The Desensitization Towards Blood and Death

 

By Jason Lovelace

Key Scriptures:

Proverbs – “There is a generation that curesth their father, and doth not bless their mother.  There is a generation that are pure in their own eyes, and yet is not washed.  There is a generation, O how lofty are their eyes! and their eyelids are lifted up.  There is a generation, whose teeth are as swords, and their jaw teeth as knives, to devour the poor from off the earth, and the needy from among men.”

 

2nd Timothy 3.1-5 - This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.  For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, high minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.

 

Revelation 9.20-21 - And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood:  which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:  neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts.

 

Revelation 13.7, 15 - And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them… And he had power to…cause as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

 

Revelation 16.6 - For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets…

 

In the media today we are seeing more and more blood being spilled on-screen.  In days and years past, only in the most vicious and cruel of Horror Movies was blood spilled in such ways as has been done in the last couple of decades.  Nowadays, even movies that are quite tame by modern standards are more and more showing the spilling of blood, violence, and killing as never before.  Violent movies that would have been shunned by the public in decades past as too grotesque are now being viewed by record numbers of people.  What does God’s word have to say about the portrayal of violence, blood, gore, and killing?  What is the end result of such portrayals of violence? 

 

Really, How Bad Can It Be?

The National Institute on Media and Family has these amazing Statistics:

 

l  By the time a child is eighteen years old, he or she will witness on television (with average viewing time) 200,000 acts of violence including 40,000 murders.

 

l  Children, ages 8 to 18, spend more time (44.5 hours per week – 6-1/2 hours daily) in front of computer, television, and game screens than any other activity in their lives except sleeping.

 

What is all of this doing to our youth and to the children of our society today at large?  When a child sees, on average, 10,000 acts of violence, and more than 2,000 murders a year on Television before the age of 18, we can only assume that said child will grow up to be a violent adult.  So far, in many countries – especially the West and Technologically Advanced nations – this trend is glaringly obvious.  In the last ten years, violent crime among youths has jumped exponentially in the countries with the highest technology.  In the US alone, since 1999, there have been dozens of school shootings, situations where students have brought handguns (or worse) into school, and killed classmates.  The second-worst school slaying in US History took place at Virginia Technological and State University in April, 2007, when a student used handguns to mow down 32 classmates and teachers.  Before that, there was the Columbine Massacre where two Seniors, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, used semi-automatic weapons and homemade pipe bombs to take the lives of more than a dozen of their schoolmates before turning the guns on themselves.  In Japan, violent crime among minors – especially young teenagers – has spiked in the last decade.  Though Japan has forbids the private ownership of guns, gun violence has been on the rise over the past decade-and-a-half.  The murder weapon of choice in Japan – knives – has also been used to massacre people, with a killer stabbing to death eight children in an Osaka elementary school a year after the Columbine Slayings in the US;, and just last year, another massacre, in Akihabara, Tokyo, where a man used a rented moving truck and hunting knives to kill nearly ten people before being apprehended by police.  In Western Europe, rioting youths have caused trouble for France, specifically Paris, for a number of years.  In Germany in the last couple of years, there has also been a rise in school shootings.  Many sociologists and psychological experts are scratching their heads at the reasons for the rise in killings and murders among youth.  However, there are answers where few are looking:  in the Bible.

 

Know Jesus, Know Peace; No Jesus, No Peace.

Children today are getting the godless message.  It is coming through loud and clear, and it usually starts at a very young age with regards to the media.  Television and movies have become increasingly God-neutral (at the very best), with those who hold some form of faith being sidelined as irrelevant to today’s society in the very mildest of cases.  The norm is becoming more and more God-hostile and faith unfriendly, especially on talk shows and in movies.  Even children’s programming is more and more leaving God at the front step of the stage and production house.  In public schools, God is welcome there only unless he is whittled down to being regarded as a character in “literature “.  Science courses and history classes have all but excised God in any form from their respective fields, and even many of today’s Christian Schools are now monopolized in the science class by the Idea of Evolution.  Further, many major print publications have also drifted further and further away from the Bible, God, and faith in any form.  Magazines such as Time and Newsweek not only have openly questioned God’s existence, but have openly ridiculed Him.  Newspapers such as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times regularly use atheistic principles and ideology in their Religion Page Editorials.  God has basically been excused from the media, from the public classroom, and, is being excised from the public forum in general.  The Bible states clearly that to ignore God, to cut him out of life is not only folly (Proverbs 1.7) but is inherently dangerous.  In fact, the very reason the Israelites of Ancient History were removed from the Promised Land for so many centuries is because time and time and time again, she moved away from God.  Though God time and time again sent his messengers to warn the Israelites (as he has sent out his messengers to warn the world we live in today), the Israelites time and time again ignored the messenger, or killed them in order to silence them.  It has been a pattern down through the years.  A nation rises.  For a time, that nation listens to God.  Then, after awhile, the message of the Gospel, the message of the need for salvation becomes loathsome, in so much that the messengers and followers begin to lose their freedoms gradually leading up to those messengers and followers being killed off.  This happens especially quickly when nations whose youths become totally desensitized to blood, gore, violence, and all other forms of debauchery.

