Welcome Alphonsus Jr.

It seems like a good group. Many thanks to all. 

Welcome to the Saints forum, Alphonsus Jr! 

Many thanks, Patricia. 

Welcome to the forums Alphonsus, Jr.! What a fine name you have there.

Whenever I think of Alphonsus, I think 'Maria'.

I hope you have a great time here and enjoy talking about the inspirations of the saints. This place is a little quieter than some, a little slower pace, but we have our daily cup of coffee and prayers and some holy folks here that can truly bring one a feeling of peace of soul rather than the temporary thrill of conflicts that so often occur elsewhere. I think you'll truly find it a fine place.

There're some restrictions on links and some positive encouragements towards virtue in conversation in the announcements I always remind new folks to read.

I'm very glad to hear what you have to say about giving up television.

We truly need more folks to get the message out there on it. What an artificial life technology creates.. and the more artificial it is the more it separates us from living the life God designed for us.. The natural family, the natural Christian life, the natural Christian society.. recovering that is a goal we all have to seek so we can live the truly good life. 

Many thanks. I look forward to peaceful and holy discussions.

I would also recommend St. Louis de Montfort's hymn, "The Wisdom of Silence."

Greetings to all. I'm very pleased to have found this forum and particularly this thread, as I'm fully convinced that television is among the most toxic of all inventions. It was this conviction that led me to read Neil Postman's devastating critique of television, called Amusing Ourselves to Death. Here's an excerpt:

There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than this: that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre. For the loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have been changed. Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now all but complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge, and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane. And if some of our institutions seem not to fit the template of the times, why it is they, and not the template, that seem to us disordered and strange....Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the [impurity], and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

Of those of you in this thread who decided to give up tv, have you since held to this renunciation?

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