Darrow Miller and Friends

Enslaved to Our Screens

Our screens are hurting us.

Last week, I read an article and was sent a link to a YouTube video, both of which addressed the same problem. Both are prophetic statements about the times we live in.

The article (“The Crisis of Biblical Illiteracy and What We Can Do About It” by Kenneth Berding) appeared in Biola Magazine. Here’s the pertinent part:

In 1986, Neil Postman published an influential cultural essay titled “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” He argued that personal freedoms would disappear not when totalitarian government imposed oppression from the outside (like George Orwell pictured in his book 1984), but rather when people came “to love their oppression, to adore technologies that undo their capacities to think” (like Aldous Huxley depicted in Brave New World). Postman wrote:

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture…”

As Huxley noted in a later book (mentioned by Postman), we have “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distraction.”

Here’s the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ut7IdSovP_E&rel=0

What can you do today, or this week, to push back against the cultural tyranny of the multiple screens in your life?

– Scott Allen

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About 
Scott Allen serves as president of the DNA secretariat office. After serving with Food for the Hungry for 19 years in both the United States and Japan, working in the areas of human resources, staff training and program management, he teamed up with Darrow Miller and Bob Moffitt to launch the DNA in 2008. Scott is the author of Beyond the Sacred-Secular Divide: A Call to Wholistic Life and Ministry and co-author of several books including, As the Family Goes, So Goes the Nation: Principles and Practices for Building Healthy Families. His most recent book is Why Social Justice is Not Biblical Justice. Scott lives with his wife, Kim, in Bend, OR. They have five children.

4 Comments

  1. Mike Soderling

    September 8, 2014 - 8:43 am

    Scott. I don’t see a video embedded. Very relevant points though. What causes even more concern for me is that this volume of info is becoming more readily available in underdeveloped countries even in remote places. (in Guatemala where I served for 11 years it wasn’t uncommon to see internet cafe’s and TV screen’s showing telenovelas all day in very remote places) But what scares me is that the youth in such countries are accessing massive amounts of false info and they have no truth filter that has been developed in their minds. Not that access to info is bad but that with the poor way in which most are educated in underdeveloped countries they have no way of discerning what is truth and what is not. Satan is using this to continue spreading his lies in very fragile locations.

  2. Mike Soderling

    September 8, 2014 - 8:44 am

    sorry, now the video appears!

    • admin

      September 8, 2014 - 10:10 am

      Good, thanks for letting us know.

      Gary Brumbelow

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