Change and “reaching out to Muslims”–instead of a space program.
I visited the Johnson Space Center immediately after the manned space program was effectively ended. Officially, it was all smiles and optimism, but the one person I spoke to with any degree of privacy made comments to the contrary, sotto voce. It wasn’t so much what he said as what he didn’t say. Obviously, they were being put out to pasture.
The entire history of NASA has been life as a political football. Kennedy’s promise to go to the moon was cemented by his death. That project was unassailable, although Walter Mondale made a show of trying to derail it after the Apollo I fire.
After the moon landing, however, NASA became more and more the subject of political whims. A NASA contract means profits and prosperity, which always invites political activity. Even the Johnson Space Center was seen by many as a pork barrel which Lyndon Johnson delivered to his home state.
In the meantime, NASA projects have been carved up at the whim of various political factions. The Space Shuttle was supposed to shuttle people to a Space Station. It spent most of its operational life doing other tasks, albeit proving very useful.
Since the Shuttle program ended there has been very little in the way of manned space programs. The International Space Station is about all that comes to mind, and the US is only one player among many in that project. Constellation was a great idea, but it seems to be gone for good. Without launch vehicles, it’s pretty hard to have a space program.
NASA in many ways is now defunct. They have to drum up interest in possibility of life on other planets or “earth-like” planets just to get attention anymore. We may go to the moon again, or even Mars, but I doubt it will be with Nasa. The future, as I see it, is with the private space industry, such as SpaceX.
Just as Verne and Heinlein foresaw it.
“The space program required testing White Sands was put to frequent use” should read “The space program required testing and White Sands was put to frequent use”.
I haven’t read Poul Anderson’s “Three Hearts and Three Lions” in a long time, but I seem to remember that God was at least implicit in most of the adventure, virtue and vice were very clearly defined along Christian moral lines, the denouement took place in the ruins of a church, and when the hero returned from his adventure to the modern world, it was clearly stated that he’d become Christian. Am I remembering this correctly? I need to go reread the book, I suppose.
Of course, the book was written in the early 1960s, before God was completely banished from our culture.
Oh Lee my dear brother surely you are very aware of the rituals one must do to have one’s face on a tv or movie screen or in magazines. Blood drinking. Spirit cooking. Sodomy & Rape. Pedophilia.
Let us look at a few shows. Lucifer. The devil isn’t so bad after all; just got a bad rap. Empire. The world domination conquest through black homo programming and love of money. Vampires. Zombies. Preacher on AFC.
He that blasphemeth the HolyGhost shall never be forgiven. Eternal damnation.
Praises be to God who gave his only Begotten Son.
I’ve never seen any of those shows. Why would I want to? And I would hesitate to allege that every actor seen on TV is guilty of really serious and abominable sins.
Perhaps there is a remnant but the ones making uber millions are devil worshippers. I am fully convinced we are living in the final days.
There are also ‘entertainers’ who go on television to declare “I sold my soul to the devil for fame and wealth” – an example of such is Brittany Spears. Now I’m not saying it wasn’t just publicity hype, but there is a certain mindset in that business – including those things that Donald John mentions. In any case, we are living in an ever darker God-less world. We must keep looking up for our redemption draws nigh. Come, Lord Jesus!
Correction: It was Katy Perry who said that on TV. I really don’t watch television and wouldn’t recognize any of these people by sight.
Katy Perry started in Gospel, but seems to have left all of that behind her. Her appeal to young girls seems boundless and those 99 cent iTunes purchases add up fast.
The music business, these days, is about massive productions with all sorts of stagecraft and trick lighting. Music is part of it, a big part, but there is much more involved, dancing, elaborate costumes and all sorts of exciting visuals. Compared to all that, the Beatles would have seemed about as exciting as watching the janitorial staff wax the floor.
I was talking to a relative about movies, recently, and we both agreed that there’s nothing much to watch. If you want to see the Special Effects people go nuts in the 17th sequel to some superhero movie, it’s easy to find. If you want to see a pleasant movie with a real plot line and great acting, you might be better off shopping for DVDs. That’s ok, it costs a fortune to see a movie in a theater these days and the refreshment prices are beyond belief.