 

That will NEVER Happen in <Insert Nation Here>!

In nations around the world that have freedoms listed in their constitutions, this desensitization, this callousness towards not only God but his followers and his message, is growing in heavy proportions.  It is of an interesting note that the US is the #1 exporter of Movies and TV Programs in the world today.  Nobody watches more movies than American movies.  In the past movies that had any kind of violence were usually sanitized, with very little blood being shown.  In movies where a person was shot, he or she usually just fell down, no bullet hole or blood being visible.  Things started to change in 1960 with the production and release of the Alfred Hitchcock film, Psycho – a movie which has become very famous for its “shower scene”.  In this movie, a deranged hotel owner-operator is drawn sexually to a woman and then, in a bloody scene, murders her while she is taking a shower.  Along the way, the main antagonist, Norman Bates, murders several others before being arrested by the police.  Since this time in, movies began to become ever more and more violent and graphic in its portrayal.  Movies such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the Friday the Thirteenth Series, the Halloween Series, the Robocop Series, the Alien Series, all the way up to the Saw Series, moves of every genre, especially Science Fiction, Action, and Horror-Thriller, have become increasingly more and more violent.  What’s worse, many of the horror movies made in the 1970s and `80s – such as Halloween, Friday the Thirteenth, My Bloody Valentine, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – are being remade with even more grotesque, grisly, and graphic violence thrown in.  Such levels of graphic violence are also beginning to show up on television.  Television shows such as the animation South Park regularly show death and violence on a regular basis, with little regard given to life.  Even sports presentations such Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) regularly show competitors and fighters beating each other to a bloody pulp.  Video games, as well, are teeming with violent and violence-oriented games, where players use any number of weapons to destroy the competition, be it virtual or real-life across the internet by way of a PC.  Even popular music is not immune, with rock, rap, and other music genres more and more intensely and graphically speaking of violence towards police officers, elected officials, even women and children.  There is even a newer music genre aptly called “Death Metal”!  Need anymore be said? It can, does, will…and is…happening in any and every nation today that rejects God.

 

Not a New Phenomenon

This is not a new thing just for the 21st century.  Two thousand years ago, the Ancient Roman Empire also had a similar problem with violence.  Where modern society has any number of avenues showing violence and death, the Romans got theirs in real life by way of the games: gladiatorial contests pitting two fighters against one another, the victor living to fight another day, the loser dying in a painful, bloody, violent fashion.  During these gladiatorial contests, criminals were regularly put to death by any number of ways, including being fed to wild beasts, crucified (and sometimes burned at the same time), or run down by a pack of wild dogs.  Eventually, these “criminals” came to include people who merely chose to follow one of the newer religions within the Roman Empire called “Christianity”.  Even before the times of the Romans and after them, empires, kingdoms, and nations regularly used public violence in one form or another not just for the punishment of the lawless, but also for the entertainment of society.  The Aztecs and Mayans of Central and Southern Mexico carried out gruesome human sacrifices to appease their gods.  Arabians for centuries before the arrival of Mohammad and Islam regularly undertook public punishment and execution for those who chose to break the law.  Even in the Old West in the USA in the 19oos, public hangings and other forms of execution were regularly attended by all citizens of whatever town in which the executions were being carried out, and the “high noon” style gunfight, while clearing the streets, were also regularly watched by people who could find a safe enough spot in which to view them. 

 

Intense, Grisly Scenes

The problem with today’s violence is the intensity and the gruesomeness with which it is being portrayed in the media.  Never before have movies been so bent on portraying violence and death.  The Saw series (with the sixth movie in the series being released on or around Halloween) is the epitome of the depth of human depravity being portrayed on the big screen.  This ground-breaking series has led to the remaking of 1970s and `80s movies which, in their time, were already quite gruesome.  It isn’t enough nowadays for a victim to merely be frightened and die, but that victim has to undergo some horrid torture by some insane maniac who appears to be impervious to the emotions and suffering of the victims.  Even in war movies, the “reality” of combat – for some reason beyond the grasp of this writer – must be portrayed.  Saving Private Ryan, starring Tom Hanks and Matt Damon, and directed by Steven Spielberg, was just as groundbreaking in its portrayal of combat violence as the Saw series has been in its portrayal of horror violence.  The same can be said for Gladiator, starring Russell Crowe, for historical drama, especially movies dealing with the Roman Empire.  Further, the movie Robocop – the first of the series – was so graphic in its violence that the ratings board for the movie industry nearly gave it an NC-17 rating, not for any sexual content, but for its violence.  The startling thing is that Robocop – released nearly twenty years ago – would, by today’s standards, possibly receive merely a “PG-13” rating at the worst (and Robocop is also set for a remake, to be released within the next year or so).  We see in the Bible a clear warning:

 

“He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity:  he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword…”

– Revelation 13.10

 

“…for all that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”

– Matthew 26.52

 

But Isn’t the Bible Full of Violence?

