My oldest son was sitting at my computer the other day, and as I walked by I noticed that he was looking through the AUTOEXEC.BAT file. This file has command lines and program pathways the computer follows whenever it is turned on and booted up. He was frowning at one particular line in the file. Tapping his finger on the screen, he said,

                 "That shouldn't be there." 

He found a line which indicated that a virus had infiltrated my operating system.  It was pretty easy for Matthew to recognize the virus because he looks at my AUTOEXEC.BAT file regularly. Since I had  so seldom looked at that file, I wouldn't recognize what Matt did. 

He investigated further and found that the "worm" as he called it, had proliferated itself in several places throughout my operating system.

Fortunately, he tracked all the files down and obliterated it from my system, but he warned me that it would probably be back, since it had come in through an e-mail message. 

Have you downloaded any "viruses" lately?  How would you know if you did? Isn't it wise to frequently compare our operating systems to the guidelines in God's Word so we can recognize viruses BEFORE we download?

 On a computer, a virus becomes evident when the infected computer does something wrong. The virus might cause anything from an annoying error message to an outright hardware meltdown. And computer viruses are generally designed by  whoever writes them to replicate themselves, thus they spread to other computers.

Our bodies are hardware - our philosophy of living is our software. 

Our operating system determines what our hardware will do and what we believe has a lot to do with what we download through our eyes and ears.

The false nonsense called  "evolution" is being uploaded from the minds and textbooks of professors in our secular schools and colleges. That virus was written by satan himself, and it has been embraced by everyone who doesn't want to be accountable to the Creator.  Nowadays at so many of our Ivy League schools, professors who even mention Intelligent Design are frequently marginalized and persecuted.
 

Sometimes viruses are downloaded inadvertently, but they're never UPLOADED by accident. Old satan is the one who uploads them, and he knows exactly what he's doing.  There are a lot of intellectuals who are actively pushing satan's agenda.

For instance, I heard the story of a young teenager named Ted Bundy who got into the habit of riding his bicycle past a trash pile near his neighborhood where pornographic magazines were frequently discarded. He quicly became hooked on the pictures and what God had designed into his physical "program" as normal desire was perverted by his download of satan's "virus". A few decades later he

was executed as a convicted serial killer.

    "When lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: an sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death."  James 1:15

Many people probably remember the film "The Deer Hunter" which was released right after the Vietnam war. One particularly gripping part of that movie was a scene where two American prisoners of war were playing a game of Russian Roulette at the behest of their Viet Cong captors. They managed to escape by convincing the enemy soldiers to put two bullets in the revolver instead of just one. 

 In the months that followed the release of that film, there were several reports of teenagers across the U.S. inadvertently killing themselves while playing Russian Roulette. The folder in their mental files called "common sense" was corrupted by a  destructive virus that destroyed them.
 

Of course, there are those who claim that what we see at the movies has nothing to do with decisions we make in the real world. That's an interesting point of view, but if that's so, why did the sales of Wayfarer sunglasses go up 1700 percent after the release of Tom Cruise's film "Risky Business"? 
 

Question: Do you take vitamin and mineral supplements? I do. They can be rather expensive, can't they?  Second question: Do you feel better as soon as you swallow the first capsule?  How about a week later?  How about a month later?  Can you say for sure (if you do feel better) that the vitamins made it happen?  Most of us who take vitamins do it with the idea that we'll be better off in the long run, don't we?
 

Changes in our mental, spiritual, and physical metabolisms can take place  quickly, but they usually happen incrementally. We don't instantly get sick when we contract a virus. Sometimes it lies  dormant for awhile before doing causing problems. And those of us who don't believe we're being affected by the stuff  we eat, smoke, drink, dip, read, listen to, watch, or think about are deceiving ourselves?

   "The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light: but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness. Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness. If thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light."  Luke 11:34-36

Directing our attention at evil things invariably becomes a "virus" in our minds and hearts, producing evil thoughts.  How many serial killers were hooked on porn for years before they began acting out their fantasies on real people?  Ted Bundy started that way!

   "For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, falst witness, blasphemies."    Matthew 15:19

The high school student in Paducah Kentucky had never fired a real pistol in his life, but when he opened fire on a group of kids who were having a prayer meeting, he fired eight rounds and hit eight kids, three in the head, and five in the upper body. Had he been training for the Secret Service or the FBI he would have received a perfect score. It was awful that  he had been desensitized the way he had. In spite of his incredible marksmanship, the only experience he had was hundreds of hours playing a violent point-and-shoot video game called

 "Doom".
 

First person shooter games aren't intrinsically evil, particularly if they deal with war situations.  Games like Grand Theft Auto, however, are more sinister, since they deal with situations where innocent people and police officers are the targets.

So why do some kids depart from reality after all those hours of video game playing and some others don't? Nobody knows for sure, but I have a theory, for what it's worth.
 

Our military discovered during WWII that only 15 percent of the soldiers in the  trenches were actually shooting at the enemy. The rest were either shooting above the enemy's head or were sitting in the trenches quivering with fright while others were fighting. Many of the soldiers werent' afraid to die, they just didn't want to kill anybody, not even an enemy! It's unnatural for most of us to want to kill another person, and for a soldier in an armed conflict, this part of our design is a liability. 

To overcome this problem after the second world war, the military changed its targets from round bullseye targets to man-shaped popups.  This began to change the way the soldiers saw things.  In battle, they no longer saw men out there on the business end of their gun barrels.  They just saw targets. In the years between WWII and the Vietnam war, the percentage of soldiers who would fire at the enemy without hesitation grew from 15 percent to 95 percent and our military became one of the most feared war machines in the world. 

Example: While bad government policy made Vietnam a losing proposition, and we lost 58,000 soldiers in that war, the enemy casualties were much heavier. The Viet Cong lost over 70,000 of their troops in the Tet offensive alone, and it only lasted for two days! In spite of the way the war ended, our troops won every major battle they fought in Southeast Asia.
 

Okay, back to the video games. Assuming the 15 percent figure is still accurate, then 1.5 kids out of ten would fire without thinking anyway. Most of that 15% either doesn't play video games or they have other factors in their lives that keep those potential killer tendencies in check. It would seem that the school and workplace killings might be carried out by a small percentage of the same 15% who would have been found actively shooting at the enemy in WWII. This would account for the fact that not all kids who play point-and-shoot video games become school or workplace shooters.

Those of us who think we're not capable of some of the evil we read about in the newspapers need to think again.  With the right sort of desensitization and the right psychological stimuli, any or all of us might become far more wicked than we could possibly imagine.  What we choose to think about will determine our actions and attitudes.

   "Finally, bretheren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsover things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."
       Philippians 4:8

  "Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life."  Proverbs 4:23

Once more, have you downloaded any "viruses" lately?

There many other evils in our society besides school shootings, rape and serial killings. These are just generally the only ones that still shock us when we read about them in the paper. The sad part is that they shock us less and less ever time we read about them, and they should be more alarming each time. This seems to  be another form of virus.   R.W.M.