Sunday, April 27, 2008

The Internet is not Evil, Any More than Fire is Evil

While it is true that the internet has given rise to an increased availability of evil influences, such as pornography and phishing, none of these things were brought about or created by the internet, and nothing forces us to be any more victims of these evils now, than we were forced to be before.

I am one who knows that the addictive powers of pornography are real and not something to be trifled with. Many good people have fallen prey to and lost all they had worked for in their lives simply because they took lightly the addictive power of pornography. When I say it is a real addiction, some may scoff at that, but there is ample evidence that the hold that it takes in the lives of the men and women it infects involves not merely their minds, but the chemical forces in the body that are by design, strong enough to drive men and women to extreme behaviors in all aspects of their lives.

There is no good that can come from an addiction to pornography, and it is not a suitable substitute for real human interaction and relations. In most cases, pornography gives men a sense of dissatisfaction with their own mates as time and life takes its toll on their bodies. Pornography offers an ongoing and purely unreal constant against which we inevitably compare our own aging bodies, and our spouses will rarely continue to measure up to such a standard of eternal youth. Eventually the damage done to a marriage is beyond repair and very often the damage does not stop at our marriages.

Still, in spite of the fact that the Internet has become a 24 hour full-open channel of these types of influences into our households, we are not any more now, than ever before, forced to be victims of it. We must be more vigilant as parents than ever before, and more aware of the protective tools available to us, to ensure our homes do not become a receptacle of the clumps of sewage that have made their way onto the information superhighway.

It has always been up to us and ever remains our challenge to learn new ways to defend against and warn about, the dangers of what is out there. It will never be a good idea to leave the entire defense in the hands of our government, duty-bound as they are to help.

Fire has awesome capabilities for good and evil, so also the atom, and more recently, the internet. No one will ever be able to defend your home as effectively as you, and God help us all if we are ever dispossessed of our freedoms to make that happen, in any realm of our existence.

Saturday, April 5, 2008

Keeping it Real Time

We have a son in the Marines, LCpl Benjamin Williams, currently stationed in Africa, and he made sure and got a laptop before his deployment that was wireless capable.

He now is able to quickly apprise us of needs, or say hello to the family. We are half a world away from each other, and yet are able to communicate real-time.

He sends us updates about the place he is living now, and some of the day to day trivialities that are very enthralling to us who have never experienced anything like it.

We are very proud of our Ben. He is the first member of our family to see a lot of the things he has seen, and we are anxious to see him again at the end of his deployment, as he is so full of life and talent. Yes, he even remarks occasionally, how glad he is that he brought his guitar along with him. His accommodations are a lot less primitive than I had imagined they would be when he first told us where he would be going, so I honestly was not sure how well a guitar would fare under those conditions. Apparently he continues to get better and there are others in his squad or platoon who play, that did not bring theirs.

It is always good to hear him ping me for a quick chat. Gotta love that real time data transfer. No previous civilization has known of the things we get to deal with in our lives. We have real time conversations with people half way around the world, we can go to the corner market and buy foods from every corner of the world, even out of season. We have ice in the desert, and conditioned air, we can drive in a day, what a man would have taken a week to cover on foot.

We are more blessed than we sometimes are willing to acknowledge but every day, I am thankful and vociferous about it. This is but one way.