Because of stupid links? I mean online links that only caress our unintentional curiosity. They do little for us because they have little to offer. We click, read, look and often feel stupid about it.
Do these noisy links crowd the Internet, offering celebrity gossip, stories of strange crimes, violent videos and sexual images?Each link requires little more than a click (what a trivial query).
- So how subtle are these links? As I write.
- CNN’s homepage highlights seven titles with links like “Top Stories”:.
The mayor who smokes crack won’t quit
Did they blindfold the pushed husband?
Woman killed in cougar attack
Fake quotes fuel Tom Cruise attacks
Deer pierced on the forehead by an arrow.
Guess who’s wearing skinny jeans again
Astronauts wash your underwear?
The magnetic attraction that we sometimes feel for titles like these predesses the Internet and the news of the night, a concern addressed by the father of the Augustinian church, born November 13, 354 AD. (more than 1600 years ago).
Augustine reflected on the temptations that darkened and distracted his own heart in his classic church history, The Confessions.
There he built the biblical precedent in 1 John 2:16: “Everything in the world?The desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes and the pride of life?Doesn’t it come from the Father, but from the world?
The phrase “The Lust of the Eyes”, Augustine interprets useless curiosities. These useless curiosities are not limited to the visual, but involve impulses of the five senses.
The seduction of the useless curiosities of the world is deeply rooted in our ancestors, and we can find it even in Adam and Eve’s rebellious curiosity for the garden tree. pretends to be a zeal for knowledge and learning?and a “thirst for first-hand information about everything. “
In Augustine’s day (as in ours), this useless curiosity took many forms and contained gossip (1 Timothy 5. 13). It included all forms of magic, astrology, and witchcraft. She was behind the vain fascination with signs and wonders (Luke 23: 8). She was behind the obscene dance in the theater. It was the origin of the cultural fascination with death, blood and mutilated corpses. And she was behind the shows of the bloodbath of the dead animals and the gladiatorial battles in the amphitheater.
The old Colosseum was a buffet of vain curiosities, by the way
The public liked to entertain themselves with the massacres, which emperors happily funded to raise approval levels, all elevated to the category of popular showcase of violence that very few pagan philosophers questioned.
Augustine was a voice against it. Curious spectators participated in perversity, he said, and believers could easily be swept away by the event’s crazy passion.
In general, the vain curiosities of the fourth century were uninterrupted. Long before the curiosity of watching someone die was available on YouTube, Agustín wrote: “Countless despicable things fight for our attention every day. “
Going back to our time, here’s the problem: useless curiosities are aborted thoughts. Vain curiosities are, by definition, displaced from God and powerless to point out Christ. They fill our brains and hearts with a disturbing temporary waste. “trash cans for things like this, filled with an unnecessary burden of waste, our prayers are often interrupted and disturbed by them. “
Worse, these vague links bring together a history of navigation that can reveal something tragic about the state of our souls. Crouching in a “poisonous curiosity,” Augustine writes, reflecting “the impulses of a dead soul, but not dead for not moving. “Will she die abandoning the source of life (Jeremiah 2:13)?
Nothing trivial escapes God’s attention (Matthew 12:36). But is it a sin to enjoy three minutes of a fun YouTube video or new clips or those made by daring men you clicked on via Twitter?Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Depends on where these videos take your thoughts and the thoughts that took you to the place in the first place.
There is an unnecessary curiosity attracted by vanity and emptiness, and a sanctified curiosity attracted by all that leads to the beauty of God, this possibility is presented to us in every link.
Then Augustine leaves the story to ask us three questions about our browsing history:
Am I looking for links that offer me a promising way to see more of God’s beauty?
Or is my habit of clicking on links unregulated, motivated by an inner whim and ends with nothing but my vain curiosity?
Or, most tragic of all, are the links where I actually click just a series of small holes in the street full of water that I hope to drink a little bonus for my empty soul?
Many things are at stake with the mouse or smartphone in hand, may God give us his spiritual resources that day, so that we do not take care of such important issues of denial in our daily lives that they seem so worldly.