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Smart Phones Have Replaced God | |
By Ted Twietmeyer | |
So how did this all start? Consider the video games of the early seventies. To play those early games you had to go find an arcade or a bar. There were no home video games quite yet. Games like pong were actually built using large circuit boards crammed with more than 100 chips, just to implement Pong primitive bar graphics. When the microprocessor (or micro as engineers call it) came out, it revolutionized everything such as vehicles, traffic light controllers, industrial machine controllers and more. The micro reduced the chip count in video games to the point these became a economical household item. Atari and Mattel were among the first companies to introduce video game consoles based on micros. Some games used plug-in cartridges containing software to play video games like Pong, Frogger, Baseball, Mario and many others. The micro made it possible introduce simulated “smarts” and graphics chips economically into video games to start the addiction. For some teenagers and adults, video games became an obsession. There were those who thought they could beat the video game and they tried their best by wasting thousands of hours of their lives. Phones became popular as a result of game technology evolution. One may laugh at the above history, saying “Who would ever do that to themselves?” But hundreds of millions of people, if not billions are addicted to a computer gave, a game console, social networking, messaging, emails even simple-minded games in their phone. Do you worry incessantly about what someone is posting about you? Phones with social networking and video games do nothing but eat up thousands of hours of time – precious years you can never get back. Then there is the fact you are paying dearly out of your pocket over many years for the phone itself, upgraded phones and the phone carrier. Human beings are genetically driven to need something to believe in, a form of religion no matter what shape it takes. Most people have hot buttons – some of these buttons they may not even know they have. But when pushed in the right order these buttons can start an obsession or addiction. For now let's consider God is real. When you die your soul will live on and at some point, have contact with God. Any obsessive relationship you may have with your phone will promptly end, once and for all the very moment you die. You will suffer withdrawal, like it or not much like someone suddenly taken off drugs. In the financial world there is something called ROI, which is return on investment. It is used to quantify the return on money or even time invested into something like a business. If you have a job far from home, and your daily investment in gasoline costs more than the job pays that is an example of negative ROI. Will investing years of your life staring at your phone do any good to promote your happiness, improve a spousal or family relationship or simply make you a better person? For people the obsession drives a marriage into divorce. The ROI for this is clearly a negative result. A phone should be seen as a tool, like screw driver or a pair pliers. Only use it or look at it when you need it. Human beings need genuine, quality face time talking with each other. This is what we are and how we are designed to be. With only so much free time, how many addicted people have even a passing thought about God? Everywhere churches are seeing reduced membership and reduced attendance. Are people wasting too much precious free time staring at a tiny LCD screen, never looking up or thinking about the future of their lives? God does not own even one web page to go find answers to life's questions. You definitely will not find your answers to God or life on social networking, with messaging or visiting any website. That answer has always been with you all along – in your heart. As for myself I own just a cheap flip phone for emergencies which sits on the shelf charging all the time. But never owned a smart phone and probably never will. This is just my way of not buying into an obsession.
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