When my father was young and growing up in a conservative pastor's house, television was a sin.To have it. To watch it. Probably even to talk about it.
Forty years later, that kind of attitude seems kind of cold and ill-informed. It's far too categorical a rejection in our minds. After all, aren't there benefits to television? Doesn't it help us learn new things, explore new places? Doesn't it open the portals of understanding so that everyone in our world can begin to understand each other a little better?
Yes, well, I suppose it does. And I'm not dismissing that in the least.
The problem is, the older I get the more I think that my grandparents were right back in the 1960s.
Television just might be a sin.
Some of my reasons for saying so probably has a lot in common with my grandparents' reasons. The language. The sex. The violence. The way in which what we watch has an insidious effect on what we start thinking and how we begin to see the world.
But if television is a sin, I'm convinced it is a sin for more than just that. It is a sin because it's just a waste of time.
In this age of hundreds of channels and season after season of our favorite shows on DVD, we have become so addicted to sitting and watching and occupying our brains with so much patent anesthetizing nonsense that many of us may be starting to lose touch with our own lives. Starting to lose touch with those we care about or ought to be caring about. Starting to lose our priorities and focus in a muddle of "reality television" marathons or the empassioned angst of any of a number of teenage groups on the WB.
Countless hours of my life have been wasted watching television. Countless hours getting caught up in the lives of imaginary people and artificial creations. They are hours I cannot ever get back. Hours that could have been spent doing so much more.
As a historian, I wonder sometimes why people in olden days seemed to get so much more done than us. Learned so much more. Loved so much more. Wrote so much more.
While some of that may just have to do with my own silly pining for the romance of the past, I'm beginning to think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that our forbears were never faced the temptations of mindless distraction that attack us daily.
Is television a sin? I don't know. But it is a question worth asking.
4 comments:
I agree with much of what you say here, Josh.
I don't think television in itself is a sin, but I do think that maybe wasting time in a way that doesn't encourage any kind of growth is a sin.
I think sitting and staring out a window is less of a waste of time than televiewing. At least, with the former, I'm observing and meditating and a part of my brain is sorting through stuff and coming out the other end with a new perspective or some mental refreshment.
I've been guilty of wasting time on the internet, and thereby separating myself from what should have been my proper concerns. It's just as seductive as television...browsing around and reading pointless arguments. I was getting so angry! ...at people I'd never met, would never meet, had no effect on my life except in that negative way.
A lot of things can be addictive in ways that take over your mind if you aren't careful. So. Having come to this paragraph...is addiction a sin? Or a moral failing? Or an illness?
Is addiction a sin? Well, part of the answer to that might have to do with how we look at sin. If "sin" is something that we do and is encompassed by a conglomeration of individual acts that each make us guilty in turn...well...I don't know.
I guess I'd like to think about things like real addiction (drugs, alcohol, etc.) being a part of our fallen world....they are all bound up in sin and happen because our world is a dark place. I'd prefer to think of addictions less as making us more guilty and more as hurting us more and more...hurting our spirit, hurting our bodies, hurting those around us.
Addictions many times start off as choices, but then people can be in bondage to them...serious affliction that they need to be rescued from.
Hmm. Reminds me of the way Paul talks about sin in Romans.
Somehow its all connected. I guess what I'm trying to avoid is telling someone that's addicted to drugs that they're sinning. Ya, they kind of are...but they need help, not more guilt.
Josh ~
I like the way you put that - those who are addicted need help not more guilt... This is so very true. We all make errors of choice. Most of those we can recognize and correct. Some of those choices instead are insidious in how they steal our very being. Addiction is like that.To recognize that addiction reaches beyond the ability to choose...and to have the capacity to care about that person anyway...that is true compassion in a Godly sense.
Addictions or otherwise, it is when we are at our lowest that we are the most open to the voice of God.
Good points - I read an article the other day that said the brain activity of someone watching television is about the same as someone staring into a fire. Not sure if that means there's less or more going on than I thought - though it is significantly less brain activity than a person reading a book.
It amy be too late for my own or my husband's addicotn, but perhaps we'll manage to spare the baby.
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