Changi Chapel

Such clamorous links litter the Internet, offering up celebrity gossip, bizarre crime stories, violent videos, and sexual images. As I write, the CNN home page features these seven hyperlinked titles as “Top Stories”:
    Crack-smoking mayor won’t quit
    Was pushed husband blindfolded?
    Woman killed in cougar attacks
    Misquotes fuel Tom Cruise attacks
    Deer pierced in the face by arrow
    Guess who’s back in skinny jeans?
    Do astronauts clean their underwear?

Augustine in his book "Confessions" called these "idle curiosities" which tend to numb our soul.

The allure of the world’s idle curiosities often “masquerades as a zeal for knowledge and learning” and “a thirst for firsthand information about everything."

In Augustine’s day (like ours), such idle curiosity took many forms. It was behind the bloodbath spectacles of animal killings and gladiator combat in the amphitheater. The ancient Coliseum provided a buffet of vain curiosities, all by design.

The public loved to be entertained by the massacres, the gladiator fighters, the bloodshed, which the emperors happily funded to boost approval ratings, all heightening into a popular showcase of violence, which very few pagan philosophers questioned.

But Augustine was a dissenting voice. Curious spectators were participants in the evil, he said.

Idle curiosities are miscarried thoughts. These idle curiosities fill our brains and hearts with disruptive temporal trash.

There’s an idle curiosity attracted to vanity and emptiness, and there’s a sanctified curiosity drawn in all things toward God’s wonder and beauty.

Much is at stake with the mouse or mobile device in hand. On this day — Augustine’s birthday — may God give us the spiritual discernment about what to click and what not to click when we browse the internet.

Have idle curiosities become normative in your life?

Tony Reinke
Desiring God Ministries, Minnepolis, MN

© Tony Reinke. Abridged, adapted and excerpted from his recent writings