New Product Management Overview- Many

New Product Management

Overview- Many conservative Christians find that one of the reasons for the decline in morals and values in the contemporary world is that children are mimicking what they see on television and in motion pictures. For example, the American sitcom Married With Children, which aired for 11 seasons between 1987 and 1997, chose to portray a dysfunctional family living in Chicago and dealing with non-standard situations. Al and Peggy Bundy, once a high-school football star and beauty queen respectively, and their promiscuous daughter Kelly, their girl-crazy "nerd" son Bud, and their upwardly mobile neighbors the Rhoades follow Al through a series of adventures that touch on numerous issues within contemporary society like abortion, premarital sex, marital affairs, S&M, homosexuality, masturbation, and a rather complete lack of limits, control, and religion within the household. The series, however, was syndicated globally, and in numerous countries remakes were made in the local language (Sony Pictures, "Married With Children." For many Christians, the show celebrated secular humanism, a belief that rejects spirituality and religion as the basis of moral decision making. We will evaluate the show MWC using three major criteria that seem to be contrary to the basis of a Christian worldview.

Belief in God -- Central the tenets of Christianity is the belief in God and in the Savior, God's son Jesus, sent to the world to provide salvation for humankind. In MWC, family values are relative to the situation at hand. They change from episode to episode, from event to event, and even from character interactions to character interactions. There is no agreement on attending services, the children are not raised to believe in a Christian God, and the morality du jour is whatever mood or logic Peg or Al can find for that day, often based on what was on television or in the newspaper that morning. For Christians, "God is the only way one's deepest needs in life can be met… Therefore, spiritually dead human beings will never meet their deepest needs and are forever trying to fill the void" (Cosgrove, 2006, 146). Thus, the Bundy's continual unhappiness and inability to actualize their lives, as well as their children result from distancing themselves from God. It is not so much that the Bundy's put stock in empiricism -- evidence based justification, which is a naturalistic approach to the philosophy of life, but instead, simply have no faith in anything other than perhaps hedonism ("Worldview Naturalism," 2008).

Moral Development- Peg and Al often dream of extramarital affairs, Al frequents a strip bar, but is extraordinarily misogynistic about heavy-set women, Kelly dresses and acts provocatively and the parents joke about it, and Bud's obsession with sex is encouraged. The children do not see a template of moral fiber in the structure of the family, are certainly not learning it at school, and therefore have no basis for any type of ethic or morals other than the secular humanist -- "it depends" and "if you don't hurt anyone" viewpoint. The secular humanist, though, espouses that there are moral values that can be ascribed without God:

. . . The moral consequences of believing the universe not to be guided by a personal god to whom petitionary prayer can be addressed are huge. That is why it is so inadequate to call oneself solely an atheist; one needs some sort of description for what motivates one's behavior afterwards (Cooke in Kurtz, 2010).

And, reading this, one might forgive Al and Peg if they at least had a moral view; but that is the issue, they do not, which causes the family to simply react to situations rather than have a foundation of love, peace, sense, and oneness with God (Strobel, 2000, 22-43).