Zaxby’s, Friday night.  My wife, myself, and my four kids are enjoying chicken together.  We talk about school, about how the tongue torch sauce is really kind of wimpy, about why the music is so loud.  Good times.  As we are eating, I notice something:  Though the restaurant is full of people, we are the only ones talking to one another.

14 out of 17 people are on their smart phones, zombie-faced, while their friends sit next to them engaged in the same hypnotic spell.  This goes on for the entire course of our dinner.

About a week later, I am in the check-yourself-out line at Kroger.  A teenager with a store badge oversees the four self-serve registers from his command post, only he is not actually overseeing anything – instead he is playing a video game on his smart phone.  From start to finish of my transaction, he never looks at nor acknowledges me once.

What does this have to do with religion?  The Bible teaches us to love one another, to treat each other as we would be treated.  I am increasingly finding this difficult with the advance of tech in my life.  It is as if there are so many conversations, I cannot have many deep ones.  So many friends, I do not have many real ones.  I wonder if the quality of my love for people is being replaced by a thousand other less-important things.

I love technology and social media.  They are brilliant ways to connect, to keep contact with old friends, to network.  But I have seen a cultural change happen in the last decade or so.  The ease with which we can obtain nearly unlimited information is turning us into imbeciles.  People cannot read maps anymore because they depend on GPS.  People cannot problem solve or investigate because they depend on search engines.  And people are losing their ability to communicate with one another because they have become socially stunted.

A thousand online friends may see our best pictures and status updates, but how many people really know us?  The convenience of texting and emailing is taking the place of real communication.  People do not deal with their problems, instead they blog.  People do not confront, instead they rant online.  We are becoming a socially inept society of spineless false-selves, hiding behind our glamour shots and enhanced profile pictures, editing our online caricature until it looks exactly as we wish people thought we were.

A recent study of smartphone users found that 79% of users reach for their devices within 15 minutes of waking up.  Are we that desperate to see if anyone noticed us?

What about a real smile?  What about enjoying the food you are eating as you gaze into the eyes of the person you are dining with?  I say this, put all that online nonsense aside and find out what is inside someone’s soul.  Stop reading about Sally’s dog’s cute haircut and go love a human being.

In his short story titled The Pedestrian, Ray Bradbury tells a parable of our times.  In a not-too-distant dystopian future, a man is out for a walk one evening to get some fresh air.  The police stop him and question him, wondering why he is out.  “To see, to get some air” is his reply.  Their answer:  “Do you not have a viewing screen and air-conditioning?”  He is arrested for acting like a human.

How relevant this is to us today.  I challenge the reader to recover your humanity.  See how long you can go without checking your smartphone, you will notice that here are humans around you that could use a smile, an encouragement, a hug, some good-old-fashioned love.