Q: "What in the hell are we watching?" What is the quality of television, movies, and video games? I believe God who created us and cares for us must certainly be displeased with the ways we entertain ourselves -- media that glorify breaking all Ten Commandments. I want an old-fashioned fire and brimstone sermon that inspires everyone to write protest letters and boycott entertainment and advertising that demeans the human spirit.
 

The Squirmin’ question is refined when Rabbi Abraham Heschel asks, "How should [men and women,] beings created in the likeness of God, live? What way of living is compatible with the grandeur and mystery of living?" How does his question help you think about movies, books, advertisements, and popular video games? "What way of living is compatible with the grandeur and mystery of living?"

Both the real world and the entertainment worlds show us how easy it is to hurt, demean, abuse, insult, dehumanize, destroy, use, and kill. And no one is an innocent bystander, untouched in real life and Hollywood dramas. We each decide if God is in us, if we will bring light or darkness to life.

Movies focus a slice-of-life that often successfully distills a film’s central message without getting mired in technicalities. An illustration: for 36 years I have poured over countless books and spent innumerable words on the nature of evil and the spiritual command to always bring life and goodness out of suffering, death, and evil. The final 18-minute segment in Disney’s "Fantasia 2000" employs Stravinsky’s "Firebird Suite" and a magnificent animation to demonstrate the truth on which I have spent 36 years. Images transcend words; words inspire images in a perfect creative balance.

Films may offer insight and understanding. I had an epiphany during "Natural Born Killers," a decidedly pornographic film. For years, when I thought about an interview with a murderer at San Quentin Prison, nothing made sense about him or his senseless crimes. Two scenes in the movie unfroze the encounter, offering understanding long delayed and a personal lesson in grace. An irredeemable film offered an unexpected redemption.

A great deal of entertainment, advertising, and real life is pornographic by Norman Cousins’ definition (see bulletin cover): desensitizing, emotionally crippling, distorting, denying love, and dehumanizing. A reality example: the front page of the New York Times last week pictured a Liberian boy of 7 or 8 years wearing red flip-flops and a pink teddy bear backpack in a military crouch ragefully preparing to fire a semi-automatic rifle. That the boy was thus armed, and at once innocent and filled with terror was pornographic, more so, the political conditions in Liberia.

I agree with the part of the Squirmin’ question that asserts, "God who created and cares for us must certainly be displeased with the ways we entertain ourselves." God must also be profoundly displeased with the real world. When we feel called by God, we must each live-out whatever is our fire and brimstone message against dehumanizing media and the porn of the real world. But, of greater urgency than censorship, protest or boycott, we must be more finely attuned to the goodness, redemption, and mercy waiting to arise from every ash heap.

Am I repulsed by much of what the advertising world serves up? Count on it! Are video games filled with violence and sexuality okay? Would I buy them for my family? Not on your life! I have explained the dangers of such portrayals, and I wisely trusted my family to get it.

Did I find beauty and meaning, and experience God in the film, "Winged Migration"? Breathtakingly so! Was I troubled by the violation of Commandments in the movie, "The End of the Affair," and did the film give me a deeper understanding of God’s tireless pursuit of redemption? Yes!

Does entertainment influence moods and behaviors, and inspire violence and acting out? The evidence points in that direction and I strongly suspect that it is sometimes true. We all know when something frightens, seduces, repulses, or pushes us over the edge. When we reach our saturation level we are wise to follow the oft repeated counsel of Mister Rogers to children, "When you see scary TV you can turn it off." It works for me.

What I most fear is uncritical viewing of any media. It is so easy to be desensitized, to accept things that subtly dehumanize or have no redeeming lessons, that subvert the example of Christ, and transform persons into objects (Buber, "I and Thou"). Does your remote have a hypersensitive off button and do you trust yourself to use it when you reach your saturation point?

It is not my place to preach your fire and brimstone, or to tell you what to watch and how to interpret it. Instead, I prefer that together we explore the meanings we derive, the challenges presented to us, and find the image of God and human goodness inherent in very situation and story. Remember, what matters most is who we become and what we do with what we see, hear, and read.

May every exposure to life and media bring us back to the example of Jesus Christ so that we may take into ourselves St. Paul’s admonition, "When you became the Lord’s people, you belong to the light…for it is this light that brings a rich harvest of every kind of goodness, righteousness, and truth." And with Rabbi Heschel, I am absolutely certain that "Every experience opens the door into a temple of new light, although the vestibule may be dark and dismal."