(Beware. This is a VERY long post.)
This is the exact text of an essay I wrote a few days ago, towards the first day of my exams week, for something that would have given me a chance at national recognition if I ever had the guts to actually submit it. On the last spur of the moment, I suddenly realized that only the privileged could have their works read, and there are millions of people who are great writers who do not need national recognition in order to be recognized. I may be a great writer to some, but one thing is certain: I write because I simply want to write, without asking for anything in return. (Well, except comments, since I am rather paranoid about how others think of me. :P)
So here it goes...
After completing the endless requirements and hassles of school work, I arrived home, dropping my bag sluggishly unto the unkempt floor and began to climb the ladder towards the upper bed of the double deck from which I and my dorm mate sleep every night. I opened my notebook, not the one made of paper, but the one made of copper wires and semiconductors. I then began to double click the icon of my Internet browser and in the span of a second I was already looking at my search engine homepage. I was going to look for facts to support a reflection paper on being human that I was tasked to submit the morning of the following day, so I clicked the search bar and was barely finished typing “fac-” when the search engine suggested “Facebook.”
A funny experience, I thought at first, that a search engine suggests the name of a social networking site when a student searches for facts to support reflection on human-ness. All of a sudden, however, the experience suddenly came to me with a new face and a new message: the familiar social networking site which became part of my daily routine does indeed provide facts to support my reflection on my humanity. It has my name, address, contact information, the names of my friends, my likes and dislikes, where I was two hours ago, and all those things that tell others what I am. But then there were those posts on my wall which reflected my opinions on nearly everything from what the latest newspaper headline is to ideas on how life should be lived. It became my avenue for expressing who I am, on how good I think of the acts of myself and of others, and how bad I can be by simply expressing myself. It showed me that this networking site revealed a side of me I never showed outside the virtual world.
Looking from a third person perspective at how good or how bad I can be paves the way for much eye opening. How a simple experience could create so much realization of truths previously unknown to oneself is simply amazing. It’s as if a whole new world was made right in front of my eyes, and I felt like discovering my bareness and deciding to put on clothes to show my modesty...
Wait. Isn’t this story familiar?
There was once a garden in the backyards of heaven, where there was a man, a woman and a serpent. In the middle of the garden was a tree whose fruits God strictly forbade anyone from eating. Then the serpent went to the woman, and all the rest is history. Eating of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil really was an eye opener to the woman. To God, it was an eyesore. This fateful event began the death of man’s ultimate favor and the beginning of pains for both man and woman. The serpent, meanwhile, was cursed to crawl on its belly and eat dust forever. Then we return to reality, facing our favorite social networking sites and thinking of what to post next that will not make us look like a socially deprived wimp. Again there is a man and a woman, but there is no serpent. Instead, there’s the Internet. In the middle of the Internet is a website whose contents’ truth value can never be verified. Reading the content of this website was an eye opener to the man and the woman. To everyone else, it’s just an anonymous person being anonymous and not caring about their lives. This event happens nearly every day.
Man only needed one fruit of knowledge of good and evil to fall from God twice. The other thing he needed was the Internet. Yes, this series of tubes brought once more upon us knowledge of good and evil through its interconnected networks, so wittingly designed that it is seemingly able to satisfy our hunger for information and social importance. The truth, however, is it does not.
Like a plagiarized essay off of the Internet for the sake of being used in a motivational speech, are we, too, simply copying and pasting the mistakes of our first parents? Are the edits we do to our copy pasted works simply the removal of hyperlinks and footnotes? Are we contented with knowing that what we did is wrong, and no longer caring about rectifying this mistake we have committed? The answer, sadly, is yes. Consequently, this means that we are also bringing pains to ourselves. But does the answer have to be always yes? You see, the realizations we learn from this information superhighway known as the Internet is not a copied and pasted form of the realizations Adam and Eve found upon biting of that magical fruit. We are in a different context that, while not exactly very different from the context we all know from the Bible, provides enough difference to make drastic changes possible. This context is our knowledge of good and evil prior to the discovery of the Internet. While it does provide us as much goods and evils as Pandora’s Box can hold, our very advantage to overcoming these mistakes is our knowledge itself of their goodness and badness. The first men were innocent, and were vulnerable to the temptations the serpent holds. The digital age men are not.
The Internet, while it holds so much more temptations than the serpent was able to offer, is not the result when we select the serpent and perform the keystroke Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. What makes it different is not its physical or spiritual structure, but the way we look at it in our changing times. God made the serpent, and God punished the serpent for its mistakes. Man made the Internet, and man can even kill the Internet if it offends him in any way. The only way the Internet can beat man is if man let it. Since man is real and the Internet is not real, this should not be the case, unless for some reason man is doomed to fall to stupidity, another harsh realization which if explained would occupy paragraphs the length of this whole essay. In the virtual world of cyberspace, where everyone is anonymous and a woman can be a man and vice versa, there exists a true freedom of thought that the physical world would never be able to accommodate. Everyone can be a troll, a faggot, a flamer, or a forum moderator with an awesome ban hammer. Everyone can be as powerful as he wants himself to be. But recall again how our knowledge of good and evil allows us to bypass these temptations that we can fall into without being seen by anyone else except God. This goes to show that reality is still more powerful than the Internet, no matter how many terabytes of data your Internet connection can transfer per second.
So I went back to my notebook, opened my browser once again to the search engine homepage, and typed “fac.” The familiar suggestion appeared once more. Knowing what I really need to do, and that the social networking site would not help me accomplish my paper no matter how inspired it made me to reflect on my life, I ignored the suggestion and continued, “Facts for reflection on humanity.” I found a very inspiring quotation of an ancient occult truism on one of the website results:
"God thought, God visualized, God spoke and the world was made and is sustained."
This simply means, according to my mere understanding of it, that no matter how many advancements man continues to create, we are still but creations of the one true Being. We may recreate all of His works through our copy and paste methods, but the output will never be exactly the same perfection God made in the beginning. Why? As I have already mentioned, our knowledge of good and evil, also known as our conscience if you haven’t figured that out yet, makes a small, but very drastic difference.
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