Stop the Violence
Stop the Violence
Deep in most people is a death wish. Such people seek death. They seek to die and they seek to watch others die. Modern entertainments are blood-soaked in so much fantasy violence that a new term seems apropos: carnography. Carnography damages the adult mind in measurable ways as diverse as lowering moral & ethical standards, coarsening tastes, and desensitizing oneself to the pain of others that when the totalitarians are on the march, citizens are unable to summon the fortitude to stop them. In other words, when good men do nothing, evil triumphs.
One assumes pornography damages young minds by cheapening their view of men and women, cheapening love, and making sex dirty. Some studies suggest that pornography serves the purpose of a relief valve in our over sexed society allowing people to blow off steam as it were and lower the rape rate. The same argument cannot be made for carnography. If anything, it encourages mass murder and serial killing. Criminals use carnography as textbooks to learn how to commit their crimes. In particular, murder novels and cop shows instruct murderers on how to get away with murder. Slasher movies inspire psychopaths and terrorists to commit ever more imaginative acts of cruelty.
If justice existed (and someday it might), then writers of murder novels and scripters of slasher movies would be locked up and the key thrown away. If this sounds like censorship by Christians, then that it only partly correct. Censorship yes but not by Christians.
Right-wing Christians are usually the first to advocate war and the bombing of people they have never met. Conservative Christians place no value on any life other than embryos. They were nowhere to be seen when Kevorkian was encouraging physicians to kill their elderly patients on the bogus argument that they cannot kill themselves and so need help. Anyone sufficiently determined can kill themselves by refusing to eat or simply losing the will to live. No modern medicine or forced feeding can override self-determination. The truth is that families don’t want to pay the medical bills.
But the god (lower case ‘g’) of Conservative Christians evidently places a low value on human life and his followers follow suit. “Killing is okay. There is a life after life. Therefore, it is okay to back every war that comes along and wrong to protest against war.” Never mind those pesky little things like the Constitutional right to protest or the Old Testament commandment by Jehovah to not kill or Jesus’ stand against killing. Never mind that from Genesis (Cain slew Abel) to Revelation (Heaven won’t accept murderers); the Bible that the Bible-pounders pound on condemns murder. It would appear that the real God (as contrasted with the god of the Conservative Christians) sides with the Quakers and the Mennonites. The rest of us are out of luck.
