Digital Sabbath keeping: the danger of Smartphones

 

It all starts with God writing with His finger on two tables of stone saying that one should not make images of anything in heaven or earth and then worship them. Is spending 75% of one’s free-time with a topic-interest involving the same images in secular zones worship?

Then Fox TV’s anchor for the program “The Next Revolution”, Steve Hilton talked about Smartphones and how they affect people. His article is online.

He himself does not have a smartphone but he has a company in Silicon Valley involved with it. He says that they are designing the Smartphones in order to addict their users. It is like cigarette companies doctoring the paper with chemicals to bring addictive assistance to it. Like alcohol helping the drinker to take another one. We are getting the drift.

So Hilton had a guest dr. Jean Twenge who shared about her latest book with the title: iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.

iGen? Internet Generation = digimodernist = FDL = First Digital Language kids. They are the millennials and those near it.

Hilton also wrote a book on the dangers of internet to show that “unsupervised internet access is actually setting back the progress our society has made”. What does it mean? He continues: “Just as we ban smoking and drinking for under 16, because we want to shield young people from their harmful effect, we should do the same for smartphones”.

I know firsthand what he is talking about: Our family attended church on Sabbath in the city and while the pastor is preaching, a young boy, under 16 sat next to his sister, his jacket hat pulled over his head, and continuously flash-flash with the smartphone. Whether they prayed, whether they sang a song, whether just preaching, his eyes are glued to the smartphone.

But, like my wife added later to me, also Hilton came to realize: “It’s about adults too”, he said, she said. I agreed.

Then Hilton said something that should make our hair stand straight and stay up, as Guy Hissam said in my class of undergrads way back in the seventees: “Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, recently revealed something that is widely known within Silicon Valley. And as the co-founder and CEO of a tech company myself, I hear it all the time. The revelation? The aim of tech firms is to make their products ‘addictive.’”

Addictive? Adventists know what addictive is: ‘don’t read novels because they becloud the mind and benumb the soul.’ Good Victorian period advice still relevant. Don’t watch soap dramas, they are just using present everyday culture to convey the agenda or drift of the scriptwriter and his/her team. Like Harry Potter’s series, novels and films are nothing less than softcore-spiritualism. It is the baby-steps into hardcore Satanism. It is Saul going into the cave to consult the witch of Endor. And if you do not know what God’s opinion is about this, please consult the Bible on this.

Addiction.

Google, Facebook, Uber all tyring to create ways to spead knowledge, to boost people’s income, to reach customers in affordable ways. All positive. But, said Hilton, Tech evangelists need to accept the negative too.

The principle is: “You can’t turn the clock back and you can’t put the genie back in the bottle” Hilton added.

Hilton continued: “Maybe not. But there are steps we can take to limit the social harm caused by this industry, just like we do with others. And that brings us back to Big Tobacco and the commercialization of addiction.”

Then Steve Hilton of Fox fame, said something that one cannot but follow all the way through the paragraph:

“It’s the smartphone that has turned adults and children alike into tech-addicted zombies, dumbly swiping and jabbing at their screens, oblivious to the world around them.

It’s the smartphone that has trapped people in this constant, miserable hamster-wheel of updates and notifications and self-destructive comparisons with friends and celebrities, and the virtual demolition of any remaining barriers between work and personal life.

It’s the smartphone that is responsible for one of the most depressing – and increasingly ubiquitous – sights of the modern age: a family sitting together but totally detached from one another, engaged with their screens rather than the people closest to them.

Of course many companies now make smartphones. But it was the iPhone that first made them so irresistibly addictive. Apple’s Steve Jobs, idolized by so many as a hero, probably did more to undermine humanity than any other business leader in history.”

For years I saw my Freshman undergrad presenting powerpoints pointing out how wonderful Steve Jobs were, writing autobiographies about him. But here I heard with Hilton something that resonates very well with me.

Smartphones are killing us and destroying civilization.

My wife and I decided to stop using the smartphone every day continuously. So at 10 pm until 10 am, I am hiding the smartphones in the house, switched off. No more flash-flash peeking onto the hand.

What if the mark of the beast is going to come by utilizing the hand and cognitive forehead part of our brains with smartphone decisions and clicks? Unless you pay tribute to the beast of Revelation 13 on issues like Sunday-keeping, willingness to honor the papacy and more can be added, one cannot have access to the systems and cannot transfer or withdraw money. All with the hand and head so closely connected now.

I do not think there is any other generation in the past six thousand years that is so connected with right-hand and eyes/head to a device in the hand than this generation. They walk over the street, stand at a bus-station, train-station, airport, church (as I mentioned), in class, outside class, yes, zombies walking in a world of their own. Their world can collapse around them, they are focused.

“You shall not make yourself any image of that which is in heaven or on earth or under the earth, and you shall not worship them. . . . .”

We need to come back to the topic because that is what life is all about. It is not about this world and what it offers, but about the world to come. We were not born to be like this.

For Digimodernism, there are digital sins, digital divides, digital partitions, digital barriers, digital crimes, digital discrimination, digital propaganda, digital selling and all comes packaged as acceptable, beautiful, appearing “progressive”, “advanced” but in essence, like Hilton said, degenerate all of us.

The problem with addicts of smartphones is that they are very “boxed” in their thinking. Self is also in the box and they are oversensitive, distorted in perspectives fooling themselves that they are “informed” and “at it”.

To arrive at data quicker than in previous centuries is not an advantage because you still have to think what to do with the data. Relating to the data in the old days meant a lot of background study in order to make your own independent decision, but these days there are gutters and corridors channeling the reader into a coordinated overdata so that acceptance of their prefixed decision making is faster and easier than making the decision by oneself.

 

Dear God

Smartphone is interfering with our spiritual relationship with You. The tool is destroying the inventor and tech is increasingly making people more lonely and drifted from You. Help us to take digital Sabbaths. In Jesus Name. Amen.

 

Source:

Steve Hilton, (11th November 2017), “Steve Hilton: Smartphones have turned us into tech-addicted zombies. Here’s why we should ban them for kids.” (Online).