Please don't distribute until finished. 

 

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"The Protestant Ethic will atrophy as more an more enjoy varied leisure and guaranteed sustanenace.... Most people will tend to be hedonistic..."[2]  Feasibility Study, Behavioral Science Teacher Education Program (B-STEP), Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Bureau of Research, 1969

 

"Since emerging forms of representation such as hypermedia and virtual reality are in their early stages of development, we are just beginning to understand how they shape not only their messages, but also their users." The Evolution of Learning Devices: Smart Objects, Information Infrastructures, and Shared Synthetic Environments

 

It is common in these books for children to use their imagination---visualise and create what you want.  Listen to Anton LaVey in the Satanic Bible:  "Children, not knowing nor caring if they possess artistic skill or other creative talents, pursue their goals through the use of imagery of their own manufacture...Imagery can be manipulated, set up, modified, and created, all according to the will of the magician, and the very blueprint that is created by imagery becomes the formula which leads to reality...If you have material desires, you must gaze upon images of them---surround yourself with the smells and sounds conducive to them---create a lodestone which will attract the situation or thing that you wish." (The Satanic Bible, Avon Books, New York, 1969:124-125)
 

Sensory Immersion "...advances in high performance computing and communications also are enabling learners' sensory immersion in "artificial realities." Via an immersion interface based on computerized clothing and a head-mounted display, the participant feels "inside" an artificial reality rather than viewing a synthetic environment through a computer monitor's screen; virtual reality is analogous to diving rather than looking into an aquarium window. Using sensory immersion to present abstract, symbolic data in tangible form is a powerful means of attaining insights into real world phenomena.  The Evolution of Learning Devices: Smart Objects, Information Infrastructures, and Shared Synthetic Environments   Here the programmer creates and manipulates  the perceived reality

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Author Says Culture's Visual Media Obsession Paves Way for Paganism: "...while many people today take this constant barrage of images for granted, one Christian author and professor of communications is concerned that the postmodern obsession with images is pushing words -- and more importantly, the Word-- out of place at the heart of civilized culture. And he says this process is, in effect, bringing on a postmodern "dark age" that resembles pagan societies of the past.

      "Dr. Arthur W. Hunt teaches communications at Geneva College in Pennsylvania and has been actively involved in Christian education for most of his adult life. And now he has written a book called The Vanishing Word: The Veneration of Visual Imagery in the Postmodern World (Crossway Books, 2003), which asks some important questions about the effect visual culture is having on people's spiritual lives....

     "According to Hunt, the main components of pagan idolatry are sex, violence, and the cult of celebrity, or person worship. And in a society where broadcast media use sensationalistic images to compete for ratings, and political candidates -- including former actors and professional wrestlers -- compete for votes with television ads, the similarities are not difficult to spot....

     "Hunt believes the inspired Word of God in the Bible was not incidental.... 'It's vitally important for Christians for them to understand that our faith is dependent upon the written word. When that begins to become devalued, then that is a threat against our faith,' he says.

 

 

Mosaic -- 'A Work of Beauty Under the Artful Hands of God' : The urban Mosaic church holds four services every Sunday. Three are held in high schools, while the fourth is held in a downtown nightclub. The church draws Hollywood screenwriters, professional painters, and sculptors. /Senior pastor Erwin McManus says the church is not "seeker-sensitive" -- and that instead of blasting everything that comes out of Hollywood, he is trying to reach the creative arts crowd with the gospel of Christ. /"Mosaic is a place filled with writers and dancers, actors, sculptors, painters -- a lot of people who are from the esthetic side of the world," he explains. "To me, it is an opportunity to reflect the creative beauty and wonder of God -- and to allow people to experience Jesus Christ in a new, fresh way."

