ClearPlay is billed as “a revolutionary way for your family to enjoy movies”. As you can see from the video, it allows users the power to remove objectionable content from movies that they watch on a DVD player.

You have to get their DVD player in order to do this, but you can use DVDs that you rent or own. Then you have to insert the FilterStik into the USB port. Apparently, you need to download this filter based on the specific movie. Filters are obtained by forming a membership, and you will have unlimited access to their selection which includes filters for television and movies.

The demonstration that the company gave me showed a scene from The Patriot, the one with Mel Gibson. Do you remember the scene where Heath Ledger observes a battle and sees the bloodshed, as well as someone literally getting their head blown off? Well, with ClearPlay, it is like watching it on TV, no head gets severed, and no blood goes flying. People fall dead, sure, just not violently.

I suppose if I wanted to keep my kids away from violence, sex, nudity, blasphemy, bloodshed, as well as disrespect to parents, then this could be a great alternative. By the way, ClearPlay is designed to filter out all those things.

I suppose this is where most Christians would praise this product, and they have. However, I don’t really want to talk about the necessity of censorship when watching a movie with your family. Because to do that, I have to invariably ignore how the bible doesn’t talk about watching a movie with your family. I could easily justify, maybe even with bible verses, that watching television or movies with or without ClearPlay is a downright sin.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say something controversial, but I honestly don’t know how much objectionable material I want my kids not to see. Granted, I don’t ever want to know firsthand the experience of gang violence, drugs, divorce, and other things, but the point of fiction is to peer into an existence that is not your own in order so you can learn.

Sadly, I will have to say that many of the lessons that I have learned in life came from experiences that would be R-rated. Characters in movies must learn the same lessons in the same way. In short, I think that there is some material that is objectionable that has to be left in a story. Otherwise, the whole Passion of the Christ movie becomes meaningless.

I am told that there are some movies that ClearPlay doesn’t cover, like Saving Private Ryan. I have never seen a censored version of this film, and I don’t want to. For this film, the bloodshed is necessary to show what war is like.

Should I be glad that technology has created a way to remove worldliness from films? Do I honestly need technology to remove worldliness from my life? So what am I trying to say here? I’m saying that I don’t know whether I would buy ClearPlay on sheer principle.