Satan Is In A Cell Phone

By KARL KIME

I grew up in a conservative Christian church with a robustly literal view of Satan. He was pictured as an actual being with mind-invading capacities for temptation and an insatiable lust for doing evil. Despite my upbringing, I had never been able to believe in Satan as anything more than a quaint, outdated metaphor. There’s no need for a supernatural tempter. Humans are capable of monumental evil all on their own.

But I’ve recently changed my mind. Now I’m convinced. There is a Devil, he is real, and he lurks in our cell phones. And our iPads, laptops and desktops. The Prince of Darkness buries himself deep in the demonic depths of the computer, the microchip, the touchscreen, the instant messager. Seduced by the possibility of communication that is both faceless and conducted at lightning speed, we step, perhaps innocently at first, into an infernal realm that soon overtakes us. We find ourselves texting and writing messages we’d never communicate face-to-face with a real person. Our perception of evil is warped by our ubiquitous electronic telecommunication devices that promise faceless communication at lightning speed.

The electronic devil isn’t adorned in a red cape with horns and smoke shooting out of its nostrils. It is shrouded in the effortless speed and sexiness of simulated relationships served up by our electronic gizmos. The magic of the computer world blinds us to consequences, politeness and due regard – our basic ethical principles.

Some examples. Let’s call him “Joe.” Joe comes home late one night from the office. His wife is asleep. As usual, he plops down in front of the computer for a little late-night web surfing. Sliding the mouse to awaken the sleeping screen, Joe runs across the undeleted remnants of a chat, apparently involving his wife. She forgot to erase it. Before him in luxuriantly pixilated colors is a lurid instant-message exchange between his wife and a man, identity unknown. Or take “Jane,” who stumbles onto messages sentby her husband to a long-lost love with whom he has reunited through Facebook.

Such exchanges might not entirely be the fault of the electronically wayward spouse. There’s something about the electronics, the distance that overtakes us. Talk that would be “out-of-character” if uttered at arm’s length spews forth almost automatically when a person uses telecommunication devices. The diabolical delusion is that telecommunication is without moral import, that somehow because you’re not physically near the person you’re “talking” to the boundaries of decency have been altered, that none of it really counts, that online flirting, even when explicit, isn’t really cheating, that lying isn’t really lying, that exaggeration is as good as accuracy, that mean-spirited comments fall noiselessly like the proverbial tree in the desert, that the virtual world has supplanted the red-blooded, living and breathing real world of morality.

The facelessness of chatting has spawned “sexting,” a term recently added to our digital-age vocabulary by the ability to abandon inhibitions in front of a screen and type something provocative. We are lulled into moral somnolence by the whirring hum of the computer. We’re not interacting with a person. We’re just hitting keys and watching a monitor.

The Satan in cell phones doesn’t only operate through coaxing us into intentional acts of wrongdoing. He lays clever traps for the unwary in the form of accidents waiting to happen. For example, how many have written unkind emails about a boss or a fellow employee, only to hit “reply to all” by mistake, thereby sending the message to the very objects of our put-downs? Even if you don’t think Satan is in a cell phone, you must agree that he invented the “reply to all” button.

Or you write a personal text message, forget to change the addressee, and hit “send” before realizing that it’s going to someone you didn’t intend.

Our electronic sins may be forgiven, if we’re lucky, but they are never forgotten. I recently learned that the SIM cards in our smartphones indelibly imprint everything we do, every text, every email, every photo. The same is true of computers. Nothing is ever deleted.

Even our posture is changing. You know the look – people walking around in stores, on sidewalks, everywhere – head hunched over, cellphone in hand, thumbs wildly typing or swiping through web pages. Watch couples or families in restaurants. No one is talking to each other. They’re all playing Solitaire. Or Angry Birds.

Cyber addiction is rampant. There should be a 12-step program for electronics withdrawal. Step one: Admit you’re powerless. Next, force yourself to put down the phone, and walk with your head held high instead of bowed in worship to the Lord of Darkness.

Candidly, I don’t believe in the devil. Or that any satanic force dwells in a cell phone. But “smart” or not, our electronic devices remind us that it is devilishly hard to exorcise our all-too-human impulses.

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