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The Evils Our Children Face
Never have times been so complicated. Never before have we done so much to complicate them. Evil can be subtle. It isn’t always furniture flying around a house. It takes many, many forms. For adults, it often seems all but impossible to grasp the problems facing our children. One reason why this is so is that in most families today, both parents must work. That leaves children more than enough time to find ways of getting into trouble, often innocently. There are many factors that contribute to this problem and as I said:. 1. Both parents working. 2. Single parenting. 3. The near extinction of moral values. 4. Lack of religion. 5. Extreme temptation. 6. Technology.
Both Parents Working For most families this is something of a necessity. With the ever growing cost of living, most families cannot get by on one salary alone. In some cases, Mom may stay home but Dad has to work two jobs to make ends meet. Both of these create several problems. The first is that children have too much free time on their hands. This can lead to mischievous behavior or worse. Teenage pregnancies have steadily risen over the years as a result. That is just one symptom. Another problem is that many working people have to commute long distances. That leaves them tired when they get home and as a result, they placate their children just so they have time to do whatever chores need to be done or just have time to relax and wind down. We will look at the ways children fill their time a little later. Single Parenting With the breakdown of the family unit, more and more people are raising their children alone. To do so, they must obviously work and in some cases, work multiple jobs. This mirrors the previously mentioned problem and it carries with it another: Children need both a male and female in their lives. The lack of parental supervision results in children who become just short of wild. They may be in the minority but they have a great impact on society. The Near Extinction Of Moral Values Today, we live in a society where anything goes. Our television shows are often sexually based. Foul language is now common to most shows. Unnatural lifestyles are now considered “alternate” life styles. Children are being taught that homosexuality is okay. This is not an attempt to bash homosexuals; simply put, children should not be taught about it. Our society lacks a collective conscience. Many parents turn a blind eye when it comes to their children having sex. That blind eye suddenly opens when they find out their child is pregnant. More and more teenagers are having sex and they are doing it at an earlier age than in decades past. It is not uncommon to find sixteen year olds who have had numerous partners. Often this is a result of what they have seen in their own parents. It also results in another act of evil: abortion. Drug abuse and alcohol abuse is as common as the cold. Again, some of this is environmental. Some of it is due to a lack of supervision. Even more is due to the “blind eye” factor. Stealing is common today. So too is rape. While these problems have always existed and always will, in our present we have drugs designed specifically for date rape. Somewhere along the line, our morality files became corrupted. I pity our future generations since the one thing we have learned is that we do not learn from our past. The Lack Of Religion Most children today know little about religion and they care even less. There are plenty of places to lay blame for this. Of course, it all starts in the home. If parents fail to practice religion, the likelihood is the children will follow suit. Here is where some of our moral files became corrupted. There is no foundation today for our children. Ask a few children if they pray and see what kind of look you get. On top of that, the large Denominations are splitting apart at the seams. The Catholic Church has been rocked by sex abuse scandal after sex abuse scandal. Where there was once great wealth, many Dioceses are bankrupt and both Churches and schools are being forced to close, shitting out those who rely on them. At one time, men were proud to be priests. Today, they are not so proud. The Lutheran Church is split in to two synods and the divide is opening. The Episcopalian Church is splitting in two over an openly gay Bishop. To illustrate for you just how little people care about religion, the government is now taking the words; “In God we trust” off of new money. All of this sends a terrible signal to our children. It leaves a void and something must fill that void. In many cases, it is self-styled witchcraft. Before anyone gets offended, I am not talking about true wiccans. My concern, and I have expressed this many times, is that books on spell casting and conjuring abound in all major bookstores. Young people buy these books and begin using them without the knowledge and belief systems to back them up. It becomes a self-styled version and that can be dangerous. In extreme cases, it can be deadly. I have seen the damage that spells can cause although it is not due to the reasons the spell caster thinks. It is damaging just the same. The lack of religion also leads to an increase of cult and occult activity. Hauntings are growing in large numbers and more demonic cases are occurring than ever before. As a friend of mine says, “If you are not driving the bus, someone else is.” He is so right. Something is waiting to pounce on the void