If you consider yourself to be pretty active on social media or other types of online communities, you may have experienced what many savvy internet users call trolls or being trolled.
Although many people use the term in contexts where a sense of humour is appreciated, the truth is that internet trolling can get pretty nasty and isn’t always a laughing matter.
Urban Dictionary defines trolling as:
“Being a prick on the internet because you can. Typically unleashing one or more cynical or sarcastic remarks on an innocent bystander, because it’s the internet and, hey, you can.”
Wikipedia defines it as:
‘In Internet slang, a troll is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting quarrels or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community…with the intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal, on-topic discussion, often for the troll’s amusement.’
Media attention in recent years has equated trolling with online harassment. For example, the mass media has used troll to mean a person who defaces Internet tribute sites with the aim of causing grief to families.
Being a troll is not a profession of some special skills. It’s a character or a persona that any person can embody online, hence even Christians can be trolls as well.
Now the question that often worries a lot of people, Christians or non-believers is, will trolls go to heaven or not. Put clearly, will they go to hell?
Appearing on the Breakfast Club Power 105.1 FM radio last week Australian Christian Churches pastor and Senior Pastor at Hillsong Church, Pastor Brian Houston said that trolls may or may not go to heaven but he is certain that they are a horrible force.
The 64 years old cleric who was the National President of the Australian Christian Churches from 1997 to 2009 and is currently the host of Brian Houston TV, a Christian weekly television program that airs in over 180 countries every week, said:
‘We I think it’s horrible, the ways people behave on the internet, trolls. I enjoy blocking them at an adrenaline rush. Blocking trolls.’
Asked why he enjoys blocking them and not just leave it to God as it the widely known Christian trait in face of attack, Pastor Brian replied:
‘Yeah, I do that as well. But, look I can’t comment on this person is going to hell, this one is not unless I know those people and even then that’s God’s job, that’s God’s work. But, I think trolls are a very negative force…for young people called suicide, depression. Yes, that’s not exactly the Christlike behaviour that’s gonna take you to heaven.’
In the interview Pastor Brian also talked about why he thinks many young people are turning to Church regardless of many thinking that it has become old, more boring and more irrelevant, his new book and an old rape case that involved his father.
Watch the interview below.
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