“The silence is killing me” is the usual feeling among humans, so of course with me the opposite must be true: The silence is giving me life. But is that what I really want? I have to wonder…

You know that people have temptations, in which they are pulled toward something they expect to be pleasurable but their conscience says is bad. Light knows I have had plenty of that in my life, and almost certainly will continue to have for as long as I live.

But this is the opposite. A temptation toward something that is not fun but which appears to me as good and pure and praiseworthy. Unsurprisingly, such temptations are quite easy to resist.

The temptation started after I had gone through my archive removing buttpics. I had left some page (without said pictures) open, and looking at a nearby entry I saw my imagination of what my day would have been if it had been 1958 instead of 2008.  One conclusion was that without computers and Internet, I would have spent quite a bit more time reading, writing, and praying.  At least that is what I think now that I do have computers and Internet. But I also seem to remember that I did, in fact, do more of all these when I was young, before I became connected to the world via an AORTA – Always Online Real-Time Access.

The Christian Church of Brunstad, back in the days when it was even purer and more innocent than today, had a story circulating. I think it may not even have been one of the Friends it happened to, but perhaps some other serious Christian, of which there were perhaps more back then. A Christian man was buying a TV for the first time, when he saw the following text on the packaging: “Jetzt kommt die Welt ins Haus!” (Now comes the World into the house!) Immediately he realized the errors of his ways and undid the purchase.

It bears mention that the TV is now the rule rather than the exception in the Christian Church. Whereas in my home there is no TV, nor do I expect there to every be. Of course, I have the Internet, which is less brain-numbing but quite distracting.

So what I have been thinking since, is that perhaps I should try to establish a “computer-free zone” of time, perhaps on the Sabbath until sundown or something? First just to see for real what I would do. Would I actually spend more time reading and praying? Not writing, probably, since my manual typewriter eventually made it to its final resting place during one of the last couple moves. But my book backlog is still growing and could need some extra hours. Of course, reading the kind of books I usually do would probably inspire me to write. A lot. Still, it would probably be better than playing The Sims yet again. Not that there is anything outright evil about The Sims. But sometimes, not being evil is not enough.  Or so I am anti-tempted to think.