Chapter 5 in the book in the book The Blinding of America, is titled Flat Screens. At first glance, flat screens might sound like a weird title for a chapter in a Christian book. What is this guy thinking? I chose this title as everyone’s life is dominated by a flat screen. A flat screen is any electronic medium showing you a video, or motion picture, providing social media, or any screen you spend time watching, such as televisions, computers, iPads, wrist watches, and smartphones.
Flat screens are the dominant method for changing people’s beliefs, society, and culture today. As I said, people spend as many as 10 to 12 hours a day on a flat screen of some size or shape. The younger generations never let their smartphone leave their side 24/7. Flat-screen use is addicting, just like drugs or alcohol. At first glance, you would believe that it is not possible drugs versus a flat screen! The use of flat screens causes a release of dopamine in the same area of the brain as heroin or cocaine. Dopamine is the primary neurotransmitter involved with the brain’s reward system and the feelings of pleasure. It is released into the brain when someone does something or sees something that warrants a reward, a pleasure response, or even when someone anticipates a reward. The rewards include behaviors such as drug or alcohol abuse or sex. The rush of dopamine experienced when using cocaine and other drugs causes the euphoria people feel, contributing to their addiction. Flat-screen activity can release dopamine into the brain, just like drug addiction. The brain becomes addicted to the flat screen in the same way as drug addiction. There is a new Silicone Valley fad called Dopamine Fasting. Even people in the social media business have realized what they are doing to their brains. Dr. Cameron Sepath, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, coined the term dopamine fasting. He recommends taking a break from screen viewing, such as a day or two per week. The Chinese government has decided flat screen use is not healthy for young minds. Young people can only be on their flat screens for 1 hour on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights from 8 to 9 o’clock. From the beginning, God told humankind to take one day of rest each week. We are to spend time with him, and God knows that humanity needs rest each week. It is very important to take a dopamine fast from your flat screen.
We live in a visual world. There are beautiful natural things in this world God has made, but there are images that humankind has made as well. The simplest flat screen is a single-frame image or photo. You have heard that a picture paints a thousand words. That is how much information can be present in a single image. Every day you are bombarded with thousands of single-framed images. Images like billboards on the side of the road, images on social media, single-framed images on television, images on computers and iPads, newspapers, and magazines. The first flat screens were developed to entertain you, but they have advanced way beyond their beginnings. The first photograph was developed in 1826. If you traveled back in time before photographs were invented and used a Polaroid camera to take a picture of someone and showed it to them, they would think it was witchcraft. You have stolen their soul and locked it in an image.
A friend of mine who is an ophthalmologist in the Navy got addicted to online gaming. He spent thousands of hours gaming. He nearly lost his marriage and career to his addiction. He finally broke the chains of addiction through his faith in Jesus Christ. He wrote a book on his experiences with his addiction. Flat screens are used nearly in everything in life; at work, schools, conference calls, webinars, movies, games, Facetime, reading books, remote tv, music, study aid, research, and storing information, to name a few.
New studies show that flat-screen use alters the brains of infants and young children. A study published in JAMA Pediatrics showed that increased flat screen use in children resulted in lower expressive language, decreased literacy skills, and less ability to name objects rapidly.
American Academy of Pediatrics
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The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends avoiding flat screen use in children under 24 months of age. There is a relationship between flat-screen time in children and body-mass index or obesity, less sleep per night, delays in cognition, slowing of language development, and poor social-emotional development. Flat-screen use causes physical changes in brain structure. It causes significantly lower brain white matter integrity related to language and literacy skills. The NIH is doing an extensive research project on 12,000 children in a ten-year study to get better answers about the damage from flat-screen use. Flat-screen use in children is a very harmful thing.
Let us look at flat screens and see how we got to where we are today. The first flat screen was a movie theater. The first commercially shown movie was The Arrival of the Train, shown in Paris in 1895. The movie was a very short film lasting about 1 minute of a train approaching the station. It is rumored that seeing this huge train approach them on a large screen scared everyone and caused panic in the theater. Can you imagine what would have happened if you were able to show them a Star Wars movie with its visual and sound effects? There would have been total panic. None of them would have stayed in the theater for a single second.
