To be honest, I was wondering about that same sentence.
On one hand, the warning to not see the trailer is given together with
the link to the actual trailer; which makes you question if the
warning was really a warning or a very clever way to awake the
reader's curiosity. In that case, the whole thing - although somewhat
misleading - is trivial.
However, on the other hand there's the possibility that it was a
sincere warning, and then we are not talking about trivial things. We
could be talking about a host of serious subjects.
One of them is the attitudes we so easy adopt towards other people's
spirituality. Are we really worried about our neighbors (ie. the other
members of this group) spirituality, or are we moved by our desire to
look better than others instead? It's as if we need to be reassured by
pointing at others' weaknesses and opportunities to fall. It is too
close to the pharisaic attitudes of Jesus' times.
Another one is the concept of a testimony. Would a person stop
believing in Jesus as his/her Savior by seeing the naked body of a
woman? Would a person who knows Joseph Smith is a prophet, stop
knowing it after watching the trailer of a violent and mundane movie?
Of course, the more we are in contact with spiritually debilitating
influences, the more weak our spirit becomes... but to lose a
testimony is the consequence of far deeper processes than watching a
raw movie trailer.
Another subject that comes out from the original post is the
narrowness of mind that is becoming the rule more than the exception.
We are losing the ability to question, to think by ourselves, to reach
our own conclusions. It is far easier to accept without questions, to
believe in what others believe, to follow; and thus, our principles
and our very testimony are nothing but a mere cultural influence: the
product of the circles we frequent. To own certain principles and
beliefs, we have to put them to the test by ourselves, not by other
people.
For example, do you think the image of a naked body is intrinsically
evil? If so, why? Would it be that we have accepted other people's
perceptions without making the effort of acquiring our own
perceptions? If we think about where the evil of nudeness resides, it
is obvious that the evil is not in nudeness but in the minds and
hearts of evil people watching it. If you are not evil, is it possible
to perceive nudeness as art, for example? Are you able to appreciate
beauty with purity in the presence of nudeness?
Those are questions everybody has to ask themselves before we throw
our judgments around. And even if you discover that yes, nudeness is
evil for you; you have to be aware that maybe for other people
nudeness is not evil. Same thing towards language (a complete
contextual issue), fashion (another subject depending on contexts), etc.
And now that we are in the mood, is Richard's movie trailer evil? Does
it depict evil characters as good?, does it describe evil intentions
as acceptable?, does it present evil acts as justifiable? From what
I've seen, it's the other way around: it shows evil as evil. Isn't
that positive?
But then, our cultural narrowness kicks in and we lose sight of the
real meaning of things because we get stuck in a few naked scenes.
Consider in comparison our own opinions about films done by non-LDS
filmmakers that present evil acts as admissible, as acceptable and
even desirable but, since they don't show nudeness, we don't jump in
judgment closing our minds to deeper perceptions.
Some thoughts :)
Oscar