No matter what new technology is developed, there will always be some paranoid group of people (often religious) who will find a reason to go overboard in restricting it.
Today’s example number one:
A leading Catholic cardinal is warning Catholic parents to be careful when buying iPods and other wireless devices as Christmas gifts because they could be used by minors to access pornography.
You could make the same case for practically any other video, audio, or image display product going back to cave drawings.
And then there is this week’s reason to shut down the Internet:
Religious leaders in a tightknit Orthodox Jewish community in New Jersey have instructed parents who have Internet access in their homes to unplug from the Web, else their children will face expulsion from the area’s 43 yeshivas, or Jewish private schools.
"We really . . . don’t want children to see ladies who are dressed inappropriately. . . . If that one image goes into a child’s head, it can wreak havoc with all the religious instruction," said Rabbi Netanya Gottlieb, one of the yeshiva principals, according to the Newark Star-Ledger.
Maybe the Rabbi should talk to the Cardinal. He needs to be banning those nasty iPods as well.
Seriously, though, I wonder why rabbis and cardinals – and parents and teachers – think that isolating kids from the world will protect them for the rest of their lives. It makes more sense to teach children how to effectively filter through and deal with with the trash life tosses at them.
I’ve seen enough kids running around with pornography on their cell phone to know that this is good advice on the part of the Cardinal. He is warning the parents that they should use prudence and not be a window in to the immorality of pornography which will influence their children’s formation.
He never said the device was inherently evil as you imply – you’ve mischaracterized his statement altogether to make him sound rediculous perhaps because the fundamental message asking parents to use prudence is too obvious true to attack.
Wow.. he even says
“The technology itself is not dangerous, in fact technology in itself is good,” Keeler said. “The danger lies in the fact that there are not safeguards or regulations in place to protect children or teens from being exposed to unwanted pornography.”
In the article. Directly addressing the accusation you make in your post that he said the ‘circuits are evil’ – he points out that it is not in itself dangerous.
the only people who would put porn on their ipods and
cell phones are people who are adicted to it in the first
place, so it is un believeable that they think that all of
the children who have technology are that irresponsible!!!