colonel@gloria.UUCP (George Sicherman) (01/28/85)
> From: TELEVISION AND THEOLOGY, by George C. Conklin and Linda W. McFadden > > "Our central thesis is that our interaction with ourselves and with the world > -- including our attraction or repulsion toward advertising, sex, violence and > other television content -- can be understood in terms of our human condition. WHAT is our human condition? > The approach of Television Awareness Training is based primarily upon > psychological and sociological understanding of human behavior. Here we will > reflect on use and abuse of television within the perspective of Christian > theology. Unfortunately for the author, television is one of those media that elude and transcend any single perspective. > Central to Christian faith is the belief that the ultimate reality of the > universe is God, who created the world and all it contains. As creature, > humankind is intended to live in relationship with all Creation and with the > Creator. Because we are created in the image of the Creator, we also have the > capacity to create. And so humans create -- cities, works of art, codes of > law, languages, systems of belief, technologies. Our very ability to have > developed television -- both the technology and the human social systems > which shape it -- reflects our divinely given creativity. You cannot create anything without destroying something else. Whether God creates without destroying is a moot point; but He certainly does a lot of destroying. > ... manifold ways. The unfulfilled, passionate longing for the ultimate > which belongs to our relationship for God creates within us fear, anxiety, > rage--a nameless terror in the night. Because of this, we reach out to > possess, to dominate, to control, to exploit, to consume things or persons > we believe can satisfy our emptiness. I see no foundation for this theory in scripture or in my experience. > ... > The producers, writers, talent and sponsors of television are no less victims > of the situation than are the viewers. The assurances of being valued and > loved to which the audience aspires are also powerful motivators for the > makers of the dream. The dream-makers seek to wear the right things, know > the right things, have the right symbols of power, be the right persons -- > exactly as we, the viewers, do. We share the same dream. It is a measure > of of our unrelenting, aggressive seeking of transcendent value that we honor > a relaive hierarchy of finite values. Ironically, we do homage to those > dream-makers who are most adept at beguiling us through their skillful casting > of the finite in the guise of the transcendent. The writer obviously despises TV. Why should he call the longing for God's love "transcendent" and the longing for I Love Lucy "finite?" Every human longing is finite and transcendent at the same time. And a Coke commercial is as great a manifestation of God's love as a cathedral. I omit the rest of the excerpt, which is concerned with distinguishing TV's "false" transcendence of reality with Christianity's "true" trans- cendence: the opportunity to spend eternity in Heaven. It amounts to a denunciation of escapism, and a claim that TV tells people that they can be wonderful by being like the wonderful people on TV. I can't wait to go out and get an Archie Bunker haircut! :-)> Still, I'm glad the excerpt was posted. No matter how superficially an evangelical work is written - and most evangelical analyses of society and culture are _very_ superficial - there's usually a morsel or two of deeper truth in it. -- Col. G. L. Sicherman ...seismo!rochester!rocksanne!rocksvax!sunybcs!gloria!colonel