When I was a kid I wanted to be superman. I pinned a towel around my neck, wore my superman underoos and ran around the house pretending to jump over tall buildings. I loved the thought of flying through the air. It was more than that though. I wanted to never lie. I wanted to save people. I wanted to be a hero. I would even dream of being a hero in real life by becoming the President and helping those who are in trouble. In return I would get lots of praise for my heroic acts and everyone would love me. To me that was the ultimate fantasy. But now let us go back to reality.

Now that I am older and we all are older reality hits us a little harder. Ethics are not as black and white as not lying. Ethics are not even gray like they were up to 1980s. Now with computers and decisions that are offhand meaningless, ethics are now in color and are harder to see. Take my iPhone. Now that jailbreaking has been declared legal I can say that I have jailbroken all of my iPhones since I got them. All it does is make it to where you can have complete control over every aspect of the phone and you are able to install apps that are not approved by Apple. Back in the day I wanted to stream my TV over 3G with a slingplayer and the only way was with a jailbroken phone. Nowadays the only reason I wanted it was to run Netflix on it, which it does quite well. I am just adding functionality to my iPhone. I am not stealing or copying anything.

But there is an evil side to this open source world. There is an app that can download appstore apps and itunes music without paying for them. "Download me" says the Tom Tom app that normally costs $50. This is a matter of personal ethics, of which we all have a certain degree of. No one will know. All it is is copying a pattern of 1s and 0s over to another device. But then you think about the concept of a store. Say Best Buy opened its doors and has no one in the store. There are no cameras recording anything. You can walk in and take anything you want and no one will ever know because the item you take magically reappears in their stock. Do you do it? Most people say no, that is not right. But in the digital world things are even more obscure. You can download movies illegally, you can download music illegally, you can look at unsundry things that you never even thought of, and no one will ever know. We all have freedom, but it is what we do with it that matters. Can you go to bed at night with a clear conscience? Can you wake up and not worry about Gods or others judgment, legal or otherwise? Has hypocrisy ran so rampant that the switch in the brain that figures out right and wrong is malfunctioning?

Not only in this colorful world is there a blurred question of illegal or legal, but there is a question of right and wrong morals. The lines are blurred again. Is it right to have gay marriage? Is it right to hate mosques? Is it right to have abortion? What if it is 1 day after or 7 days after or 7 months after? Is it right to have pre-marital relations? If everyone does it, does that make it right? Is it ok to be wrong? Bottom line is there is no one out there who has a right to tell you what you should do, but there is your conscience and if you are saved there is the Holy Spirit. I deleted that app that downloads apps. I did it because in my mind that is the right thing to do. I can sleep at night without worrying about repercussions about anything I have done. Granted I am no superman, but I still try to be. As I have gotten older I have realized ethics should not be about selfish ambition or getting what you can get away with. Ethics should be about looking to the whole picture of the effects of our decisions. If we all really wanted to stop and think, made a wise and responsible decision, and tought others about it our world would be a much better place. We would not go down dangerous roads and paths that lead to destruction if we just stopped and thought about the long term effects.

If everyone downloaded apps illegally there would be no more apps because there is no incentive to make them. If everyone could get married then there would be no such thing as the definition of marriage which is commonly known as being restrictive. If everyone hated mosques like the tea partiers then we would eventually have another holocaust. If everyone could have an abortion then there would be more potential murder than the holocaust even had, all because the science can not tell you if it is right or wrong. God can, but science can't. If everyone had premarital relations then why get married? If you read the Bible you can see that when the two becomes one flesh is when marriage really takes place. Our manmade definitions are obsolete compared to the truth. But, we are not the judges. We are not the jury. We are not the executioner. I cannot tell anyone what to do as I am a sinner myself with a large board in my eye. We are all hypocrites. But what if we all tried to not be one? Let us all admit we cannot achieve that perfectness, but let us all strive for it and make this world a better place. It all starts with making the right decisions. Then everything else will follow. That is the path to a better world. Peace to all.