Another fruit of a de-Christianizing culture I’ve noticed

A reader writes:

Ads rarely make me speechless but I’m really not sure what to say about this one. I guess they figure it’s more effective to scare people than it is to convince them of the advantages of self control. God only knows what’s next.

One of the little things I’ve noticed of late is that as our culture becomes coarser and our belief in humans as moral creatures made in the image of God fades in favor of a vision of humans as creatures shaped by heredity and environment, our faith in the power of moral suasion goes with it. We’ve seen it, of course, in the torture debates endlessly: our first, rather than last, assumption is that men must be treated like animals to get even minimual “results”. But advertising is bearing the mark too. Where there used to be PSAs which said “Every litter bit hurts” we now get “Litter and it will hurt” (something you could just as easily say to a beast via whip). “Buckle up for safety!” has been replace with with “Click-it or ticket”.

And, of course, in the ad above, the goal is to just scare the crap out of people because they are creature of appetite who cannot be expected to control their desires as rational animals made in the image of God. Instead, you do the equivalent of firing a pistol and making the sheep bolt in some general direction away from the sound. It’s to be expected, since so much sexual agitprop (and especially gay agitprop) is, in fact, all about describing the human person as nothing more than a mammal controlled by his sexual desires.

But it’s still foreign to what we actually are. However, this sort of Crowd Control State is what we can expect as we continue to abandon the Christian vision of the human person.