that the lack of religion has created. That something is evil. Dabbling in the occult is the leading cause of haunting situations. Various rituals and spell casting are ways of directly inviting Satan into our lives. This year alone, I had two cases where problems arose after someone made a pact with the devil. In my 35 years in this field, I never had a single one until this year. Extreme Temptation Everyone is faced with temptations on a daily basis and if we are completely honest with ourselves, we give in to far too many of the bad ones. It might be drugs, alcohol or sex. It might be taking some money from an employer. It might be lying, speaking bad about others. There are many more but I think you get the point. If we adults face these temptations, what are our children facing? They have hormones to spare and they also have to deal with peer pressure. What they do not have is the maturity needed to resist the many temptations they face on a daily basis. All of the problems mentioned in the above categories are felt here. Technology Before going anywhere, it must be pointed out that technology is a wonderful thing. Modern science has grown by leaps and bounds and we have more freedom, more chances to learn and a giant encyclopedia at our finger tips. Yes, the Internet is a great thing. However, it is also a terrible thing, a double edged sword. There seems to be an endless supply of pedophiles out there and they often select their victims through chat rooms. Yes, the police are catching more and more of them but the sad fact is that far too many, and one is too many, are falling victim to these pedophiles. Yes, the Internet can be a great thing but it must somehow be regulated. If you think I am trying to limit or take away our constitutional rights, consider this: try typing “porn” into your search engine. You will find graphic porn sites littered across the Internet. You have straight porn, gay and lesbian porn, bondage, incest and just about anything you can think of. It is shocking and disgusting what is out there for anyone to see. The biggest evil is child porn and while I have not come across any sites that deal with child porn, I know quite well they are out there. I will not look for one because it would make me sick as well as furious. There are enough atrocities in this world and child porn ranks up there with the worst humans have to offer. For that matter, I will not look at any of those sites again. While I am in no way naïve, I was shocked to see how easily anyone, including children can find any of those disgusting sites. It is shocking and it is evil. Tell me Satan has nothing to do with that and I will tell you that we are an evil race. Regulation is needed in this area more than any other. You can learn to build bombs on the Internet. Is that necessary? I do not want the government deciding for me what I can and cannot have access to but there are some things where they must step in since we obviously do not have the ability to regulate ourselves. It is such a shame to see wondrous technology abused in this manner. Yet the Internet is only one area that corrupts our children. There are some flat out, hideous video games on the market. Cars run over people for points. The more you kill, the better your score. Shoot the police and score points. And on and on it goes. They proliferate the market today. Do games like these desensitize those who play them regularly? Probably. With gang violence, shooting people is like taking candy from a baby. Do video games contribute to that? I would have to say they do. What ever happened to playing sports? When I was growing up, you couldn’t keep me in the house. If it wasn’t stickball, stoopball or whiffle ball, football and hockey were the biggies. Today, children are too busy playing video games where they kill everything in sight and not moving around much. Exercise? Isn’t that a four letter word? You might think so. Obesity in children is rampant. People sue fast food chains because what they sell is fattening. Steps are being taken to regulate them but nothing is being done about the pornography. If a child eats at McDonalds every day, whose fault is that? Whatever happened to bringing lunch to school? So, our young eat fattening foods and get little exercise and we wonder why we have an obesity problem with them. That brings us to another little piece of technology that is a double edged sword too. I am referring to the infamous cell phone craze. Thirty years ago, who would have dreamed that you would be able to call anyone at any time? Everywhere you go you see children and adults on their cell phones. How did we survive five thousand years without them? Keep this in mind too. Cell phones are not just for talking. No, you can play video games on them, send text messages and even take pictures with them. This last item has violated more and more people’s privacy than anything else. You can also connect to the Internet with some of those phones. Happy joy. The technology craze has gotten out of hand. Our technology always seems to grow much faster than our maturity to use it. We don’t regulate ourselves and we don’t regulate our children. It is a frightening picture I just painted. Again, I pity future generations. I hope they can find a way to cope with a world spinning out of control. We must start taking control. People need to find God again. Then they need to teach their children about Him. © 2007 T. Cooney |
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