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

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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

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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==