Elder Bednar of the Mormon Church recently gave a speech to a youth group on the perils of social networking on the web and the creation of avatars in the virtual world. In my opinion he could have been just a bit stronger in his admonitions.
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://broadcast.lds.org/ces/2009/May/CES_2009_05_00_BednarDA__108662_eng_.mp3&h=63591608add01cb841b28b960f2a4f6d
My view of this is that we need to act in all worlds as a moral and enlightened being. If we hope or desire to be a good person at our core, we need to be a good person even when in private when no one is watching. Our minds are a completely awesome system, building new neural pathways when we have new experiences and reinforcing pathways when repeating activities and experiences. The pathways in the brain are the same whether we experience the activity in the real world or some other virtual world.
Many of the emotional ills that we see people having are a result of conflicting pathways in their brains. In one world they must follow one set of rules, in another world there are no rules. It is inevitable that once the pathways are built and reinforced in one world, these behaviors will bleed over into the other worlds.
We must always behave as a moral being. Which ever world we find ourselves in.
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