Christopher Laurence Examines – Watch Your Profanity

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

Christopher Laurence Examines – Watch Your Profanity

 Let’s do an experiment, I’m curious about something. Raise your hand if you turn off a TV show, movie, YouTube video, podcast, etc, as soon as you hear the Lord’s name taken in vain. If you have your hand up I commend you. If you don’t, ask yourself why. Not metaphorically. Really ask yourself why. What stops you from just shutting something down if you hear blasphemy? I’m not going to impose a reason on you, and I’m not going to judge. Is it because you’re so addicted to that show; that YouTube series; the films in that “Cinematic Universe”; that bumping song? Maybe you just hadn’t thought about it.

I’ll give you a personal anecdote. I used to listen obsessively to a particular podcast. It was one of the funniest things I’d ever heard up to that point. There were hundreds of hours of it, and I’d listened to all of them over and over, more times than I could count. I used to fall asleep to it every night, that was how familiar it became. But as time went on and I kept striving to advance in the spiritual life, something about it began to unnerve me. One of the hosts used the Lord’s name in vain. A lot. As an expletive, a reaction, to punctuate a thought, etc. When I first became consciously aware of it, I didn’t like it, but I didn’t think about it much. I kept listening, because I liked this show so darn much. There was nothing else like it. It made me howl with laughter, and it was a comfortable old friend. But at some point I listened to a talk by a good and traditional priest (guess who) about blasphemy. And I learned that even saying “Oh my —” was a form of taking the Lord’s name in vain. Well, then and there I was convicted. I stopped listening to that podcast. It wasn’t easy. Part of me wanted to keep listening. Part of me still wants to, sometimes. But my rejection of it — and of all things which contain blasphemy — is twofold:

1) Taking the Lord’s name in vain is a sin. Pure and simple. I know someone might say yeah, but I wasn’t doing it. Sure. But I was listening to it, participating in it, tacitly supporting it. By turning a deaf ear to such blasphemy I am at fault, no question.

2) Why would I want to support or engage with the work of people who would casually use the Lord’s name in a derogatory manner, anyway? They hate me as they hate Him (and they most certainly hate Him).

Making a conscious choice to disregard hearing the Lord’s name taken in vain is spiritually damaging. If you are doing so regularly, it is likely that you are largely desensitized to it. This is exactly what they want. Think for a minute if it seems like the frequency with which the Lord (or His Mother, or the Saints, etc.) is profaned in pieces of entertainment has increased. I’ll tell you: it has (some has even found its way into a series about Christ. But that’s another article..).

Before you ask; yes, it was deliberate. At least in the US. In a long-faithless country like England, the Lord’s name as an exclamation is more ingrained in the popular culture, and has unfortunately been commonplace for quite a while. But here in America, not long ago, it was very rare (and surprisingly forbidden) to use blasphemy on television, or in film if the producers wanted a certain rating. Now, that has largely gone out the window. Or I should say it has been thrown out the window, along with nearly every other form of decency. The elites, who hate God, decided to increase the irreverent, offensive use of His name and the names of all things sacred, in order to further decrease the reverence due to Him in the collective subconscious of the nation. Clearly, and sadly, it has worked. It was not all that long ago that polite society would have never stood for such a thing. Or for the many other depravities which have accompanied it (depictions and normalization of every lewd and degenerate thing which is imaginable, and some which aren’t).

There is a principle, called the Principle of the Integral Good, which, among other things, can help us to know whether or not a piece of media is morally acceptable. For the purpose of this short article, I will mention one specific aspect in very simple terms: any media which contains a real occurrence of something inherently evil, violates the principle. In other words, one may watch a movie in which a murder is depicted (provided it supplies something which is necessary to the story, and is not shown simply for perverse, sadistic enjoyment) since we know this murder was faked for the film. Blasphemy, however, is an inherent evil which cannot be faked. Either one utters the name of the Lord irreverently or one does not. And increasingly we are seeing a predominance of media which does so openly.

As with much of the errors and evils now accepted in our society, we have gotten where we are through the slow, frog-boiling effect that I’ve mentioned in other articles. It’s time for us to feel the heat and hop out of the pot. So, I encourage you to do several things: if you are watching something, or listening to something, or playing a game, and blasphemy is employed, turn it off. It isn’t worth offending God for a couple of hours of entertainment. You can do better. And, secondly, try to gradually work on removing phrases from your lexicon which are what I would call “blasphemy lite” – such as O.M.G., and “Oh my goodness” (since God is all goodness), and others. You’ll find that even this will contribute to your growth in the spiritual life, increase your willpower, give you greater control over what you consume, and lessen the hold these evil, subversive elites have over you, which they have no right to.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]