09/11/2018
THE DEVIL LIVES IN OUR PHONES (Friday Church News Notes, November 9, 2018, www.wayoflife.org, [email protected], 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “A Dark Consensus about Screens,” New York Times, Oct. 26, 2018: “Technologists know how phones really work, and many have decided they don’t want their own children anywhere near them. A wariness that has been slowly brewing is turning into a regionwide consensus: The benefits of screens as a learning tool are overblown, and the risks for addiction and stunting development seem high. The debate in Silicon Valley now is about how much exposure to phones is O.K. ‘Doing no screen time is almost easier than doing a little,’ said Kristin Stecher, a former social computing researcher married to a Facebook engineer. ‘If my kids do get it at all, they just want it more.’ Ms. Stecher, 37, and her husband, Rushabh Doshi, researched screen time and came to a simple conclusion: they wanted almost none of it in their house. Their daughters, ages 5 and 3, have no screen time ‘budget,’ no regular hours they are allowed to be on screens. ... Athena Chavarria, who worked as an executive assistant at Facebook ... said: ‘I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children.’ Ms. Chavarria did not let her children have cellphones until high school, and even now bans phone use in the car and severely limits it at home. She said she lives by the mantra that the last child in the class to get a phone wins. ... For longtime tech leaders, watching how the tools they built affect their children has felt like a reckoning on their life and work. Among those is Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired and now the chief executive of a robotics and drone company. ... ‘On the scale between candy and crack co***ne, it’s closer to crack co***ne,’ Mr. Anderson said of screens. ... ‘We thought we could control it. And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain. This is beyond our capacity as regular parents to understand.’ He has five children and 12 tech rules. They include: no phones until the summer before high school, no screens in bedrooms, network-level content blocking, no social media until age 13, no iPads at all and screen time schedules enforced by Google Wifi that he controls from his phone. Bad behavior? The child goes offline for 24 hours. I didn’t know what we were doing to their brains until I started to observe the symptoms and the consequences.’” CONCLUDING NOTE FROM D. CLOUD: These people are exercising more wisdom in this matter than the average parent in a Bible-believing church. Pastors must take the lead in this and inform and warn and exhort the people about how to protect the children and youth from the great spiritual danger of modern communications technology. We have been publishing material on this subject since 1998, including The Mobile Phone and the Christian Home and Church.
BONO CALLS EUROPEAN LEADERS OPPOSED TO OPEN BORDERS “THE DEVIL” (Friday Church News Notes, November 9, 2018, www.wayoflife.org [email protected], 866-295-4143) - At a concert in Milan, Bono, lead singer of the rock band U2, dressed as Satan and called European populist leaders who oppose open borders “my people.” Bono, speaking for the devil, said, “My people are all over Europe. They go by many names.” He referred in particular to the Swedish Democrats, Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France, Matteo Salvini of Italy. Bono has no idea what he is talking about, and he is a first class hypocrite. He calls for open borders, but he doesn’t open his own house to immigrants. He calls for socialistic redistribution of wealth, but he doesn’t give away his own wealth. Like socialists the world over, he wants to “do good” by confiscating and redistributing other people’s money. He claims to love Jesus, but he doesn’t believe that Jesus is the only way to heaven and “never accepted the whole ‘born again’ tag” (“Bono Bites Back,” Mother Jones magazine, May 1989). He claims to revere the holy Bible, but he lives an unholy life by his own admission and claims that Paul was wrong about women and homosexuality (“Bono: The Rolling Stone Interview” with Jann Wenner, Dec. 27, 2017). In 2006, Bono said: “I recently read in one of St. Paul’s letters where it describes all of the fruits of the spirit, and I had none of them” (“Enough Rope with Andrew Denton,” TV series, March 13, 2006).
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