How upsetting would it be to move into a brand new home with upgraded appliances only to see a single cockroach come out from under the oven? You decide to investigate further, and so you pull the oven back only to see a colony of cockroaches begin to pour out to the open kitchen floor infesting your whole house. It makes one's skin crawl. And yet, sometimes, I feel as though this is what can and does happen to the Internet and Social Media.
The Internet is a wonderful tool with so many applications and means to honor God. It has already done so much for the advancement of the gospel. However, there is a dark underbelly of the Internet, where anonymity can turn the cowardly child-man into a ferocious beast, simply with the stroke of a key. Take for instance the incident with retired Boston Red Sox Curt Schilling.
He recently tweeted a picture of his softball player daughter throwing him a pitch. She recently made it onto an elite softball team and like so many fathers do, he tweeted a congratulations. Well the vile, disgusting vitriol about his daughter's looks made him so mad that he actually investigated some of these so-called men, and reported them to their colleges and jobs. He blogs about the whole incident here (WARNING: While Curt Schilling's blog article is well-written and clean, he reports the tweets which are terribly lewd and evil.). His point was this, as a father he had to protect his daughter. These "children," as he calls them even though they are adults, failed to realize that there are real life consequences to their actions even on the Internet.
But this whole scenario is a sad reminder that depravity will always take the good and distort it. Evil never creates anything. Only good can create something. Evil simply distorts what is good. Paul reminds us of this in Romans 1:21-23:
The Internet is a wonderful tool with so many applications and means to honor God. It has already done so much for the advancement of the gospel. However, there is a dark underbelly of the Internet, where anonymity can turn the cowardly child-man into a ferocious beast, simply with the stroke of a key. Take for instance the incident with retired Boston Red Sox Curt Schilling.
He recently tweeted a picture of his softball player daughter throwing him a pitch. She recently made it onto an elite softball team and like so many fathers do, he tweeted a congratulations. Well the vile, disgusting vitriol about his daughter's looks made him so mad that he actually investigated some of these so-called men, and reported them to their colleges and jobs. He blogs about the whole incident here (WARNING: While Curt Schilling's blog article is well-written and clean, he reports the tweets which are terribly lewd and evil.). His point was this, as a father he had to protect his daughter. These "children," as he calls them even though they are adults, failed to realize that there are real life consequences to their actions even on the Internet.
But this whole scenario is a sad reminder that depravity will always take the good and distort it. Evil never creates anything. Only good can create something. Evil simply distorts what is good. Paul reminds us of this in Romans 1:21-23:
For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
God created all things good. (1 Tim 4:4) We just happen to worship good things and we don't turn them into evil things, rather we reveal the evil in our hearts. C. S. Lewis describes how this occurs in Mere Christianity:
You can be good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong-only because cruelty was pleasant or useful to him. In other words badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness.
The Internet can become spoiled goodness. The disgusting filth on the web can be so terrible. The implications of this filth not only impacts children, but also these children who eventually become adult-aged children, will filter down to the whole of society. As future generations fail to discern good from evil, society will slowly degrade as a whole. What Curt Schilling and so many others have experienced on the web is a harbinger of the societal, cultural, and moral problems that will only worsen over time. And no Internet filter or technological solution can provide the cure since the problem is not the Internet, but the human heart.
Therefore, the house can be brand new, the kitchen sparkling clean, but the roach colony is growing and eventually it will need to take over the whole house. The only solution? The owner needs to rebuild the house and destroy every roach there is.
Therefore, the house can be brand new, the kitchen sparkling clean, but the roach colony is growing and eventually it will need to take over the whole house. The only solution? The owner needs to rebuild the house and destroy every roach there is.