The first film studios were built in 1897. Before 1927, motion pictures were produced without sound. A pianist or musician sometimes accompanied the motion picture. In 1927, Warner released The Jazz Singer, which had sound in portions of the movie. Movie producers continued to develop new and better ways of entertaining people. Editing became important, so they could present things exactly as they wanted them portrayed. In 1935 Technicolor was invented, and color pictures were born. Drive-in movies became a new way of going to the movies. Film production continued to advance with the development of 3-D movies. Then Disney took movies to another experience level with 4-D movies. Disney added the sense of smell and motion of your seat to increase the experience.
Early in the development of flat-screen technology, people realized how much movies could influence people watching them. Watching flat screens has the power to control even the most intelligent people. The human mind is incredibly suspectable to the effects of watching movies, videos, and any visual media. The conscious and subconscious mind absorbs all the visual stimuli your eyes are observing. All images, even some you may not wish to remember, are stored in your brain. These images become part of your paradigm, even those you may not remember until the right circumstance brings them to life. Companies wanting to sell their products know that flat screens are the best way to entice you to buy their product.
Hitler and Stalin knew they could change people’s beliefs with the movie screen. Hitler and Stalin realized the power of movies and used the flat screen to their advantage. The first flat screen quickly became a propaganda medium to control people. Unfortunately, technology has made the flat screen more powerful as technology keeps advancing. Hitler and Stalin produced and showed their propaganda movies throughout their countries. In Stalin’s time, ninety percent of Russians could not read or write. Movies were the medium they could use to indoctrinate the masses. The Bolsheviks controlled the film industry in Russia. Movies in Russia enshrined the revolution’s ideals, calling on all workers to unite against any oppressors, celebrating Stalin as a great leader, and justifying any means necessary to protect the people. The Soviet film industry developed a uniform style known as socialist realism. The propaganda movies were shown from city to city and into the countryside by train. The movies were shown at the train stations. Russian film producers mastered the editing and sound precisely to make the audience sense panic and fear.
Hitler and the Nazis were very aware of movies’ propagandistic effects during the beginning of their rise in Germany. The National Socialist German Workers Party planned the use of cinema for propaganda in 1930. The German propaganda films developed a subconscious association of Jews with rats. This is how they got the German people to accept what they were doing to the Jews. Hitler wrote about the psychological effects of images in Mein Kompf. He wrote.
One must also remember that of itself; the multitude is mentally inert. That it remains attached to its old habits and that it is not naturally prone to read something which does not conform with its own pre-established beliefs when such writing does not contain what the multitude hopes to find there…
The picture, in all its forms, including film, has better prospects… In a much shorter time, at one stroke I might say, people will understand a pictorial presentation of something which it would take them a long time and laborious effort of reading to understand.
Joseph Goebbels was Hitler’s propaganda minister and is famous for this statement. If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will become to believe it! Another two of his statements are: It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent; its task is to lead to success! Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident that they are acting of their own free will!
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This effect was verified by a study at Temple and Villanova Universities. The study is called Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity. The Illusionary Truth Effect is a principle of psychology related to the fact that when something is repeated enough times, people will believe it’s true even if untrue. This was backed up by another study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology called Knowledge Does Not Protect Against Illusionary Truth. The Illusionary Truth Effect can change a person’s belief in the truth through frequent repetition of a false statement. You can make the truth what you want it to be!
Unfortunately, Big Tech, national news media, radical leftist governments, radical left-wing groups, and liberal teachers know this to be true and will stop at nothing to rid America of its founding principles. God is being removed from society. Just like George Orwell said in his famous book 1984. Big Brother will tell you 2 +2 = 5, and you will eventually agree.
The next flat screen to appear on the market was the television. The television brought movies, entertainment, news, and many other programs into your living room. Companies, politicians, and anyone who wants to sell you something or influence you can bring it right into your home. The first color television was developed in 1953. Fifty percent of homes had televisions by 1954, and by 1962 over 90% had televisions.
The next flat-screen sold to the public created a monumental and everlasting change in how people live their lives. The personal computer was available in 1977. By the 1990s, personal computers were small enough to be portable. In 1983, instead of naming a person of the year, Time Magazine named the computer the Machine of the year.
The internet would take connectivity and your involvement with a flat screen each day to a new level. On September 4, 1998. Google appeared on the scene. Can you imagine living without Google? In 1994. Amazon was founded and changed how people shop. In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg developed Facebook, and the beginning of social media began.
