This week, the celebrity gossip columns were filled with reports of Tony Parker's text-based infidelity and wife Eva Longoria's subsequent divorce filing.
The news will probably add some fire to a small-town pastor's controversial sermon on the evils of social networking.
This Sunday morning at 9:30am, Reverend Cedric Miller
(pictured) of the Living Word Christian Fellowship Church in Neptune,
New Jersey, will ask his congregation of 1,100 to delete their Facebook
accounts, in order to preserve their relationships.
"I've been in extended counseling with couples with
marital problems because of Facebook for the last year and a half,"
Miller told the Associated Press.
"What happens is someone from yesterday surfaces, it leads to
conversations and there have been physical meet-ups. The temptation is
just too great."
Eliot Subervi, a member of Miller's congregation told the New York Post that Facebook flirtations caused some trouble in his marriage
Reverend Miller is "not saying Facebook is the
devil," Subervi told PCMag. "He's just saying it's another place where
temptation can arise and if it does, take yourself out of the mix. It's
like—if you're an alcoholic, you wouldn't hang out at a bar."
Using another sermon-like analogy, Subervi linked the emergence of the Internet to the disapperarance of the town square.
"At one point we had a town square—where couples
would go to listen to bands, talk—and then they went home together. The
husband didn't stay at the town square while the wife went home," said
Subervi. "The Internet's become a town square where couples break off
and do their own thing," he said.
But for couples who simply can't bring themselves to delete their Facebook accounts, even in the name of God, Subervi says to practice full transparency.
"If you're married, share passwords and log-ins," he
said. "Or create a Family Page. I think [Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg
should heed the cry and make it easier to create Family Pages."
In another clash between God and technology this week, Guardian columnist Martin Robbins blogged
about a group of Brazilian evangelical Christians who have banned the
use of USBs because the symbol resembles the Satanic trident.