Play is a necessary and inevitable part of the life of almost any person, not only a child. A game is the ability to be different. This is the identification of a person with the social role to which he is "attached" and in which others are accustomed to see him. If only you knew how monks and even bishops play! No, they are not playing with dolls or "war"... For example, you meet close people, for example, classmates in the seminary. Now they have different ranks, different positions in society and they live far from each other. All of them are serious and respected people. But I really want someone to communicate with you simply, in a human way. Without "reverends" and "bishops". I would say a heartfelt "you" to you and in a schoolboy, old, simple way "give out" what people from your current environment will not say. Someone from the outside will listen to this conversation and say: "Well, they are fooling around! And how can my lord (or my father) allow himself to be treated like this!"

And isn't it a type of game – traditional (including for the clergy) soulful Russian gatherings with a "communication intermediary" in the form of a bottle? No, not alcoholism, not drunken piggery. There is, indeed, such a degree of touching alcohol when wine cheers the heart and helps a person turn to his interlocutors with a different side, unexpected and very human. One of the brightest memories of my life is parties at the seminary. Then I was convinced of the correctness of the Apostle's words: "To the pure all things are pure" (Titus 1:15) For what is in the mind of a sober man is on the tongue of a drunken man. And what if cleanliness is still on your mind? And if in secular companies wine immediately turns into fornication (at least in the form of anecdotes), then the "relaxed" seminarians stepped over completely different taboos. For example, a taboo on stories about one's spiritual path. After all, in the Orthodox Church it is not customary to talk about the miracles that have happened in your life, it is not customary to talk about your experience of being a church and about your path to faith... But wine lifted this prohibition. And the man who seemed to be a cracker and a rationalist suddenly revealed such a living facet of his life...

So there are games in which a person turns out to be more human than in his official uniform. A person understands his irreducibility to his habitual social position. In this sense, play is a faint secular shadow of repentance. For repentance is the thirst to be different...

From the point of view of philosophers, anthropologists and psychologists, a game is a human action that is not aimed at making a profit. The game does not set goals that go beyond what is happening. She is closed in on herself. And in this sense it is unselfish.263 Therefore, you should not be alarmed every time you hear the word "game". It's just that everything should have its place: time for business, time for fun. Or, more strictly, in the words of St. Theophan the Recluse: "The work is one thing, the rest is the appendages."264 And, of course, this is the right place to recall the words of Blessed Augustine, who believed that all the misfortunes of mankind arise from the violation of the true hierarchy, when we use what should be enjoyed, and enjoy what should only be enjoyed (De diversis quaestionibus.

But if the world of adults is not devoid of game moments, then even more so the life of a child cannot be approached with the requirements imposed on the life of a schemamonk.

If we tell children that the computer is their enemy, they will end up hiding in the computer world from us. So, maybe we just need to control the contents of this "box", the quality of the games that are stored in it?

I know Orthodox families who buy video recorders and televisions,266 but do not connect them to shared television antennas. Such a TV does not show what is broadcast from Ostankino, but it can show children videos bought by parents. The Orthodox video library in such houses consists not only of church films. It has Soviet cartoons and – again Soviet – film classics: "our good old cinema". A child cannot live without a fairy tale, without a "multi-pulti". Today's American cartoons are monstrous. Many of these series are permeated with occult and pagan ideas and "miracles" ("Come to me, Spirit of Fire!", "My strength, do not leave me!"). And a video recorder gives the family a certain measure of independence from state television. Just as the tape recorder made it possible to listen not only to the music and not only to those songs with which Soviet radio stations inspired the Soviet people to build communism, but also to the "humanizing" songs of Okudzhava, Vysotsky, Galich, Nikitin, Gorodnitsky, so the video tape recorder can become an aid to creating a climate in the house that is different from the one that prevails in the country as a whole.

