Culture
Clips —
January 3, 2007
Hollywood
’s Four-Letter
Word: God
Atheist
activist Sam Harris recently proclaimed on National Public Radio
that America needed a lot more
mockery of religious belief. "I think the criticism
of irrationality just has to come from 100 sides all at once,”
he declared. “In the entertainment community, maybe you'll just
have people making jokes that are funny enough and true enough
so as to put religious certainty in a bad light."
Harris
said he’s been trying hard to make contacts among the mind-benders
in the news and entertainment media to find those God-scorning
people who feel “a profound sense of relief that comes with hearing
somebody call a spade a spade.”
Why
does taxpayer-funded NPR, or anyone else for that matter, care
what atheists like Sam Harris think? They are squarely in opposition
to public opinion. According to a recent Zogby/American Bible
Society poll, 84 percent of adults are not offended when they
hear references to God or the Bible on network television shows,
and 51 percent say entertainment networks should develop shows
with positive messages — and even specifically refer to God and
the Bible.
So
who is paying attention to Sam Harris? The entertainment television
industry.
After
Mel Gibson’s The Passion box office tsunami two years ago,
the conventional wisdom had it that Hollywood finally had accepted the marketability of faith-based programming.
Not so. The Parents Television Council has completed its seventh
study of the treatment of religion on prime-time network television,
evaluating TV shows during the 2005-2006 season, and the numbers
are stunning. From a quantitative standpoint, the total number
of treatments of religion has been reduced by 50 percent in the
past year alone. And when religion is part of the storyline, more
often than not it is not a positive thing: television today regularly
mocks the clergy, religious laity, church doctrines and religious
institutions.
Brent
Bozell
Parents
Television Council
http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/lbbcolumns/2006/1228.asp
--
Come Back, Little Babies
"The
single most important fact about the early 21st century,"
writes Mark Steyn in America Alone: The End of the World as
We Know It, a doomsday book to spook any New Year's celebration,
"is the rapid aging of almost every developed nation other
than the United States. Canada,
Europe and Japan are getting old fast,
older than any functioning society has ever been and faster than
any has ever aged."
The
birth dearth is real, and there are many reasons for it. In the
United States we're replacing
ourselves at an average rate of 2.1 births per mother, and large
families are increasingly rare. Many women who waited to have
their children well into their 30s are disappointed to learn that
older women often get pregnant only with difficulty. Working women
complain that it's hard to juggle a career and child care and
good day care is difficult to find. In the large families of yesteryear,
the older kids helped.
My
extended family tells the modern American story. My mother had
six siblings, my father seven. My husband and I have three children;
two of my adult children have two. The family has shrunk.
Personal
tax exemptions are generous, but not enough to inspire large families.
In 2006, a married couple with three young children could qualify
for a total exemption of $16,500, based on $3,300 for each parent
and child. That can't cover the cost of raising children and saving
for college, but once upon a time we usually didn't decide how
many children to have by merely calculating the costs. In an adult-centered
society, we do.
Suzanne
Fields
Jewish World Review
--
Holocaust Denial Goes Beyond Dangerous
A
recent Los Angeles Times editorial headline was
dangerously understated. It read: “Holocaust denial can be dangerous.”
How about the “Holocaust denial is
dangerous”?
Paulo
Casaca, a member of the European parliament, recognizes the severity
of Holocaust denial. As the conference in Tehran
closed, he wrote to the Parliament’s secretary-general: “It was
with much disgust that I received reports on the Neo-Nazi Summit
held in Tehran ...” He continued, “As you
are aware, the Iranian regime hosted individuals and organizations
from 60 countries with the sole purpose of endorsing and reawakening
Nazism, denying the Holocaust and attacking Israel. This outrageous action
can not be ignored by the European Union and deserves the most
vehement of the protests.”
That’s more like it.
Kathyrn
Jean Lopez
National ReviewOnline
http://author.nationalreview.com/latest/?q=MjE3Mw==
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