Ten years ago tomorrow I sat down at a computer and started these posts....the first of which was titled A La Carte Cable. It had been my contention....and still is....that Christian discernment is directly related to the ratio of time spent dwelling on the things of God vs the amount of time spent on pastimes and entertainments. Television therefore was a main culprit!
Our son wasn't even a toddler yet back in 1987....one evening he was sitting on the living room floor staring at the TV set as I called out his name. He didn't respond so I came closer and ran my hand between his face and the television. He didn't even blink so I umplugged the set and put it in the basement for nine years. Since then we have had only a handful of channels with basic cable. Today our son has no television in his home!
There are just too many channels available to us to fight this temptation while at the very least we are wasting our time and in the process greatly hindering our discernment in an age that demands that we be able to sort thorough the confusion and deception. A la carte cable would have at least given us the opportunity to pick only the channels that we deemed necessary....and in the process we wouldn't be supporting cable networks with which we wanted nothing to do.
Anyway.....I had a follower right away but didn't like that idea so I disabled the link. Since then I try often to point people to ligonier.com which was R. C. Sproul's ministry....and to great Christian writers from the past....along with other books of today written by those much more capable than I am. Then all of a sudden comments were appearing. They were nice and polite for I hadn't really entered into any controversial areas as of yet but I also immediately knew that....one....I would have absolutely no time to respond.....and two....I wanted to be a conduit for my thoughts....and not those of others. It wasn't until months had passed when I said to myself...."hmm...I don't even have my name on this." I decided to keep it this way because this is certainly not a blog....but mere pamphlets.....and I'm just a pamphleteer! Like it or not....right or wrong.....it's been ten years.
The hits are over 100,000 but that's deceiving because 'bots' started to make an impact a year or so ago....so I pay more attention to the hits on my profile page. The following was my second post:
The Written Word....December 3, 2008:
We've become a society that relies more on visual sources of information than the written word. Newspaper circulation is near crises point. Libraries continually add more computers and rely on their DVD collections. Books publishers continue to struggle while their biggest source of sales is novels where we are not gathering information. The Discovery and History channels grab the attention of the youth more than reading a book....and we learn how to cook and to do home improvements from television. Michael Moore and Bill Maher have become our political science teachers. The golden arches tell us that it is McDonald's. In the evangelical world, impressive sanctuaries draw people to a church where the absence of a pulpit that hides the stylish clothes of the preacher is more important than proclaiming God's Word in keeping those people in pews. (excuse me...cushioned seats)
President Bush is an evangelical but from his comments in interviews it doesn't appear that he has read much....if anything....in the faith that he proclaims. (President Trump's ghostwriter for The Art Of The Deal....Tony Schwartz....who spent eighteen months with Donald Trump in preparation for the book....is reported to have said that "I doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life."
Barack Obama on the other hand has written two autobiographies where even liberal commentators are amazed that he has revealed nothing of who he is in these books. We have been able to delve deep into the mind of great historical figures through their collected letters but the closest that we come to that today is in the collected emails of some business or government figure as revealed in their court trials. (today we also have the Tweet!)
Our son wasn't even a toddler yet back in 1987....one evening he was sitting on the living room floor staring at the TV set as I called out his name. He didn't respond so I came closer and ran my hand between his face and the television. He didn't even blink so I umplugged the set and put it in the basement for nine years. Since then we have had only a handful of channels with basic cable. Today our son has no television in his home!
There are just too many channels available to us to fight this temptation while at the very least we are wasting our time and in the process greatly hindering our discernment in an age that demands that we be able to sort thorough the confusion and deception. A la carte cable would have at least given us the opportunity to pick only the channels that we deemed necessary....and in the process we wouldn't be supporting cable networks with which we wanted nothing to do.
Anyway.....I had a follower right away but didn't like that idea so I disabled the link. Since then I try often to point people to ligonier.com which was R. C. Sproul's ministry....and to great Christian writers from the past....along with other books of today written by those much more capable than I am. Then all of a sudden comments were appearing. They were nice and polite for I hadn't really entered into any controversial areas as of yet but I also immediately knew that....one....I would have absolutely no time to respond.....and two....I wanted to be a conduit for my thoughts....and not those of others. It wasn't until months had passed when I said to myself...."hmm...I don't even have my name on this." I decided to keep it this way because this is certainly not a blog....but mere pamphlets.....and I'm just a pamphleteer! Like it or not....right or wrong.....it's been ten years.
The hits are over 100,000 but that's deceiving because 'bots' started to make an impact a year or so ago....so I pay more attention to the hits on my profile page. The following was my second post:
The Written Word....December 3, 2008:
We've become a society that relies more on visual sources of information than the written word. Newspaper circulation is near crises point. Libraries continually add more computers and rely on their DVD collections. Books publishers continue to struggle while their biggest source of sales is novels where we are not gathering information. The Discovery and History channels grab the attention of the youth more than reading a book....and we learn how to cook and to do home improvements from television. Michael Moore and Bill Maher have become our political science teachers. The golden arches tell us that it is McDonald's. In the evangelical world, impressive sanctuaries draw people to a church where the absence of a pulpit that hides the stylish clothes of the preacher is more important than proclaiming God's Word in keeping those people in pews. (excuse me...cushioned seats)
President Bush is an evangelical but from his comments in interviews it doesn't appear that he has read much....if anything....in the faith that he proclaims. (President Trump's ghostwriter for The Art Of The Deal....Tony Schwartz....who spent eighteen months with Donald Trump in preparation for the book....is reported to have said that "I doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life."
Barack Obama on the other hand has written two autobiographies where even liberal commentators are amazed that he has revealed nothing of who he is in these books. We have been able to delve deep into the mind of great historical figures through their collected letters but the closest that we come to that today is in the collected emails of some business or government figure as revealed in their court trials. (today we also have the Tweet!)
