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Heard about Facebook changing its name to Meta? Well, that’s because the company wants to focus on building the “metaverse”, which is supposed to be the next big thing in the digital world.

So what is the Metaverse?

Simply put, the Metaverse is internet 2.0. It is like an alternate world, within ours, where we can play outdoor games at home, travel to places without vehicles, attend school, buy land, earn money, be at our workplace while in our homes at the same time and much more. Metaverse is a future combination of several technologies that make the internet more immersive. These technologies include augmented reality (think Pokemon Go or Google glasses), live video chats (like Zoom or Facetime), a digital economy (virtual items and coins), and virtual reality (like the Oculus Rift, which is now owned by Facebook/Meta).

While social media apps that we use today help us to text, call, and upload photos and videos, metaverse takes this to another level, wherein people will have their avatars that will meet in chat rooms and the experience is getting real day by day.

Read Here More about where the world is heading and what’s happening in countries like India

Metaverse can cause serious damage

Here are 3 main ways how Metaverse can attack your children:

1. It will straight attack their identity

If the devil can get you to question or mess up your identity as a child of God, he can lure you into all kinds of destructive behaviors.

While the Word of God enforces our identity as Image bearers of God (which is incomparable to who we are in the physical realm), in the duplicate world of Metaverse, every aspect of our identity will be completely customizable, as you can “live” as avatars.

The anxiety of self-creation is already crippling Gen Z and Millennials. The idea of being able to fictionalize your identity and project a version of yourself that differs from real life can really mess especially with teenagers and youth. In fact, the younger the child, the less they can discern between the real and the virtual worlds. So a young child’s brain may think that who he portrays himself as in the virtual world was real, or at the very least be confused by the two. This is where Metaverse can cause serious damage.

2. It leaves no room for accountability

Accountability is important because it removes the element of isolation from our Christian walk. Of course, our primary accountability is to God, but being accountable to someone (example, children to parents) can help us stand strong in areas where we can fall (Heb 10:24-25).

Metaverse, while not inherently evil, can offer an easy platform for secret sins. It offers you a platform to commit any “sin”, and, in a manner that seems more realistic than ever before, with little to no accountability. And all these can be kept totally private without anyone knowing what is happening in the virtual world.

This kind of freedom is dangerous – because you have “power”, yet no accountability.

3. It is addictive and highly intrusive

Because VR simulations have become so realistic, they can actually be scarier to children than similar content in movies or video games. In fact, one of the few studies on kids and VR showed that elementary aged kids had difficulty telling the difference between things that happened in VR and things that happened in real life.

Now Metaverse is much more immersive than VR in the sense that it literally puts the user inside its fake environment. This also means that any exposure to sexual content is going to be more intense than seeing it in a movie or video game.

If you are alarmed at the way demonic forces like pornography, abuse, sexual sins, teen sex, exploitation etc are attacking our children right now, then can you imagine the heightened level at which these evils will be exposed to in Metaverse, where children and youth could actually participate in such activities as it would become so real to them.