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The Christian Celebrity System: Part One
Posted : 17 Dec, 2010 04:43 PM
The Christian Celebrity System: Part One
Bernard Pyron
We are living in an age of deception, un �ge de tromperie. In the tribulation, which is coming soon,
many Church Christians will be deceived by false teachers who have good images - who serve the appearances - and teach false doctrines, which the Church people will accept. They are now being deceived by false prophets, and its hard to find Church Christians who have not accepted some form of false doctrine, which they received from celebrities like Hal Lindsey, Grant Jefferies,Tim LaHaye and many others. But those who follow the lamb wherever he goes, and have his mind in them, will not be deceived by Christian celebrities with their lies. Those of the Remnant, and the 144,000, will not themselves be deceivers, as Revelation 14: 5 and Zephaniah 3: 13 say. In part though, some who claim to be of the Remnant do sometimes tend to follow Remnant leaders who have good images rather than those who do not but have just as much truth.
In II Corinthians 10: 7 Paul asks "Do ye look on things after the outward appearance? " After the outward appearance is from kata prospopon, according to appearance. Prospoon can mean the face, visage, surface, external form, or appearance (Moulton, Harold K. The Analytical Greek Lexicon revised, 1978, p 353). Prosorolerteo means to pay regard to external appearance (Moulton, p.353). A prosopoleptes is a "respecter of persons" in Acts 10: 34.
Christ says in John 7: 24 "Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment."
In our post-Christian culture. image is everything. Some years ago,a TV commercial on NBC for Canon cameras told us that "Image is everything." In Norman Spinrad's science fiction novel, Bug Jack Barron (1969) Morris, head of the Republican Party, tells Jack, "You're a marketable commodity...an image behind which we can unite...Image, Barron, image is what counts...not the man...never mind what the real man behind the image is like."
In the image culture success has become more and more a matter of giving An appearance of being successful and attractive. And the main game in the worldly culture is to win image and success for oneself. An artist is successful when he attains to much image.
Network television is responsible for making the the image culture, created earlier by Hollywood movies, much more
a dominating part of popular culture. Most viewers of network TV were seduced by a medium that was so deceptive that viewers did not know they were bring hoodwinked by the dumb show. Network TV weakened the cognitive abilities of many viewers and also reduced their capability of detecting deception on TV and in real life.
When network TV began in 1948, the fairly good storytelling heard on radio was continued in TV Westerns, detective shows and adventure dramas. But by the sixties the narrative quality of network TV began to decline and continued its decline into the nineties. Of course, by the first decade of the new century, network TV was beginning to be left behind by the Internet.
Almost all formula Westerns on early network TV had clear cause and effect sequences of actions. In other words they were mostly coherent. By the sixties and later the major coherence problem of network TV drama was over-cutting. Scenes were broken up by too frequent cutting. In his 1977 study of network TV Tamer found that cuts made up 94.7 percent of all shot changes. He found that, on the average, a sudden cut from one scene to another happened on network TV every 3.3 seconds, and he did not include commercials.
Network TV leaves out many actions and verbalizations necessary for understanding a story.
In addition, to the coherence problem of jump cutting, network TV fell into a habit of using poor story grammar.
Cognitive psychology has contributed some to the study of story grammar, and part of this comes out of Noam Chomsky's version of Cartesian linguistics. Interestingly, Cartesian linguistics makes a distinction between
the outward verbatim form of a sentence and the representation of the meaning of that sentence held by the reader in his mind. Chomsky called these two surface structure and deep structure. Usually the verbatim surface form of a sentence is not represented in the mind word for word. Rather, the gist of the sentence is abstracted and that gist meaning is stored in memory. Meaning is in the gist representations in short term and long term memory. It is not efficient for the mind to memorize the exact words of a sentence. So the mind represents a sentence by a kind of short-hand, by a "map," just as a map in abstract form contains the features of an environment. This use of Cartesian linguistics by Chomsky fits right into cognitive psychology.
So, if the stories presented on network TV are so incoherent due to poor story grammar and jump cutting that
the viewer cannot create in his mind gist representations of the actions and dialogue, then the story is essentially meaningless to him. He may though enjoy the actions, landscapes and the actors images.
A theory can be created from all this which predicts that poor story grammar and jump cutting on TV results not only in a momentary loss of the viewer's ability to create gist meanings from TV, but that the more he views TV the more he will develop a cognitive deficiency in his ability to generate accurate gist meanings in his mind of real life events. In other words, network TV was a dumbing down medium. There were a few studies I found in the early nineties when I was interested in the negative cognitive effects of network TV viewing. For example, Emery and Emery (1976 found that viewing network TV hindered the viewers ability to pay close attention to stimuli. Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi (1990) found that viewers reported that their mental concentration was lower while watching TV, but their concentration, they said, increased when they were doing reading. Studies of brain waves while viewing TV show that the mental state during viewing is one of low alertness and a low level of focus.
The human mind is greatly influenced by almost any kind of of much repeated experiences - be it reading grammatically well formed stories that are coherent, or by watching disconnected images on TV. Ability to focus attention is very important a leader of other cognitive abilities. The list of cognitive abilities that may become impared by watching TV or years include (l) the ability to tell the difference between what is important and what ius not important, (2) the ability to create accurate gist meaning representations (3) the ability to think in cause and effect ways, (4) clarity of perception of space and of time, (5) the ability to perceptually isolate and pay attention to an item embedded
in a complex visual field or context, (6) the ability to remember information from long term memory at the right time, (7) the ability to hold more than one item of information in short term memory at a time, and (8) the ability to combine into possible combinations and to see new connections. In addition reading skills arfe probably impaired by years of watching TV.
A person who has been dumbed down by network TV - and by other means and through other media - is more likely to fall for the messages of secular and Christian celebrities, than a person who has greater cognitive abilities to discern lies and truths behind images.
We are living in an increasingly age of cognitive dimness. And spiritual darkness follows cognitive dimness and deception with its dumbess regarding truth, especially among Church Christians, and increasing moral insensibility. Often contemporary people cannot tell the difference between truth and lies - in Christian doctrines and elsewhere. This is also true in the sciences, though some basics are agreed upon as working truth.
II Thessalonians 2: 3 says "Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition." The false teachers and their followers do not believe their theology is a big part of this falling away, and so they are deceived. Matthew 24: 11 tells us that
"And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many."
Both of these scriptures warning of deception zero in on the time of the end, the tribulation period. II Thessalonians 2: 7-10 says that during the very end time the man of sin, who in this context of the falling away, looks like the Second Beast of Revelation 13: 11-18, which is the Church in the falling away, will operate with deception. He will mislead Church Christians and some others perhaps "...with all deceivableness of unrighteousness.
In the age of deception at its height, the urge to deceive people, which will be a desire of most, grows out of an evil urge. Though John's description of the Anti-Christ in I John 2: 18-19 and I John 4: 3 does not predict one single super dispensationalist Anti-Christ as a political leader, the spirit of Anti-Christ will increase during these very end times and will manifest in many Anti-Christs all of whom will be deceptive.
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