After getting all too serious on the subject of religion yesterday, I thought it’d be a fun idea to run off tangentially and talk about everyone’s favourite topic: kiddie porn.

I should probably cease the sensationalism and just tell you what I really want to talk about: the current fad of teenagers sending naked, or very revealing, photos of themselves to other people. It’s even garnered its own portmanteau word: sexting.

Sexting is the same as texting, only… sexing it up a little, either with a photo, or even a little video clip! People have been doing it for years now — God knows I’ve received my fair share of dirty SMSes over the years (even some very naughty photos from angles that to this day I can’t work out). The problem is, kids have started doing it too; really young kids. I’m talking about 9 year-olds taking photos of themselves in just their underwear and sending it to a friend. More worryingly they’re being sent to boyfriends and girlfriends too.

If you don’t find that idea worrying enough, it’s also quite common for children to upload photos to social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo — these kids just can’t get enough!

The reason it’s come into the media spotlight is because these images could be considered offensive, illegal material. If a girl sends a lewd photo to a friend of theirs, their friend could technically be arrested on the grounds of collecting child pornography. If their friend then goes one step further and uploads the image to a website, or sends it to other friends, they are then distributing child porn! This is an even more heinous offence, an offence which can land them some jail time, and a juicy entry in the sex offenders register.

A recent report found that 10% of all imagery and photography involving under-age children is self-produced — and that startling fact was from a child protection agency that has catalogued more than 9 million articles!

The risk here, as always, is that kids don’t know the potential harm that might befall them. Long-gone are the days when children were hardly ever let out of their parents’ sight. Long-gone are the days when innocence and chastity were virtues to be extolled above all others.

But most importantly, long-gone are the days without computers and mobile phones. They are undoubtedly the root cause of the problem, and the reason I am so interested in this ‘outbreak’ of self-manufactured kiddie porn. Computers are so infinitely powerful; they put so much raw, unrefined power at our fingertips that it must come as no surprise that uneducated use of them can result in alarming situations like this.

We, as a population, know so little about just how much a computer enables you. In just 200 years the world has gone from being immensely huge and undiscovered to infinitesimally small, with every nook and cranny inspected and exposed — because of computers! Just 20 years ago you would’ve had to wait 5 days for a response to a query by mail. Today you get antsy if you have to wait more than 5 seconds for Google to return the correct result.

Kids, normal, non-prodigal kids, must surely be unaware of the self-inflicted risks they are introducing by taking photos of themselves. How can they possibly know the risks when the normal source of such  information, our parents, aren’t any wiser? In the past, parents knew what dangers their children could expect. Those potential dangers changed slowly — from poisonous plants, to motor cars, to getting into a car with a stranger with a lolly pop — so slowly that parents could easily keep a tab on developments.

Fast forward to today and it’s simply impossible to keep up with all of the possible pitfalls that your children might unwittingly stumble into. The parents don’t know, the kids don’t know, and I would bet that even the security services are playing catch-up most of the time.

I’ll leave you with this hypothetical situation (although it’s probably not all that hypothetical…)

A young girl sends an older boyfriend a naked photo of herself. The boyfriend uploads it to the internet (not maliciously, perhaps just to another male friend, who knows). Then, an online predator finds the image which helpfully had a filename that matched the girl’s real name.

This predator is only a couple of steps away from finding the girl’s address, checking out her home on Google Maps Street View, analysing the apparent security, the number of cars outside, if there’s a fence or not and… well, you get the idea.

The Internet is a predator’s haven; for your sake of your children, or your friends, tell them to value their little, still-innocent bodies a bit more.

Ah, now this is a meaty one. I’m not going to name any names, and I ask you kindly to do the same. I’m going to speak in general terms and hope I don’t offend too many people. But if you’re a believer of some kind and I make you question your faith… don’t hurt me! It’s a good thing to re-evaluate your environment occasionally. Things change, don’t forget. Something that made sense a while ago might not make sense now. With that said, on with the show.

* * *

Religion is technology. Something — something new, some kind of data — is discovered. It’s then honed and refined. And then it becomes a religion. Religion is simply ‘high-tech’.

Along the way there are fads and cults but ultimately, if it passes through its trial by fire, it becomes a religion.

Big pill to swallow, and I need to provide an example. Let’s take Jesus (sorry Christians), as he’s as close to omnipresence as things get. Look at your surroundings right now: your computer, iPhone, TV, keyboard. Pretty awesome eh? Do you know how any of them work? Maybe. Mostly they just work, you don’t question it. You sure as hell don’t call your computer a ‘box of miracles’ — well you might, but most of you probably don’t.

But that’s what it is. The fact that we can send data from one side of the planet to the other in a fraction of a second is a frackin’ miracle. We have the knowledge and power to surgically replace faulty hearts and perform crazy experiments at a sub-atomic level — that’s a damned miracle.

Only it’s not. It’s just technology.

Do you really think Jesus was a miracle worker? The son of God?

Just because I control the flow of electrons and fly through space at the speed of sound… does that deify me? Do you prostrate yourself before me; am I the Messiah? No — at least I doubt it. I’m merely harnessing technology.

You see, all these fields, spheres of thought and belief are really, really closely entwined. I’m close to a resolution, an epiphany: I can just about put my finger on it but it’s… slippery. Magic is the key to belief — mystery, that is. You don’t believe in something tangible, something real — you don’t believe in your car. You believe in true love, God, UFOs.

But there’s no such thing as magic, beyond impressive use of technology or new inventions. It’s magic until you learn how it’s done… and then it becomes mundane.

Is religion the same thing? Was talking to God, receiving divine prophecy and turning water into wine what passed for ‘high-tech’ 2,000 years ago? Did Jesus have some sterilised bandages or knowledge of Eastern medicine that cured large swathes of sick people? Does that make him a work of wonder, or merely a nice guy with some great tools? Why don’t we drop to our knees and deify Sagan or Einstein, our modern-day masters of the universe?

Our understanding of the universe is so great and our critical analysis now so exacting that magic and mystery are finding it impossible to gain a foothold in today’s society. Fads will form, and cults will climb to power and become religions, but as technology improves and shines a light on their inherent fallacies, they will fall — as soon as the curtain is whisked back and the truth revealed, the mystery will melt away. The magic castle will crumble and the religion, cult or fad will perish.

Without magic, there is no no faith, no prayer, no belief. Without mystery — the single most powerful force in human nature – there is no no religion.

In 50 years our understanding of the universe and humanity will be so great that I’ll be able to zap your body and fix it of all maladies. No side-effects. No caveats. What will existing religions do then?