Ingesting Pollution

From the book City of God 2:7-8 “...Were it not a more suitable education, and more likely to prompt the youth to virtue, if they heard public recitals of the laws of the gods, instead of the vain laudation of the customs and laws of their ancestors?...What man is there who is not more likely to adopt, for the regulation of his own life, the examples that are represented in plays which have a divine sanction, rather than the precepts written and promulgated with no more than human authority?...”.

We must be cautious about what we feed our senses. Society is built on the back of the example of others and stories shared and celebrated, religious or otherwise. The Church used to have a list of banned books, not because it wanted to control us, but because it recognized our weakness in discerning what was ok to ingest and what wasn’t. Under the banner of freedom and the delusion that because we are “mature adults” we can ingest ideas and images through entertainment that we can consciously choose whether or not to allow to participate in our formation, we allow ourselves unrestricted access to pollution. This idea is a lie.

Our eyes, ears, and mind are mouths and stomachs, respectively. Mindless entertainment is worse than obviously corrupting material because many of us will avoid obvious corruption because we recognize it corrupts us, but we do not likewise see that mindlessness makes us mindless. Augustine saw the source of corruption that brought down, in part, the Roman Empire, and it was tame compared to what children and adults alike are exposed to, ingest, and assimilate into their being, in our time. Seems inevitable that the result will be the same, if not worse.

Human-Written, AI Spell-Checked 3/9/21 AD

Image from thelogicalindian.com