PROPAGANDA

Over the past two nights I have watched The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded. Tonight I will finish the trilogy with The Matrix Revolution. I've seen these movies several times since they first came out. These movies are so good. They also have served an important purpose in my life and awakening. This story has been a visual of some of the things that have been going on in my life over the past 20 years when myself, my wife and a number of other families stepped outside the organized religious system at the leading of the Holy Spirit. It was the beginning of my awakening to the dominating control that the world system uses to move the polis in the way these systems what the polis to move.

I am not sharing this in an attempt to convince anyone of anything. As Morpheus says in the movie...."You can't tell someone what the Matrix is. They must see it for them self."

As we watched Reloaded last night, the power of propaganda was just so evident. The system employs it in such a covert way........just like the air we breathe, we are shaped by it without even noticing it. The truth becomes difficult at best to find because the information the system gives us creates many illusions that then shape our beliefs and they become the reality we live by. We are controlled at this point and we certainly are not free.

Awakening to how these systems control us is so important when it comes to living free. They are powerful forces and the environment we live in is saturated by them. But we don't have to be. Jesus made a way for us to live as he lived in this world. Unaffected by the temptation to grab the "power" these systems offer. Jesus was the first real human that wasn't shaped by these forces in any way, shape, or form. The ememy, in charge of these powers, offered them to Jesus in the desert and Jesus just wasn't phased by the offer. He trusted his father and he knew where real life (reality) resided.

One of the last things he asks his father for us, is that he would send us into the world in the same way he was in the world. That we would be in it.....but not of it.

I for one have found it important to pray for understanding as to how the world system, made up of the economic....political...religious...social...educational and I am sure there are others, have affected me. Mark 4:19 comes to mind:http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark%204:19;&version=49

I want to live free in Christ.

Propaganda

1. publicity to promote something: information put out by an organization or government to promote a policy, idea, or cause

2. misleading publicity: deceptive or distorted information that is systematically spread

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Jacques Ellul quotes:

“Propaganda proceeds by psychological manipulations, character modifications, by creation of stereotypes useful when the time comes - The two great routes that this sub-propaganda takes are the conditioned reflex and the myth”

“The goal of modern propaganda is no longer to transform opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief”

"It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale"

"Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity. "

"The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment."

"Thinking has become a superfluous exercise... purely internal, without compelling force, more or less a game."

I will end with this from the movie The Matrix

Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.