Today like never before Evil has let down the nets to tempt us and haul in uncountable numbers of souls.  One of the main ways the Adversary is doing this is by juxtaposing the the Good next to Evil. We see this in ‘entertainment’ especially. But not only there.

One need go no further than Social Media, from YouTube and Tik Tok to Instagram and ‘X’ where decent programs or documentaries are often placed seductively right alongside images of filth and where even supposedly serious commentators regularly revel in vulgarity. The ‘F’ word is incessantly dropped in supposedly serious podcasts, vile stories are told, and other iterations are seen all over the Internet. Algorithms used to sort influencers and their products could theoretically be stopped, just as pornography could be banned from the Internet, or at least put behind serious paywalls, but there appears to be little sustained effort in that direction or will to choose. There are some very good individual efforts and we must be grateful for that. But these lifeboats are up against tidal waves of decadence. This is the antichristic.

The really tragic part about all of this is that children know how to access it all, at the same time that their tastes and characters are being formed. By the time they are 13 years old or younger, it is said, many children have wallowed in violence and sexual content for a long time. This is long before their maturity level prepares them to distinguish between normal and abnormal-evil in a media saturated world of kaleidoscopic streaming images.

Children know how to get around blocks and are very observant of the routines of their parent(s). They learn early how to spot when they can have their own “private” viewing time, and when they can share it with friends. Parents very often simply cannot keep up.

Priests, Religious, and laypersons

And what about Priests and Ministers? Priests are only human. So when the Smartphone is practically the only game in town for immediate communications, it only stands to reason that they will be subject to the same temptations as laypersons. And perhaps fall as often.

Complacency

Another major problem is that because the Internet and pornography have coexisted from the beginning, and because pornography today serves as the magnet to keep massive numbers of people all over the globe coming back for more (which is big money to the tech oligarchs), people become desensitized to it and rationalize that “there’s nothing that can be done about it”. So it is not at all unusual that we only very rarely hear any  pushback from pulpits across the land: there are relatively few warnings to congregations about the danger to our immortal souls’, and practically no calls for global boycotts against the sex moguls. And we hear no calls for the development and manufacturing of special phones that respect the consciences of Christians.

It appears we have largely bought the lie that ‘No Censorship‘! is the eleventh Commandment. Meanwhile human beings are reduced to flesh.

But at what price comes this surrender?

Stephen Hand