BATMAN

BOP, BAM, BOOM...
Do you remember the old batman series from back in the 1970s? You remember when Batman would fight the villain of the week, you would never actually see him strike anyone. Instead your TV screen would be filled with a cartoon lettered:

WHAP, WHAM, SLAP...
And then when the picture returned, you would see the villain staggering from the powerful blow that was dealt him by the caped crusader. Now I'm not much to say, "I miss the good old days," but man the other night on CNN I watched a man get executed in the streets of Baghdad. Of course, they were gracious enough to darken the screen for the actual shooting, but they didn't dampen the sound one bit.

POW, BANG, KA-BOOM...
Why does our society have to be so "in-your-face"? Why do we have to continually push the envelope to shock people more and more? What's gained from it all, other than a generation of desensitized kids and higher levels of violence? Now, don't get me wrong, I know the other side of the story. I know the counter arguments here: "We're just trying to show people the gravity of the situation," or "You're responsible for censoring your own TV watching." And while there may be a kernal of truth at the center of those arguments, I think we've pushed too far. I think we need to set new standards and regain a modicum of decency and decorm that we once had.

You know it's funny, being a follower of Christ is a lot like raising the standards of society. Christ followers don't just wake up one day and decide to be holy and pious. They don't go from bar boozer to altar boy over night. It's a gradual process of the Holy Spirit working on you, changing you little by little, making you more like Christ. People get turned off by the whole Christianity thing because they don't want to give up the smokes and the beers and the poker and the parties, but they don't realize that after a while God has worked on them enough that they don't have any desire for those things anyway. They fear whatever is happening behind those big letters. The Alpha and the Omega can be scary, but after a while, you learn that it's actually comforting.

You know, I miss Batman. And more importantly, I miss the standards that Batman brought to my TV. AMEN