When Ray and I visited the Galapagos Islands, one of my favorite pictures was the two of us with a gigantic tortoise. Unfortunately, my big ol' red purse was on the ground in the picture too. So I photoshopped it out. 
At our son's wedding, one of the ushers wasn't wearing his boutonniere when it was time for the formal pictures. "Not to worry," the photographer said. "We can photoshop it in later."
During my daughter-in-law's holiday family picture taking, someone suggested photoshopping in a beloved uncle, since they were missing him. "No! He's been dead for two years!," someone else responded. "You don't photoshop in a dead person who couldn't have been here with us!"
We just had fiber-optic TV and internet installed. We can now pause and rewind live TV. Whoa.
The ability to manipulate digital images and sounds has spoiled us, I'm afraid, into thinking we should be able to manipulate the rest of life. It's a technologically enhanced update of the enemy's lies in the garden, enticing Eve to think she and Adam were entitled to be like God, a thinly veiled offer to make themselves as gods, just as he had.
And so we end up with people redefining things like marriage to include any two people, including those of the same sex. And a couple of gay men who successfully got both their names put on the birth certificate of their adopted son. This is the fruit of people redefining truth and reality according to their whims and desires.
And it is so much more serious than subtracting a purse or adding a flower.
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Great insights, Sue. Technology is meant to make life easier for people. In the end, it's still our own call if we let technology "edit" our lives. Free will, as we all call it.
If a gay couple were devout buddhists, do they go to hell? :-)
Sue,
Thanks for bringing up this reality of our culture. We don't have an "edit" button in life, but how desperately we want one because we have one for everything else!
I currently have braces on my teeth and our first baby is coming in April. I don't think I'll have them off by then, but my husband knows photoshop well. My debate, I really don't want them in the picture and the flip side is that I value authenticity - how authentic am I being? I think I know the answer to the debate, but I really want to press that edit button.
Thanks for your words.
Laura--thanks for your comment.
I can imagine looking at photoshopped teeth in your birth pictures for years to come, and every time feeling that guilty pang of knowing full well that's not how you looked when your baby was born!
Some days I'm not so sure the invention of something that builds up our denial systems is such a good thing, you know? :-)
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