Do you remember where you were the first time you saw adultery gloriously portrayed on the screen in front of you?  Probably not.  Do you remember the first time you saw two sodomites making out on the screen in front of you?  Probably. I remember both, the first actually happened while I was with a group of Christians.  It’s interesting how sin becomes normal to us.  Our concious makes grand protest the first time we are introduced to something evil, but after repeated attacks we are no longer as sensitive.  Satan knows this well, which is why he has cleverly disguised social decay as progress.  He literally has an army of people slowly introducing more and more evil into our daily lives until we are numb to it and ready for the next evil.  They bought adultery and became adulterers, now let’s try sodomy.  What’s next child sacrifice on TV?  Oh wait sorry, that already happened.

The Bikini Atoll is a small ring of islands, part of the Marshall Islands, that is somewhere far to the west of Hawaii.  Shortly after World War II the US began testing nuclear weapons at the atoll so they could study the effects on various types of ships and document the results.  Shortly after this, one Louis Réard got the brilliant idea to pass off ladies underwear as a legitimate swimsuit. He wanted a name that would express the explosive nature of this swimwear, so he called it the ‘bikini’.  They were thought to be so risqué, even in France, that no models were willing to model them for Réard, so he had to hire a stripper.  Today it a common household word and no one thinks twice about sending their little daughters out in public wearing them.  Interesting that we are still afraid of nuclear power to this day, but our fear of the bikini is almost gone.  Even as we read about another coal mining accident, nuclear power has proven the most safe form of power on the planet. Whereas the bikini has not been so benign.  Studies have shown that men who see a woman in a bikini begin to think of her as merely an object to be acquired, he does not see her as a person.  But we really don’t need a study, this should be obvious.  The collective consciences that initially rejected the bikini is all we really needed.  Today sex is out of control, yet having children in actual families is more and more rare.  This is not progress.

Satan likes to confuse the rejection of novelty with the rejection of the immoral.  If you stand with all of humanity from the past in rejecting something that has always been seen as immoral, you are just an old fuddy-duddy stuck in the past.  Just because something is old does not make it right but just because something is new does not make it right either.  And the fact that something is old at least means it has been tested and found successful.  But today we think anything new must be better.  It works for electronics, so it must work for morality. So we have been brainwashed into viewing looser and looser morality as progress.

The power of story to the human mind is profound and fundamental.  We are creatures of story, which is why the Bible is mostly stories.  We become like the stories we read.  The impact of stories in video form are magnified incredibly, as story is put into our head with almost no thinking.  It happens slow.  We are introduced to the sin a few times and we are shocked. We see it in a movie, someone else is engaged in the behavior as part of the story.  We justify it because this was the only movie available, and it was only a few minutes, and the rest of the movie was ok.  The next few times the shock is mostly gone and there is just a little thrill of evil. But these moving stories become our muse for life.  We begin to copy the behavior we have seen acted out.  The pattern has been set in our minds and we follow it.  The next thing we know we are saying and doing things that would have appalled an earlier version of ourselves, and God.  Evil men are well aware of this.  There was literally a conspiracy to push more and more immorality in Hollywood.  They undermined every sacred establishment; the church, the family, gender identity, country living, Christian values, and the value of hard work.  Instead Marxist ideas were inserted advocating big government, adultery, single life, city living, and freedom as doing whatever you want.  And they have been successful.  The average college student is religiously agnostic, politically marxist, and socially of Sodom.  The rejection of the Ten Commandments and the rest of God’s law is seen as a virtue.

The men of old were well aware of the power of story too, which is why they spent so much time writing and telling moral stories.  They worked hard to preserve morality and to convey it to their children in stories.  They built walls of protection to ensure that the next generation honored God more than the previous.  This is the oft repeated command of the Old Testament, remember the faithfulness of God, when it seems to have faded.  Tell it to your children because they might not yet have experienced it.  Write it down.  Testify of his faithfulness. I was once quoted a common line from the Psalms such as 98:1, as a justification of throwing out old music for new.  “Oh sing to the Lord a new song”  But the real meaning isn’t about worshiping what is new, it is about telling of God’s faithfulness.  It’s not about worship music, it’s about testimony. Put into words the real events in which God has been faithful and sing them from the mountain tops!  This is why the story of Amazing Grace is so powerful.  This is truly a new song.  But, I don’t hear songs like this anymore and only in some churches do they sing the old songs–Psalms.  I love this one but its hard to keep up with.

I was recently blown away, again, by the quality of old black and white movies.  I had seen quite a few of the most popular ones, and even their morality is shockingly Christian, but I was still surprised.  In the Maltese Falcon I was struck by the complex plot, and the way plot points were alluded to instead of spelled out as if we were idiots, the way that movies now do.  The dialogue was so much more complex, it contains long speeches each with more words than an entire movie these days.  And they have a sense of justice, correct justice.  Not Obama’s ‘fairness’ but evil is punished and it makes for a happy ending.  The Postman Always Rings Twice was a grand example of this.  And even the message of the title, God’s world does make sense, in the grand scheme, you might not hear the first ring but you always hear the second ring.  And love is never an excuse for adultery, or anything else.  And when it is used as an excuse everything falls apart, very much like reality.  But quite the opposite of all movies and TV these days.  Speaking of TV, did you see the sick new Oprah reality show mixing sodomy, politics and the NFL?