A meme shared earlier today reminded me of the movie: Birdcage, where a mom and her kids see these hideous beings (never shown to the camera apparently according to reviewers, never watched the movie myself) and cover their eyes while trying to get away from them. The meme was joking about wearing eye masks to prevent people from seeing what is really going on right now, and I know many of us would describe what is going on as hideous to put it mildly.
Then my mind turned to the Buddhist monkeys who “see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil” and I realized another action is missing from the trio. “Do no evil”, which, as I sit here thinking about it, is very similar to Google’s former mantra: “Don’t be evil”. I just did a search (not on google’s engine) for their mantra and ran across an article written in December 2020, about how and when this mantra disappeared.
Considering that Christ said that our thoughts matter, that what comes out of our mouths soils us more than what we put into our mouths, (referring to food at that point), and considering that elsewhere in Scripture we are told to guard our hearts, that out of it come the issues of life, (proverbs), that the heart apart from Christ is desperately wicked, that God’s Word exposes what is in our hearts (New Testament), it stands to reason that speaking and doing evil come from being evil, and that being evil stems, in part, from seeing and hearing evil. Because we speak and do based on what influences those words and actions and how we internalize those influences.
In Google’s case, profit took over from service. Service said to not be evil. Profit says to do whatever is necessary to make a profit, and they’ve been losing key employees over that shift since 2017. This is without Christ being at the helm of leadership’s lives over there. It’s amazing sometimes, how sin can both be so blind, and yet recognize itself in others without God being honoured in either case. God said He would write His laws on our hearts, and He has. We know right from wrong as mere sinners, let alone as blood-washed believers.
As believers, we are to guard what enters our eye gates and ear gates. We do this by critically examining our entertainment choices and our entertainment sources. We can’t do as the world does and just claim merriment or education as the reason we accept fictitious sinful behaviour in our vision or hearing. What we feed our minds with eventually sways our world view and our behaviour toward others as a result of that changed world view.
We guard our eye and ear gates by being critical of the news we choose to ingest as well. A fair bit of what is called “news” these days is nothing more than gossip and it bothers me to see Christians spreading it around. Next to gossip rags now being mainstream news articles, it seems that catastrophe and the breaking of the 10 commandments regularly makes the news too. Stories about murders, thefts, broken relationships, the rise and fall of idols, etc, has earned the nightly news the title of “the nightly blues”. But one seriously has to only click on the news station’s entertainment category to find the reasons for the “terrible” news in the main news headlines.
For some inexplicable reason that only sin can explain, it is perfectly ok to tell the human subconscious that murder, sex outside of marriage with anyone you choose consent or no, theft, crime of varying degrees, is all at your personal whim and fancy, but then turn around and tell the human conscious mind that those things are wrong, watch them get dredged out to sink opponents in the political and economic arenas, and dragged through the courts, killing careers, etc.
If it’s wrong in the courts, wrong on the street, wrong in the business world and wrong in the political world, wouldn’t it stand to reason it would be wrong in the world of entertainment too? This form of logic, while lost on the unsaved world, seems to be lost in the Christian world too, for far too many people. A youth group music pastor on Facebook scathingly got after everyone in his newsfeed for how much time he spent watching Game of Thrones (he’s married) and telling everyone not to judge. I didn’t enter that conversation because many who cared about his influences were being raked over the coals for doing so, but I understood and shared their concerns. I’ve written various times about the need to be careful about what we put into our hearts and minds.
We need to get back to critically examining our news and entertainment choices so that what God says to our subconscious in His Word, has more sway on our functional world view than what the world is feeding us.
Yes, Google, “don’t be evil” does mean monitoring one’s world view and how it impacts doing business and doing life. It does shackle one from decisions that would harm others, harm one’s self, or negatively affect one’s world view and by extension impact how business is done and the profits realized from that business.
We don’t need blindfolds or masks, we need the filter of God’s Word and the conviction of the Holy Spirit.