As technology advanced, flat-screen devices became smaller. Apple released the iPad in 2010. By May of 2017, Apple had sold 360 million iPads. Hitler and Stalin would salivate at being able to use the connectivity with people present today. It would be easy to corrupt the people today. Which, by the way, is what is happening? Now you can have a flat screen on your wrist. Time Magazine named the smartphone the most influential gadget of all time. The antichrist will have no problem convincing people to follow him!
The prevalence of using flat screens is one of the primary reasons for writing this book. Flat screens and social media dominate social interaction, especially for young people. Socially and culturally, technology is changing the world. It has also changed how the world relates to God and removes God from society. Unhealthy flat-screen addictions are flourishing because people do not see the consequences of their addiction to the flat screen, which is powerful beyond their imagination. Facebook, Instagram, Snap Chat, TikTok, the new metaverse, and other smartphone apps distract you from the world around you. People are living in a fantasy world. Artificial intelligence programs and apps are rapidly developing. Young men are now dating AI girlfriends. The AI programs learn all about the young man and provide nearly all his needs without the problems of developing a personal relationship with a girl. Eventually, there will be androids that will replace human relationships.
The culture today is all about me, and I want instant gratification. Americans live hectic lives with flat screens pouring out information all day long. Your smartphone is continually going off 24/7. All this stress of technology or flat screens is taking its toll on the health and well-being of people.
Personal communication through a device is now the preferred way of communication. People do not want to speak from person to person anymore. The average American looks at their smartphone 96 times a day. Americans are looking at their phones 15 billion times a day. You tap, swipe, or click your smartphone 2,617 times a day. 75% of Americans use their smartphones on the toilet. You don’t need a magazine in your bathroom anymore. The average American spends 5.4 hours a day on their smartphones, 67 days a year. Teens spend nearly 8 hours a day on a smartphone. By stimulating their brain’s limbic system or emotional center, they become addicted to its whims and fantasies. Smartphone time continues to increase each year. The increased use of flat screens begins to isolate you. Bullying has skyrocketed as it now occurs on social media. There is no personal responsibility for bullying online. This type of stimulation alters how the mind thinks, functions, and develops. This is especially true for the developing brains of our young people.
The increased use of flat screens isolates you. Americans are becoming obese because of diet, little exercise, and limited outdoor activity. People spend hours aimlessly going from one screen to the next, thinking they are in control of their lives when they are actually addicted to the flat screen. Mental disease is on the rise because of people’s flat-screen addiction. Flat-screen use can lead to obesity, dry eyes, increased stress, anxiety, depression, poor posture-related problems, and sleeplessness, to name a few.
Technology will keep advancing, and the addiction to flat screens will become more devastating. The resolution of flat screens has dramatically improved to make your viewing more vivid. There are OLED screens that are extremely thin and can be rolled and folded. You could have all four walls in your house covered with a flat screen in the near future. Hologram technology is advancing along with virtual reality systems. We will be stimulating our minds to the extent that we will never remove ourselves from our flat screens. Like in Star Trek, you will have a holodeck in your home. Knowing how sinful we are, it isn’t going to be nature programs we will be watching. I will share some facts that most of you will find shocking.
Porn sites receive more regular traffic than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined. Thirty-five percent of all downloads are porn related. The world’s largest porn site received over 42 billion site visits in 2019. The teen porn category has topped site searches for the last eight years. Girls aged 13 to 24 are the fastest-growing demographic group watching porn. The world lures people into their dark web with all kinds of temptations, and with technology, the temptations are becoming more enticing and addicting!
1 John 2:15-16 NLT
Do not love this world nor the things it offers you, for when you love the world, you do not have the love of the Father in you. For the world offers only a craving for physical pleasure, a craving for everything we see, and pride in our achievements and possessions. These are not from the Father but are from this world. And this world is fading away, along with everything that people crave. But anyone who does what pleases God will live forever.
George Marden is quoted as saying:
"Are Christians using technology to transform the world or is technology transforming Christians in unhealthy ways?"
Christianity is under attack! You cannot say anything negative about the Muslim faith, Buddhism, Hinduism, or any other religious-like entity or you will be canceled, banished, or scorned. You can say what you want in a negative manner about the Christian faith and receive no repercussions. You may even be praised or rewarded for your negative attitude. Without the basis of a Christian ethical and moral code, all societies will eventually fall from within to moral decay and chaos. Americans are bombarding their brains with negative things, sexuality, and anything that will stimulate the emotional centers of their brains. Americans are in stressful mental overload. Satan and the powers on the left are at war with America!
