Berit Kjos
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Berit Kjos is a Christian writer and entertainment media critic. She is the creator of the website crossroad.to, which focuses on Christianity, prayer, culture and education reform. Her criticisms of video games, role-playing games and movies have drawn the attention of critics of her views.
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[edit] Broadcasts
Kjos is a frequent guest on national radio and television programs. She has been interviewed several times on The 700 Club, Point of View (Marlin Maddoux), Bible Answer Man, Beverly LaHaye Live, Crosstalk and Family Radio Network. She has also been a guest on the CNN program Talk Back Live and on other secular radio and TV networks.
[edit] Crossroad.to
[edit] Media entertainment
Kjos's website covers many topics. Among these are articles critical of many popular movies and cartoons. These have included Sailor Moon, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Dragon Ball. Even Christian inspired books like The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings are questioned for their use of mythological beasts and monsters inspired by non-Christian beliefs.[citation needed] Role-playing games like Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons have also caught her attention. Articles Kjos wrote in 2006 include:
- Marketing the occult: Harry's impact on "Christian" values
- Karate, Kids, and the Culture: Your Child and the Martial Arts
- Role-Playing Games & Popular Occultism
- Answers to questions about occult entertainment
- Lord of the Rings: When an Obsession Is an Idol
- Movie Magic and Unconscious Learning
Horror movie characters are also a target, including Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger. Such characters, in her view, promote witchcraft. Predictably, Harry Potter, with a situation plot based entirely around witchcraft, also falls under question, as does Pokemon, which is based on monsters.
[edit] Virtuous virtual entertainment
Kjos has targeted what she considers to be violent and morally dubious video games such as Grand Theft Auto. Like Jack Thompson, she calls such games "murder simulators", and asserts that they are molding the minds of both toddlers and adolescents towards destructive behaviors in adulthood. According to Kjos, "The training methods militaries use are brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and role modeling.... Just as the army is conditioning people to kill, we are indiscriminately doing the same thing to our children, but without the safeguards."[1]
[edit] Music
Like many other music critics, Kjos has also known to criticize rock music and pop music. [2] She cites Dave Hart, a research analyst for Menconi Ministries, who identifies "Party metal" as emphasizing sex, drugs, partying, and living for today with no thought for tomorrow. "It’s the stuff getting on the charts: Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, Def Leppard," explains Hart. "There is very little overt occultism." Party metal, says Kjos, has stooped to the level of kinky, cruel, and violent sex — or "porn rock" — such as Judas Priest’s song about oral sex at gunpoint.
[edit] Controversy
Some Christians have been critical of Berit Kjos as a false prophet[citation needed]. They object to the idea that those who love the entertainment she criticises are loving evil more than good. Kjos tends to quote the Bible to support her arguments. She has been described as a "cafeteria Christian".[specify] Kjos has also cited Wikipedia to support her views.[citation needed]
[edit] Brave New World
Kjos warns against the plethora of strange new labels that have begun to define our schools, workplaces, clinics and other institutions. She argues that few people understand terms like Outcomes-based education, School to work, Total Quality Management, or Third Way. She believes they are not just part of a local agenda, but point to a global management system. The most important question, according to Kjos, is who defines the terms and sets the standards.[3]
Kjos argues that strategic new terms are changing our thinking. Such words include stakeholder, partnerships, facilitator, accountability, assessments, win-win, empathy, synergy, consensus, and continual or managed change. Kjos claims these words provide a "seamless" framework for managing and monitoring the global community. This revolution has three major but inseparable parts:
1. Systems: a network of "seamless" management systems or organizational frameworks that link all the pieces and manages the global transformation. [See systems thinking]
2. A mind-changing Process: a standardized but flexible process that conforms each human resource to his or her place in this vast network of global systems.
3. Standards: a set of universal standards that holds all people accountable, forcing them to adapt to the changing aims and needs of the system.
