The Devil In Disguise

Technology makes life easier. I can do more with my smart phone today than I could have done with my computer, cell phone, PDA, and camera combined from just a few years back.

Things get done easier, faster and with less thought with the help of technology. Technology informs us, teaches us, entertains us, and helps keep us informed with friends and the world. I couldn't calculate all the time and energy technology frees up. It certainly makes thing easier, even sin.

Those things we love about technology, the ease to get information and entertainment, the things we can share, the knowledge we can gain, can have a dark side. Because it wrapped up in a new style we might not recognize for what it is. It’s when Facebook makes us busybodies, Twitter is our place to boast, and Instagram a means to show our vanity. Our blog is our way to murmur and complain, our email to spread lies, the comment section is a place to spew hate. Youtube fills the lust of our eyes, EBay drives our greed, and Amazon our materialism. Any of those are not in themselves evil, but they can become a vehicle that drives our darker impulses. We may not see what we become when we interface with the technology.

Either online or in person, it can be easy to fool ourselves. To not see things for what they really are. To explain away our behavior. To think I am in control of it rather than it being in control of me. Maybe the anonymity becomes a mask that hides us from others and even ourselves

It isn't the technology however, it is us. I may be using it to sin but it is still the sin working in me. Don't let the new and shiny mask what is underneath. Look past the tech and see what it truly is. Online or offline, sin is still sin. Don’t think an insult on a wall is different than an angry word spoken or a lustful look at a picture is any different than a lustful look at a person. Sin corrupts and kills. From the ancient to the high tech, it is Satan’s weapon to make us fall.

Before you post, surf or tweet, think why am I doing this? Why am I using this, for good or evil, for self or for service? But examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good; abstain from every form of evil. (1 Thessalonians 5:21-22)

Comments

I Know All Those Words, But That Sentence Makes No Sense To Me

Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...

Master Your Self

In a contest for the toughest president of the United States, it would be hard to go against Theodore Roosevelt. He was known for his “manly” pursuits hunting big game, climbing the Matterhorn, participating in boxing match while president. (These weren’t play fights, he lost the vision on one eye because of them!) Once before he was about to give a speech an assassin shot him in the chest. Roosevelt refused to go to a hospital and insisted on giving his speech, still wearing his blood-soaked shirt! Teddy might have become tough but he wasn’t born that way. He was a sickly child that suffered from severe asthma that almost proved fatal. As was a young boy, doctors discovered that he had a weak heart, and advised him to get a desk job and not strain himself. He was homeschooled because of his many illnesses and spent most of his time indoors. But then as a teen his father, whom Teddy Roosevelt revered, told his son, “ ...

The Other Peter Principle

Simon wasn’t very good at his job. For most folks, fishing is a hobby a good time on the lake even if you get skunked. Not so for the professional fisherman. A day without a catch means no product to sell, no money collected, and nothing to bring home to the wife and kids. Those days seemed to happen a lot to Simon. Maybe I’m wrong but all I can go by is the history we have on him and every time we have it recorded, he caught nothing, at least on his own. You would have to be hard headed to keep at it with all that failure. No wonder he got the nickname of rock. So perhaps, that’s why when he got the chance at a new career he jumped at it. Well, not so much a new career but a different form of the old one. He would still be fishing just going after a different kind of fish. This time he would have a boss, one that had shown him, even in his old job, a better way to do things. And that made all the difference. Simon didn’t al...

Ecclesiastes 12:10

Search This Blog