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.

Russia's self-isolation would not have been too terrible if it had been in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. But on the threshold of the XVIII century, it would have become disastrous. The era of technology competition was beginning. Now the fate of battles and countries was no longer decided by the number of sabers or the thickness of the fortress walls. The quality of gunpowder and cannons, the maneuverability of ships and the accuracy of engineering and sapper calculations predetermined the outcome of wars. It is impossible to master military technologies without borrowing industrial technologies. It is impossible to master industrial technologies without mastering scientific technologies. Scientific technologies require the adoption of many features of thinking, behavior, value orientations, including those that were quite unusual for the way of life of Muscovite Russia.

And they would have been met with Avvakum's lamentations: "Oh, oh, poor Russia, why do you want German actions and customs!" 271. And this "poor Russia" would have followed the example of its supreme moral teacher and would have boasted of its intellectual integrity: "Yes, all the saints teach us that rhetoric and philosophizing are outward whoredom, peculiar to inextinguishable fire... I am neither a rhetorician nor a philosopher, I am unskilful in didaskalism and logotheticism, a simple man and full of ignorance."272 Let me remind you that in those days the word "philosophy" absorbed all non-theological sciences, including natural science.

Tsar Peter would then have embarked on the path of reforms, and he would have had to face the unanimous resistance of the entire Russian Church, "raised" on Avvakum. And here one of two things: either Peter would have broken the back of the Russian Church (and he had plans to introduce Lutheranism in Russia), or the church opposition would have broken the neck of Peter and his reforms. And then, in a few decades, Muscovy would have to choose which colony – Swedish, Polish or Turkish – to become by the end of the 18th century. And the corresponding faith would have been implanted in place of Orthodoxy in this colony.

But the schism led to the fact that the spirit of Avvakum "flowed" from the Church. Kiev rhetoricians and philosophers arrived and "replaced" Avvakum. They brought with them the spirit of the West, the spirit of scholasticism and secularism. The intellectual life of the Russian Church became more diverse and even contradictory (in the clashes between the Western spirit and the spirit of the Holy Fathers). But in the end, Peter's reforms found supporters in the Church itself (Saints Mitrophan of Voronezh and Dimitry of Rostov, Metropolitan Stephen (Yavorsky) of Ryazan and Murom, Archbishop Theophan [Prokopovich] of Novgorod). Peter's war with the church structure did not turn out to be total. In the Church there were forces that supported both his reforms and the transformation of Russia into a new, imperial Russia. Russia survived the cataclysms of the eighteenth century without severing its ties with Orthodoxy. And already in the XIX century, she healed most of the wounds that were inflicted on her church life by Peter's reforms.

Today, the "spirit of the Old Believers" is again condensing in the Church. As for the Internet, they scoff: "Internet". When you hear the word "computer", there are immediately associations: "beast", built in Brussels, and "mark of the Antichrist". And again the same readiness to sacrifice the future of one's country, one's children, and one's Church to gossip and prejudice.273

I myself was prejudiced against the Internet, as it is "accepted" in church life. But once, in a conversation with me, an Orthodox person who works professionally in the world of computers mentioned the Internet. I gave out a couple of routine "pious" phrases about the connection between the Internet and the Antichrist. And my interlocutor calmly noted that if the Internet is to be connected with the prospect of the reign of the Antichrist, then it is just the opposite. The Internet can become an outlet for Orthodox Christians and a means of fighting against antichrist propaganda. After all, the Internet is inherently uncensored. Related to this are its problems (the uncontrolled distribution of electronic, as well as sectarian ideas, moreover, with the deepest and most shamelessly blasphemous, often openly satanic criticism of Christianity), but this same uncensored nature and anonymity can enable Orthodox Christians to explain their views on what is happening in conditions where TV channels, schools, printing houses and newspapers are tightly controlled by the enemies of the Church. In the United States, the Internet has already become one of the most effective ways of preaching Orthodoxy and, in particular, polemics against Protestantism.

It's not about the dirt that is on the Internet. The point is in the "climate" that the person himself maintains in his soul. Biologists know the so-called "Cannon's Law": The constancy of the internal environment is a condition for free life. A warm-blooded animal is more independent of temperature changes in the external environment. But the same is true in asceticism, as well as in contacts on the Internet: everything is clean for a clean person, but a pig will find dirt everywhere: whether in virtual reality, or in ordinary reality. You need to enter virtual reality, but not live in it. You need to use it, but not live in it.