[edit] Total Quality Management
According to Kjos, Total Quality Management or TQM is based upon the Hegelian dialectic, invented by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In the Hegelian dialectic process, a diverse group of people (Kjos identifes a mixture of believers ["thesis"] and unbelievers ["antithesis"]), gather in a facilitated meeting with a trained facilitator, teacher, group leader, or change agent, and use group dynamics, including peer pressure, to discuss a social issue (in this case, to have dialogue about scripture) and reach an outcome of consensus, compromise, or synthesis. Kjos warns that such systems can be used to institute programs such as new standards-based math instruction or mandated High school graduation examinations while giving the public the impression that it was the result of popular demand rather than the designs of a few.[4]
[edit] Education Reform
Berit Kjos is one of the leading critics of Standards Based Education Reform (also previously known as Outcomes-based education) and School to work. In her book, Brave New Schools, she claims that factual learning and individual thinking are out, and feelings and group thinking are in. If this international system is put in place, she claims, all children will be monitored through a national computerized data transmission system designed to build a permanent, personal file on every child. Those who control the new "school-to-work" system will affect all children, including children taught at home and in private schools.
[edit] Kjos vs. Christians and other religious persons
Kjos is especially critical of groups associated with witchcraft, most notably the Wicca. She also takes a dim view of Christians who indulge in entertainment and games which are influenced by occultist and Satanist beliefs.
She has described the followers of Islam as infidels or terrorists.[citation needed]
Kjos publicly takes a strong position against racism and terrorist hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, she likens increasing government control over people's lives and thoughts to Nazism and similar movements. Yet anonymous detractors have claimed on open source internet articles that Berit Kjos is a KKK supporter, and dislikes African Americans and Muslims.[citation needed]
[edit] Kjos vs. the entertainment industry
Kjos has been quoted as opposing some of the most popular cultural books and games:
But why did Amazon also list Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition Player's Handbook as best-seller #6? What common threads have raised Harry Potter and D&D, "the bestselling adventure game of all time," to the peaks of popularity?
Warner Brothers -- producer of the Harry Potter movie scheduled for release next year -- granted Hasbro licensing rights to produce a variety of Harry Potter toys and games. Pagan fun has become big business![5]
Mattel and Hasbro were also targeted for selling Wizards of Coast and trading cards like Pokémon, Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. The Harry Potter movies and books have also received criticism from conservative Christians, with Kjos in the lead.
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/04/toying-with-death.htm Toying with death
- ^ http://www.crossroad.to/Books/YourChildNewAge/YCNA-15.html
- ^ http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/Reinvent1.htm Reinventing the world
- ^ http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/04/3-purpose.htm Small Groups and the Dialectic Process
- ^ http://www.crossroad.to/text/articles/D&D&Harry.htm
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Berit Kjos's site
- Comments on Berit's negative views on other religions, some positive and negative
- Comments made by people page, and also with both mixture of positive and negative reviews
Computer and video game law | Family Entertainment Protection Act - Truth in Video Game Rating Act - Video Game Decency Act |
---|---|
Organizations | Entertainment Software Rating Board - Pan European Game Information - Computer Entertainment Ratings Organization - Office of Film and Literature Classification - National Coalition Against Censorship - Videogame Rating Council (defunct) - Recreational Software Advisory Council (defunct) |
People | Jack Thompson - Cody Posey - Devin Moore - Hillary Rodham Clinton - Joe Lieberman - Herb Kohl - Sam Brownback - Evan Bayh - Fred Upton - Rick Santorum - Berit Kjos |
Games | Grand Theft Auto series / Hot Coffee mod - Mortal Kombat series - Night Trap |
Categories: Articles with unsourced statements | Articles lacking sources from December 2006 | All articles lacking sources | Computer and video game censorship and ratings | Christian people | Living people | Moral panics | Censorship | Year of birth missing | Education reform | Film critics | Computer and video game critics | Music critics