Hollywood, the music industry, gaming, spectator sports, advertising, e-relationships, and pornography are saturating the lives of God’s professed people. But what does the latest science say about the mind-altering effects of 21st century media? And what is the spiritual agenda in the entertainment and advertising industries?

<p>Hollywood, the music industry, gaming, spectator sports, advertising, e-relationships, and pornography are saturating the lives of God’s professed people. But what does the latest science say about the mind-altering effects of 21st century media? And what is the spiritual agenda in the entertainment and advertising industries?</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Belt of Truth Ministries

Scott Ritsema

Media on the Brain - Mini-seminar

Father in heaven, we thank you so much for the privilege of being sons and daughters of the king.

You are our creator and lord that thought just humbles us.

We pray that we would surrender and submit our thoughts, our opinions, our preferences to your will.

We pray that we would have ears to hear your voice in this area of media so that you can speak into our lives, convict us, and lead us along your path, we pray.

Welcome to the Media on the Brain seminar.

As you can see on the graphic, we're looking at a topic that is quite vast.

Everything from TV and movies to video gaming, spectator sports, advertising, social networking, texting, even pornography, the music industry, Madison Avenue, you name it.

It's the new reality in the 21st century, media and entertainment.

So we have to ask ourselves some tough questions.

What does the latest scientific information say about the mind-altering effects of these media?

And what is the spiritual agenda in the entertainment industry and the advertising industry?

We're going to cover all of that in just bits and pieces this evening.

This is an abbreviated format of the full 7 plus hour seminar.

We're going to hit some of the highlights this evening, but before we get any further, I should mention, this is an image of my family.

I'm a teacher, and my story, I guess, is very media heavy.

When I was a young person I grew up in a family where we had a lot of media.

I watched TV, played video games most of my childhood and really that isn't all that abnormal in America today.

But something unique is this has been in my DNA, in my blood.

If you look back in generations past, my grandfather was actually in the 1950s 1 of the pioneers of bringing television to the masses in America.

He was a salesman bringing Zenith televisions to us.

As I progressed on into high school, I got involved in a pop punk band.

Me and my friends, every manner of immorality in that area.

And then in college, it was all about music to me.

Download that latest song off of Napster, back when it was free, and get the newest band, the latest songs from that band bootlegged, or I've got to get the new speakers for my car just always upping the ante in this trap, this media trap.

On into the 2000s, my wife and I, we didn't find much else other than going to a movie or renting a movie as dates for our marriage.

And so media has been a big part of my life and I confess I am a recovering media addict.

The Lord has pulled me out of a lot of that media and entertainment world and I found a more balanced way to interact with media in our generation And we want to talk about that a little bit today, but first I want to ask, is it possible that media is the greatest stumbling block, spiritually speaking, in America today?

And as I've traveled around doing this seminar, the Media on the Brain seminar, at churches, at schools, for parent meetings, teacher conventions, family camps, you name it.

What has spoken to me strongly is the families and the stories of individuals, of children, of adults, people who just can't stop doing the things that they are doing in the area of media.

But it's not just anecdotally speaking, and it's not just from my experience.

He is obviously the most widely known and respected name in polling in the church today.

Had a chance to meet George Barna, actually, and share our material with him.

He said, Scott, media exposure has become America's most widespread and serious addiction.

He said, well, what we did was we took the seven-question survey of the American Psychiatric Association that's used by psychiatrists to diagnose an addiction.

And we just did polling with those questions and the majority of Americans qualified as having an addiction to media.

More Americans are addicted to media than any other thing.

It's not George Barnard just spewing some rhetoric.

He says what our research has found is that this is the most serious.

If we look at the entertainment numbers, the average child aged 2 to 5 is consuming 32 hours of TV a week.

The average kid aged 8 to 18 is spending 5 hours per day on TV.

When you look at video gaming, this is where it gets really serious, there are 19 million, according to the American Medical Association, video game addicts.

We're talking the latest version of the Diagnostics and Statistics Manual, the DSM-5, which was just published, just a couple of months ago in 2013.

The latest edition of the Psychology Bible, as they call it, lists video gaming, finally, as an addiction.

And the American Medical Association says there are 19 million addicted.

Do you know how many alcoholics there are in America?

Now we make a big deal because 12 million people addicted to alcohol is kind of a big deal, but gaming is an even bigger problem and addiction in America.

There are 5 million gamers that are playing over 40 hours per week and the average child is spending 10, 000 hours behind a video game console or computer by the age of 21.

Moving beyond gaming, if we look at music, we're looking at 2 and a half hours of music for the average kid on top of all these things, and the average teen is texting over 3, 300 texts per month.

Last of all, if you look at the average college-age boy, we're looking at 8 hours per week, on average, viewing televised spectator sports.

Now I don't think all college-aged young men are viewing it.

Maybe half of them are viewing the sports on TV, and so the average spectator sports viewing college student is then viewing 16 hours per week.

This is, these are serious and sobering numbers.

In fact, the average screen time for the American child today is 8 hours a day.

So if you think about sleep for 8 hours, go to school or work for 8 hours, and screens for 8 hours, there's your 24-hour time period.

Is this the abundant life Jesus came to give to us?

By the way, as you look at these statistics, I want to give you 2 rules of thumb.

1, in this abbreviated presentation, if I mention something, you can bank on the fact that in the full 6 DVD seminar that there's more information on that 1 topic that I'm mentioning briefly in passing.

Another rule of thumb is I always find, 100% of the time that I've done further digging into things I've found that I that I actually had understated the case So if you think oh, he's exaggerating he's making big big deal out of things.

No, I always am understating the case It's always worse than what I say Unfortunately, That's what I found again and again.

And this is why my wife and I, this media madness, is the reason my wife and I founded Belt of Truth Ministries and we began with the Media on the Brain seminar, because this is the greatest stumbling block to us.

I want to actually talk about child rearing and principles for raising our children in a more healthy and productive way, other than having the television raise the children.

So we worked on a seminar called Raising the Remnant, also utilizing some of George Barna's research.

Interestingly, Barna went out in search of all of the spiritually strong young adults in America, not the typical churchgoers, but the people who are really living their faith.

He asked them how they were raised, did surveys and interviews.

Then he talked to their parents, got the same story from both, and he has painted a portrait of what successful Christian parenting looks like.

We report on that in this DVD Raising the Remnant, but also what we do is we go back and look at traditional 19th century parenting advice and we find out, wow, we knew this all along.

All the principles for successful Christian parenting have been in our hands from the Bible and from traditional Writers from the times past that we've seemed to lost the wisdom.

We have lost the wisdom from those times Here of course is the DVD set I'd be very irresponsible to not mention to you how you can get the rest of the information.

We're only covering just a little over an hour today, just bits and pieces of the full 6 DVD seminar, Media on the Brain.

In disc 1 you'll find it's conformed or transformed TV the brain in the science of salvation we're gonna talk a little bit about that this evening just disc to be a by beholding we become slaves to the high priests of a new religious order will also talk a little bit about that this evening.

The topic is just so big, takes such amount of time to really develop it that I'm leaving that aside.

You can view it on the DVDs, but disc 3 is the spirit of the music industry, how 1 man transformed American culture.

Disc 4, musical manipulation, how Satan will use music to deceive the last day masses.

Back to Menu

Media on the Brain - Mini-seminar

Transcript

Description

Sponsor

Recorded

Sound Doctrine