If you are like me, appealing to the Spirit for ever more sanctification, this will mean that you are increasingly sensitive to the things of the world being evil and eternities apart from God's holy standard. I can't think of what it must have been like for Jeremiah or Paul to endure seeing and being around evil every day. Paul was upset a lot of the time, and Jeremiah simply wept. How about Jesus, who was totally holy and sinless, being amid all the earth's sin! Ow! What He endured for us!
In my own way, I also am aggrieved by sin. I hate seeing profanity, looking at television commercials that are licentious even if the program I'm watching is clean. Facebook and Youtube have become crowded with ads that are sometimes not too healthy to see. Though I'm careful to follow clean speaking people on Twitter, occasionally they will retweet something that has a curse word in it. It is all the more starkly vivid for having been absent from my life. It's jarring when you see or hear those words. So what to do?
Greasemonkey. In the web browser Firefox, there is an add-on you can enable which will allow you to customize web pages to your liking, as long as you can find the script someone has written who feels the same as you. Apparently, a lot of people felt the same as I do about Facebook ads and Youtube ads, because there were a lot of scripts some people had written that wiped out the ads on both those pages. Simply adding greasemonkey does not stop the ads, it only provides the platform for adding scripts which will do that job for you.
Here is how to do it-
1. In Firefox, search for and then add-on "greasemonkey"
2. Restart Firefox
3. See monkey icon on top menu bar. Click once to see the drop down menu. Choices are 'greasemonkey options, 'manage scripts', 'get new script', 'web sites' etc.
4. Click on "web sites'
5. This will take you to Greasemonkey's website, userscripts.org. From there you can search for scripts that other people have written which customize web pages in some way. Search for Youtube no ads, or Facebook no ads, whatever you want.
6. Of the search results, look at the reviews. I tend to like 4 and 5 star reviews. Once you find one that is satisfactory to you,
7. Click on 'source code' at the top of the page, which will bring you to the page of the actual script
8. Copy the script
9. Go back to Greasemonkey icon
10. Click on the monkey and click on "new user script"
11. A pop up will come up, allowing you to name it. I named mine No ads Facebook HA HA HA. Lol. Then at the bottom of the popup it asks "add from clipboard? and say yes.
12. That is it! The script is now installed. The next time you go to your website that you just customized, it should be working. I have been ad-free on FB and Youtube for two days now and it is a relief!
It literally only took me half an hour from not knowing Greasemonkey existed to having installed three new scripts and no more ads.
As for the profanity filter, that took a little tweaking because of the unintended consequence. LOL. Get this- I was happy knowing I was not going to see any more profanity. Then I went to the John MacArthur Grace to You page to listen to a devotional about the use of the word raca in Matthew 5:22. It was titled "*** and the Name Caller." Huh? Oh, I get it, the word the asterisks were blotting out was hell.
It turned out that hell is used a lot in my own writing (which the profanity filter blotted out,) and on others' Christian websites, not as a curse but when using the word to describe the place. I went back into the userscript, found the word hell that it was banning, and deleted it fromthe script. Problem solved.
Except not.
Later, I was googling "clean television shows" and one result popped up in someone's recommended list that looked like this
"The *** Van *** Show"
Huh?
Oh, I get it. Dick Van Dyke. Hm, two more banned words in the script, apparently. HA HA I found a clean tv show that my profanity filter wouldn't spell out the title of. Irony!
Oh well, still needs tweaking I guess. Obviously there are two meanings to some words that can be used as a curse. If this gets too onerous I can edit the script. Other than that, so far so good!
I had mentioned this on my Facebook account and others had asked me to explain how I did it so I thought maybe here also would be a help to someone. I think you can use greasemonkey with Safari and one or two other browsers, but not Chrome. You can look it up.
I have seen no ads on FB nor Youtube since I installed it and I could no be happier. Oh, eventually FB and YT will likely write a script of their own to get ads back in, and then some layperson will write another script getting around that and post it. But maybe we will be raptured by then and never have to deal with unholiness again! Hey, a gal can hope...