If even a brief, superficial survey of the Bible is undertaken, it is soon easy to see that violence is depicted and described, even in rather grisly fashion.  Stories of men being hacked to pieces with a sword, men being beheaded, cities ravaged with women and children killed are easily seen in the Bible, most often in the Old Testament.  With all the stories of such, it would be rather easy to conclude that God is some horrible ogre, ready in an instant to have some unbeliever stricken dead at the first crossing of His Law.  However, digging a little deeper into the Bible, we see a picture of God that is quite different than what modern critics would charge.  We must realize, first and foremost, that God is not a proponent of death:

 

“The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish.”

– 2nd Peter 3.9

 

“‘Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die?’’ saith the Lord God:  ‘and not that he should return from his ways, and live?’”

– Ezekiel 18.23

 

“‘For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth,’ saith the Lord God:  ‘wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye.’”

– Ezekiel 18.32

 

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.  For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.”

– John 3.16-17

 

“There were present at that season some that told him of the Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.  And Jesus answering said unto them, ‘Suppose ye that these Galileans were sinners above all the Galileans, because they suffered such things?  I tell you, “Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.”  Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all in Jerusalem?  I tell you, “Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.”’”

– Luke 13.1-5

 

We need to understand that God is not a God of violence, and he does not approve of death and destruction.  As the verses above explain, violence is portrayed in the Bible for our example.  As the verses from Luke 13 state, violence in the Bible is set for us as a warning.  We need to understand something, and we need it drilled into our collective psyche and burned into our communal conscience:

 

GOD HATES SIN

 

There are no two ways about this fact.  God hates sin.  He hates sin so much that he came down, in the form of Jesus Christ, and died rather than have people go through the pain and suffering of sin and eternal death.  The violence that we see in the Bible comes about and came about as a direct result of sin and people continuing to live therein.  God hates in, and he will judge sin.  That is the reason violence is portrayed in the Bible:  it is set as a warning to us of the magnitude of the consequences of sin, and is, in a way, a mere, tiny example of the violence that will be the Lake of Fire, or, the Second Death.  The Bible even speaks to the Israelites and to the New Testament Believers to teach children and young ones the dangers of sin, the gravity of the commission of sin, and the consequences of living a sinful life.

 

The Bottom Line – It Will Only Get Worse Before It Gets Better

There is only one reason, and one reason alone that violence continues in media and continues to get worse and worse year-by-year:  there will come a day in the “civilized”, Western world when people will be publicly put to death merely for naming the Name of Jesus Christ, and allying with him as Lord and Saviour.  Revelation, Daniel, and other books in the Bible speak of a coming time when Believers and Followers of Jesus Christ will be slaughtered publicly just because they choose to live for Jesus Christ.  Jesus himself states in the Gospels that people will think that they are doing God a service for destroying his followers, and such an example is given to us in the Book of Acts by way of Paul before he turned and came to Christ as Lord and Savior.  Before the Damascus Road revelation, Paul – thinking he was doing God a favour – persecuted, imprisoned, destroyed, and had executed believers.  Such a time is coming for the rest of the world.  It may not come exactly as happened in Ancient Rome, with Christians being used for lamps by Caesar Nero, or used as food for the lions and tigers of the arena, but it is coming, of that you, reader, can be sure.  This desensitization towards violence, the portrayal of grisly and grotesque death, and the production of movies, TV shows, and video games which shed buckets of blood is for this process.  These are tools of the Devil, and he is making as much use of them as he can before his time comes.  Violence, its portrayal in Television, Movies, Video Games, and other media outlets will get far, far worse before it gets better.

 

Conclusion – How’s Your Spiritual Diet?

Are you day and night watching movies, TV shows, or DVDs and videos that portray violence?  Do you listen to music that calls for killing of police officers, or describes rape or murder?  Friends, you may think that this doesn’t affect you, but that is the trick of the Devil with regards to this.  Though you may think it is harmless fun or innocent entertainment, the truth of the matter is that it is gradually eroding your sense of what is good and right.  In essence, your conscience is being seared away with every portrayal, every scene, and every description of violence.  The Devil wants you to think that all of it is harmless fun and innocent entertainment, but the truth is, it is like being bitten by a snake:   that poison will eventually reach your heart, killing your spirit and conscience just as surely as a snake’s poison will eventually kill the physical body.  The remedy?  Throw away those movies, those videos, those games, and that music that speaks of barbarous violence, bloodshed, and death, and fill it with the presence of the Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.  There is no other way.

 

Prayer – Father in Heaven, hallowed be Thy Holy Name!  We come today to Thee, O Lord, and we ask for your help in defeating the violence and destruction that is so pervasive in today’s world.  Give us, O Lord, the ability, the strength, and, most importantly, the desire, to turn away from the things that would so easily destroy us from the inside out.  Help us, Lord, with your Spirit of Discernment, to make good choices when seeking entertainment from today’s media.  Help us, Lord, to keep our eyes and our hearts on things above, as your Word declares.  We ask all of this in the Precious, Awesome, Name above All Names, Name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

 

Verse for the Day:

“The Lord is…not willing that any should perish.”

– 2nd Peter 3.9

 

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