Lesa McMahon-Lowe

All of this talk about the TV being "evil" got me thinking about how people
project their feelings onto inanimate objects and give those objects power
over their lives. Can objects really *BE* "evil"?

I then was WATCHING TV last night and stumbled across a show that I had been
looking forward to seeing called "Most Evil" (on the Discovery Channel).
There is a criminologist who ranks killers on a scale from 1 to 22 (22 being
the most evil and disturbed). The first show was about couple killers
(Partners in Crime), where a few of them were dominate men who dominated the
female and in turn the female committed acts to help her partner commit
violent heinous sex crimes and murder.

They go to a point in the show where they talked about the "shock box" that
someone (I'm sorry I don't have the facts on who, I didn't write it down at
the time) built after the Holocaust and one of the high ranking officers
said in his war crimes trial that he was "just doing what he was told." He
wanted to see just how far people would go when they were just doing what
they were told.

So he brings in people to do this experiment. One as being the teacher and
one the student. What the teacher doesn't realize is that the shock box is
fake and that the student is an actor. The teacher is then instructed to
ask the student to respond to a series of questions and each time the
student gets them wrong they are to push a button that sends a shock to the
student (the teacher cannot see the student, he can only hear him). Each
wrong answer brings a higher shock level. The shock levels range from a few
volts up to a deadly 345 volts.

The man expected less than 1% of the people brought in to be teachers to
actually go all the way to the end and administer 345 volts. The actual %
that went to the end was 65%! There were quite a few people that questioned
going so far but were told to keep going. They were told that they wouldn't
be held responsible for their actions. That it wouldn't be their fault. A
quote that this man made after the experiment was "If you want to see the
face of evil, look in the mirror."

So, can *objects* actually be evil? Money, TV, jewelry, tattoos, piercings,
movies, music, etc... I DON'T think so. I really believe we project onto
those things our fears and issues and let them take control over our lives.
We choose to make them evil, they are not evil in and of themselves.



Lesa
http://lifeacademy.homeschooljournal.net
-------Original Message-------

From: Sandra Dodd
Date: 08/11/06 09:35:18
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [AlwaysLearning] Re: TV????

From an article called Hide Your Books
http://www.waldorfhomeschoolers.com/hidebooks.htm

Seems that TV is only an idol to be worshipped when people want to
use that image to control people. A Christian site personifies TV as
something evil with a gun to your kid's face. A Waldorf site links
an article that refers to it as "the almighty screen."

That is propaganda. It's fear with a boogeyman. It's not child-
centered. It's control-centered, and fear-mongering.

And on a lighter note, her "there was no end to the time..." would be
a candidate for the "If I Let them" page http://sandradodd.com/ifilet
if she weren't a teacher in the business of controlling kids who
aren't even her own.

Sandra


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