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Art and images:  This book ...is about the relations between images and people... I was struck by certain kinds of response--psychological and behavioral responses rather than critical ones--that appeared to have been observed throughout history and across cultures, whether 'civilized' or 'primitive." They were not usually confronted in the literature because they were unrefined, basic, pre-intellectual, raw. They were too embarrassing or awkward to write about..... xx

    Much of what follows deals with the sorts of behavior in the West that rational positivists like to describe as irrational, superstitious, or primitive, only explicable in terms of 'magic.' xxi

Furthermore, since so much of the evidence for live images involves a tacit or explicit sexual relationship, a bridge is provided from religion to sexuality. In t eh material on arousal by images, one can again begin to understand the problem of fear. If the image is, in some sense, sufficiently alive [or provocative] to arouse desire, then it is more than it seems, and its powers are not wha5t we are willing to allow to dead representation.... xxiv

People are sexually aroused by pictures and sculptures; they break pictures and sculptures; they mutilate them, kiss them, cry before them, and go on journeys to them; they are calmed by them, stirred by them, and incited to revolt.... They have always responded n in these ways; and they still do. They do so in societies we call primitive and in modern societies... They have psychological roots that we prefer not to acknowledge.  1

People have smashed images for poetical reasons for theological ones; they have destroyed works which have roused their ire or their shame... because the image is a symbol of something else.... 10

it is not uncommon to find that the suggestive turns out to be more provocative than the blatantly descriptive. But with images from t he distant past, it may well help to establish the limits of the publicly acceptable ah the borderline between that which rouses shame and that which does not. Modern beholders may no longer find the Venus of Urbino especially arousing, not only because they have seen so many reproductions of it and many others like it, but because sexual imagery can no go so much further. One has only to consider the vastly greater sexual expressiveness and exposure in popular imagery--from billboards to pornographic magazines -- over the past few decades. 21

 

the dialectic between sensitivity to form and artistic skill on the one hand and, on the other, the kinds of responses which do not appear to be so dependent on formal and technical factors. 42  .. we too fear the power of the images he makes and the their uncanny abilities both to elevate us and to disturb us. They put is un touch with truths about ourselves in a way that can only be described as magical, or they deceive us as if by witchcraft. ... we have been educated to talk and think about images in ways that avoid confronting just these kinds of effects.... 42

The issue ... is the relationship between cognition and the commonplace. ... With painting, depiction is more readily understood as representation; it is irredeemably two-dimensional and thus irredeemably inert. ... Alberti, just like Hawthorne... assigned painting a special status precisely because it very lack of three-dimensionality made it seem all the more supernatural, or made the beholder construe it as such. Its powers seemed more mysterious and further beyond the capacities of normal creativity.... 49

...the only way in which the danger of Flaubert's passages can prpoerly be presented is by describing them as paintings. His writing is dangerous, as the prosecutor says, because it shows "lascivious portraits." It is no loess than "the realistic school of painting." 50

 

 

 

Entertainment. Entertaining Ourselves to Death: "Movies are fun. Like most entertainments today, they excite the emotions rather than stimulate the intellect. ... The problem is that we are spending so much time with movies, video games and TV that we tend to become addicted to exciting electronic images. Worse, we become addicted to excitement itself, and we have difficulty distinguishing artificial entertainment from reality...."  ["The addiction to entertainment is also the driving force in the modern church today," comments Paul Proctor, author of The People's Church]  See also America's Spiritual Slide and Brainwashing in America.

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  "The love of servitude cannot be established except as the result of  a deep, personal revolution in human minds and bodies. To bring about that revolution we require, among others, the following discoveries and inventions. First, a greatly improved technique of suggestion through infant conditioning...."

