The TV is EVIL... What?

All of this talk about the TV being "evil" (by discussion on Always Learning group) got me thinking about how people project their feelings onto inanimate objects and give those objects power over their lives. Can objects really *BE* "evil"?

I then was WATCHING TV last night and stumbled across a show that I had been looking forward to seeing called "Most Evil" (on the Discovery Channel). There is a criminologist who ranks killers on a scale from 1 to 22 (22 being the most evil and disturbed). The first show was about couple killers (Partners in Crime), where a few of them were dominate men who dominated the female and in turn the female committed acts to help her partner commit violent heinous sex crimes and murder.

They go to a point in the show where they talked about the "shock box" Stanley Milgram (Click Here For More Information!) built after the Holocaust and one of the high ranking officers said in his war crimes trial that he was "just doing what he was told." He wanted to see just how far people would go when they were just doing what they were told.

Milgram brings in people to do this experiment. One as being the teacher and one the student. What the teacher doesn't realize is that the shock box is fake and that the student is an actor. The teacher is then instructed to ask the student to respond to a series of questions and each time the student gets them wrong they are to push a button that sends a shock to the student (the teacher cannot see the student, he can only hear him). Each wrong answer brings a higher shock level. The shock levels range from a few volts up to a deadly 450 volts.

Milgram expected less than 1% of the people brought in to be teachers to actually go all the way to the end and administer 450 volts. The actual % that went to the end was 65%! There were quite a few people that questioned going so far but were told to keep going. They were told that they wouldn't be held responsible for their actions. That it wouldn't be their fault. A quote that this Milgram made after the experiment was "If you want to see the face of evil, look in the mirror."

So, can *objects* actually be evil? Money, TV, jewelry, tattoos, piercings, movies, music, (yeah, I picked things that are vilified in the Christian community... damn, I'm going to hell {NOT}... I like to watch TV & movies, I listen to metal music, I have tattoos and piercings... damn... LOL) etc... I DON'T think so. I really believe we project onto those things our fears and issues and let them take control over our lives.

We choose to make them evil and give them power over our lives, they are not evil in and of themselves.