How Culture is Affected by Media, Art, Religion, and Technology

Culture and Media, Art, Religion and Technology
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Culture refers to the way of life of a people, community, or society in a particular time. This paper articulates culture as a central idea and how it has been affected by the media, religion, art, and technology as illustrated by different scholars. 
The Effect of Art on Culture
The book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, presents how the alphabetic culture killed a person. The writer presents that establishing a deity without an image barred people from imagining and creating their own images of the goddesses they believed in. Christianity created a God that could only be read about, imagined, or written about. Moreover, the book argues that the scribed laws, known as the Ten Commandments, invalidated any images of the supreme deity to the point that art is seen as blasphemy and is the worst sin as stated in the Ten Commandments. The bible, for instance, says in the first four commandments that the imageless God is the only God while the law about murder is placed as the fifth. Therefore, Shlain's argument portends that Christianity sees art as a sin greater than murder (Shlain, 2008).
Even in the biblical stories in the Old Testament, there are instances when people wanted to see, not feel the presence of God. This indicated a shift from the cultural spirit of God to the need for a presence of a deity. For instance, the book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, highlights the biblical story of when Moses opened the Ten Commandments before the people of Israel. They trembled to know that they were in the presence of a deity. But to their amazement, this did not contain any likeness of a god. On the ark were written words, and for the first time, the Israelites were expected to adhere to the words of the deity and not its image (Shlain, 2008). 
Also, the Ten Commandments needed Israelites to read the laws instead of the traditional way of worshiping that required them to gaze at the deity. This was another shift of culture that the art of writing brought. Reading of the Torah has been one of the sacred practices of the Jews. Reading about the deity instead of gazing at it became such a radical break from the past events where people would stare at bronze serpents like that of Mosses' rod (Shlain, 2008).This break from the cultural way the Israelites used to gaze at the deity during worship to read about the deity made them start creating images with supernatural powers, diorite statues, totem poles, and fertility amulets. This is because they wanted a god that they could see. 
Though the sectarian prejudice of the Israelites stood in sharp contrast with other religions of that time, they were now joining the bandwagon of religions that worshiped idols. The Egyptians who had interacted with Israelites who did not have images to worship started to practice Polytheism, worshiping many gods. They had local gods, national gods, personal gods, and family gods. They shifted to polytheism, and people respected the God of others as they later respected the formers god in return. And due to the interaction of cultures, different religions sampled gods from different cultures (...