    Huxley's coldhearted conditioning tactics shock our Bible trained sensibilities, but they fit right into the tested and tried brainwashing strategies used by Communist and Nazi tyrants. Picture this scene in:  

They returned... with eight-month old babies, all exactly alike and all dressed in khaki.        "Put them on the floor."        The infants were unloaded....        "Now turn them so they can see the flowers and books." ...        The babies ... began to crawl towards those clusters of sleek colors..... From the ranks of the crawling babies came little squeals of excitement, gurgles and twittering of pleasure.... The swiftest crawlers were already at their goal. Small hands reached out uncertainly, touched, grasped... crumbling the illuminated pages of the books.        The director waited until all were happily busy, then... he gave the signal.        There was a violent explosion. Shriller and ever shriller, a siren shrieked. Alarm bells maddeningly sounded.        The children startled, screamed; their faces were distorted with terror.         "And now," the Director shouted, "now we proceed to rub in the lesson with a mild electric shock." ...        The Nurse pressed  a second lever. The screaming of the babies suddenly changed its tone. There was something desperate, almost insane, about the sharp spasmodic yelps... Their little bodies twitched and stiffened.        "Offer them the flowers and the books again."         The nurses obeyed, but... the infants shrank away in horror....

 

 "Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks--already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked;" explains Huxley, "and after two hundred repetitions of the same or similar lessons would be wedded indissolubly. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder." He adds,

 "They'll grow up with what the psychologist used to call an 'instinctive' hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably conditioned. They'll be safe from books and botany all their lives."[4] Brave New World 

After all, information must be controlled and limited in the envisioned world of peace. There can be no unity unless everyone receives the same fitting information -- and nothing but....

"Information is useful only if citizens can put it into a framework of knowledge and use it to solve problems, form values, and make choices. Education for sustainability will help them make individual and collective decisions that both benefit themselves and promote the development of sustainable communities. [It] must involve everyone." [4] From the President [Clinton]'s Council on Sustainable Development which, like other national PCSDs, follows guidelines from the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (See  Local Agenda 21) 

 

For stories and images affect people. American attitudes and values have already been transformed through such negative conditioning through: 

• the media: linking Christianity to extremism, linking pro-life sentimenst to anti-abortion rallies, 

• Hollywood: linking fatherhood to stupidity, linking homosexual lifestyles to personal fun and fulfillment, linking pastors to insensitive bores... 

• Schools: Linking Christianity to repression and abuse, while linking earth-centred religions to unity and peace and earth stewardship. 

It doesn't matter that the facts of history teach a different picture, for those facts were censored years ago. What counts is perception, and today's social engineers have researched and perfected the art of deception to 

 

 4. Group thinking has replaced individual views. [Brainwashing in America]

 5. Communal "feelies" or sensory experiences are encouraged. [A New Way of Thinking]

 6. Disturbing or contrary feelings must be controlled with calming drugs. [Psychiatric Drugs]

 7. Casual sex is obligatory (see chart ) and mandatory pills prevent pregnancy. [Sex Ed and Global Values]

 8. The State controls of all land and provides managed vacations to selected places. [World Heritage 'Protection']

 9. People are kept too busy with work and trivia to think or complain. [Mainstream Media]

10. All must participate in mystical group rituals invoking a universal god. [Solidarity]

11. Peer pressure and constant surveillance ensure compliance. [Using Teen Violence to Justify Control]

"The love of servitude cannot be established except as the result of  a deep, personal revolution in human minds and bodies. To bring about that revolution we require, among others, the following discoveries and inventions. First, a greatly improved technique of suggestion through infant conditioning....         "Second, a fully developed science of human differences, enabling government managers to assign any given individual to his or her proper place in the social and economic hierarchy (Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and to infect others with their discontents.)        "Third, a substitute for alcohol... more pleasure-giving than gin or heroin.        "Fourth... a foolproof system of eugenics, designed to standardize the human product and so to facilitate the task of the managers."[5] Brave New World

 

Sitting in a movie theater, you wait for the feature to begin. An ad shows a brimming cupful of buttery popcorn and your mouth begins to water. A few people yield to the suggestion and go to buy something good. Others have already been conditioned to make their purchase on the way in. 

 

Whether you personally yield to the temptation or not, today's marketing research has shown that billions of dollars spent on feel-good ads multiply their sales. Plenty of people will follow their brief, mindless and feeling-based suggestions. Don't think that a 30 minute profane television epiosode, a two-hour fast-action movie or a 3 hour occult role-playing game won't impact the youth that participate in these imagined pleasures.   

 

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