There’s no moderation anymore. Everything has to be the flashiest and most impressive. If I wanted to see some good musicians in a quiet setting, I wouldn’t even begin to know where to find such a thing. Buying a simple, serviceable vehicle is all but impossible. No one wants to sell a simple pickup truck for utilitarian purposes, but if you want to spend $60,000 – $70,000 for something really special, step right up. It’s true with almost everything. We need moderateness.
I don’t watch anything with celebrities in it. I’ve never seen Katy Perry perform. Heard Britney Spears once, on the radio, and could hardly believe what a terrible singer she was. And I once heard Beyonce, who wasn’t much better.
But they fill their videos, etc., with truly vile images, and I guess that’s what Donald had in mind. I consciously avoid that stuff.
Gee, “Primeval” sounds pretty innocuous by comparison. At least it’s got dinosaurs.
As I see it, the point is simply that most entertainment is Godless. Some is overtly anti-God and that’s something I would want to avoid like the plague.
Very little coming out of the entertainment industry would be something I would consider “Godly”, but that’s nothing new. If you read the exploits of actors from Hollywood’s Golden Era, the morality tends to be quite lacking. Flash forward to our day and the difference is startling. Movies used to present most of their characters as moral people, even if the actors were not living that way in their personal lives. Nowadays, an amoral lifestyle is very common in movies and television.
The video productions that accompany music these days, along with football halftime shows and openers for the Olympic Games (none of which I watch), all seem to have occult, demonic influences embedded within them, whether overt or covert – they’re there. Tragic influences on our young people.
The opening ceremony for the Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland appears to be about as demonic as anything I’ve ever seen. There was one dancer with a goat’s head, perhaps a Baphomet costume. The dancers performd sexually provocative moves and actions overall atmosphere was strange and eerie. Someone pointed it out to me at the time and I was appalled. I viewed just a few clips and came away galled. This looked like a Satanic ritual played out in real time, before our very eyes and likely financed by the taxpayers of the region.
I’m all for music and dancing, I’ve been known to do a lot of the first, and even a little of the latter. I’ve played music in public for over forty years and appreciate how hard it is to create such elaborate choreographed shows. But I don’t understand why every show is supposed to be that way.
An uncle told me about going to see Nat Cole at a nightclub. This uncle had done manynimpressove things, but nothing impressed me more than imagining what it would have been like to see Nat Cole play piano and sing in a live setting. No effects, no dancers, no smoke and mirrors, just a gifted jazz pianist and vocalist at his best.
About 20 years ago, I got to hear a Big Band in a live setting. Once again, no effects, no dancers, just 19 musicians performing great arrangements and performing them flawlessly. When I was 22 years old, I got to see Benny Goodman live. What a privilege! I’ve seen Chet Atkins live on two occasions and consider this the highlight of my concert going. More recently, I’ve seen Junior Brown in concert, playing mostly modern country songs in the style of Ernest Tubb. I’ve seen Tommy Emmanuel in concert, one man, one guitar, and one heck of a show.
Not o e of these experiences included fancy lighting, special effects or dancers wearing a Baphomet costume, yet I feel like I’ve seen the better shows. These shows were propelled by one thing, and only one thing: prodigious musical ability. There were no stage directors, choreographers or lighting technicians (beyond basic stage lighting), but the shows were excellent and memorable.
One other thing which really galls me is the costumes worn in some of these shows. Ever since Janet Jackson and her famed “wardrobe malfunction” there have been ever skimpier outfits for female artists. If the costume “fails” and reveals too much, all the better. Such a “failure” will be on the Internet and available for viewing worldwide within minutes. The value of that publicity is hard to overestimate, which is why it continues to happen.
I posted that tunnel ceremony here, once upon a time. It was like a delirium. What were they thinking???
As I understand it, there’s a legend about the Devil being used to build a bridge across that valley in exchange for the soul of the first person to cross the bridge. They tricked the Devil by sending a goat across first and perhaps the legend of the Devil’s Bridge is why they chose that theme for their program. This does not, however, explain the overall strange nature of the show or the performers growing one another as part of the show.
There are legends in exactly that same pattern found in Britain and America.
I goggle at some of the things I hear about that have appeared on television. I don’t have a TV set any more. I threw away my last one in 1999 when I realized I hadn’t even turned it on since 1991. And the things that disgusted or just plain bored me then seem like nursery tales now, compared with the things going on today.