Without play, a child cannot grow. He learns about himself and the world in the game. You just need to choose the right games. If they teach ruthlessness and violence, then they should be avoided. If they develop ingenuity, reaction, teach them to foresee the long-term consequences of their steps, then let such games come to children. And there is no need to refer to the fact that violent games prevail on the computer market. What do we care about what prevails there. On the book market, too, most of the publications are thoughtless and inhuman. But this is not a reason to close all the libraries and burn our church books. The same applies to the computer market. It is diverse. And smart and kind games - albeit in a limited number - can be picked up on it.

If we ban Orthodox children from playing computer games, we will lose Russia. Yes, this is the price of our grumbling about computer civilization.

If a child is not accustomed to working with a computer from childhood, he will keep a respectful distance from the computer world and will never fully master all the possibilities of computer civilization. But civilization will be just like that – computer – in the coming century. Children from Orthodox families who have not been bought computers and other consumer electronics will grow up to be computer illiterate. They will be significantly inferior to their peers in the ability to adapt to university systems. Then they will lose significantly to their secular peers when looking for a job. Without knowledge of the computer, our children will be doomed to the role of laborers. Do we really want our children to be just shabes-goyim, servants? After all, without knowledge of the computer, the path to the elites of the XXI century will be closed. We will leave the elites - and it is good for us, because there is no place for Luddites there. By running away from one temptation, moreover, a hypothetical one, we can plunge ourselves into a completely real abyss.

People who are afraid of computers and at the same time translate the spiritual meaning of the Holy Scriptures into the language of computer technology (they say, an electronic credit card or passport is the "seal of the Antichrist"), pass a sentence on Russia: in their opinion, it will never become Orthodox again. They say, "It's time to give up hope of remaining faithful to Christ and still surviving in the big cities. Man will soon find himself at the crossroads of three roads: INN, death from lack of means of subsistence, and exodus to distant lands." According to the mud, this is a call to the Orthodox to become marginalized, to become outcasts who will not be able to influence the fate of the country in any way. Isn't that what the radical "democrats" dream of?! Hey, Mr. Senin, who publishes the Russkii Vestnik, have you not forgotten your conscience in the place of your former work, in the Central Committee of the CPSU? How dare you, living in Moscow, having accepted the TIN for your publication (and, I believe, for yourself personally), drive other people out of their homes and doom them to suffering?! The "Russian Messenger", voluptuously repeating the false prophecies of the false Pelagia of Ryazan about the destruction of the greatest Russian cities269 – has it not already become anti-Russian?!

Do Orthodox zealots really want Russia to be governed in the next century without any participation of Orthodox people? Do they seriously want science, business, journalism, culture, politics to do without the Orthodox? But if it is their opinion that prevails in the Church, then by what right will a handful of uneducated and embittered marginals then insist that "Russia was, is, and will be Orthodox"?270 On the contrary, for the sake of its survival, Russia will simply have to throw them away.

For several centuries, we have been living in a world of competitive technologies. The position of the detractors of computers confronts us with a choice: if they win and impose their opinions and their fears on the whole country, then Russia, finally deprived of scientific, technological, economic and military power, will be divided between the Turks, the Chinese, the Japanese and the Poles. Or (if the victory of the computerophobes is limited only to the framework of the Church) the Orthodox will forever lose the right to dream of any kind of "symphony" with society and the state.

This was already the case at the end of the XVII century. At that time, the reforms of Patriarch Nikon – for all their lack of foundation, ill-conceivedness, haste and cruelty – providentially saved Russia and Orthodoxy. Nikon's reforms caused a schism in the Church. As a result, from the patriarchal, reformed Church, came not only many people who, in their simplicity, identified the details of the rite with the essence of Christianity, but also people who in the pre-reform era largely determined the intellectual "climate" in the Church. Archpriest Avvakum is by no means an "illiterate village priest." The rector of the Kremlin cathedral, a man who gathered around him the best theological minds of his time, he could – in a different course of events – convey his worldview to the entire Church and the entire Kremlin. What would have happened to Russia and the Church in this case? If Avvakum had managed to defeat Nikon, then, according to the natural laws of psychology, the very thought of any reforms in the way of life in Orthodox Russia would have been taboo for several generations. The "censer curtain" between Russia and Europe would fall.