Archive for the 'Pornography' Category

Pornification: The Facts

Published on August 10, 2011 in Pornography. 0 Comments

Ed Stetzer with a sobering summary:

Sexual lust has been present with us since the early days of humanity. But in our modern era we are faced with free, 24/7, private access to images not fit to describe.  The Boston Globe online notes,

Not too long ago, pornography was a furtive profession, its products created and consumed in the shadows. But it has steadily elbowed its way into the limelight, with an impact that can be measured not just by the Internet-fed ubiquity of pornography itself but by the way aspects of the porn sensibility now inform movies, music videos, fashion, magazines, and celebrity culture.” [Boston Globe]

 Of people who use the Internet, 43% visit pornographic websites. Some 40 million Americans are regular visitors to porn sites, with pornographic downloads represent 35% of all Internet downloads. Of the 40 million regular visitors, 33% are woman, while 70% of men aged 18-24 visit porn sites monthly. [Gizmodo reference below]  It’s not just adults.  “Sex” and “porn” are among the top 5 most frequently searched terms for children under 18. Only 3% of adult websites require verification of age before viewing and some of those merely say, “Are you over 18? Click HERE if yes.”  [Online Education]

 The passion for pornographic images and the corresponding consequences have been around since the beginning of recorded civilization. Phone porn and sexting did not create the pornification phenomena but does enhance the problem. By the way, in a 2009 Harris Survey, 19% of teens surveyed have engaged in sexting. . .

Read the rest here.

Arousing ourselves to death

Published on May 4, 2011 in Church, Marriage, Pornography and Sanctification. 1 Comment

Kill this or it will kill you. Beat to death with a shovel if you have to as described here.  Kill it in any case.

Russell Moore writes about how churches should deal with the pornography epidemic:

The couple will typically tell me first about how stressful their lives are. Maybe he’s lost his job. Perhaps she’s working two. Maybe their children are rowdy or the house is chaotic. But usually, if we talk long enough about their fracturing marriage, there is a sense that something else is afoot. The couple will tell me about how their sex life is near extinction. The man, she’ll tell me, is an emotional wraith, dead to intimacy with his wife. The woman will be frustrated, with what seems to him to be a wild mixture of rage and humiliation. They just don’t know what’s wrong, but they know a Christian marriage isn’t supposed to feel like this.

It’s at this point that I interrupt the discussion, look at the man, and ask, “So how long has the porn been going on?” The couple will look at each other, and then look at me, with a kind of fearful incredulity that communicates the question, “How do you know?” For a few minutes, they seek to reorient themselves to this exposure, wondering, I suppose, if I’m an Old Testament prophet or a New Age psychic. But I’m not either. One doesn’t have to be to sense the spirit of this age. In our time, pornography is the destroying angel of (especially male) Eros, and it’s time the Church faced the horror of this truth.

A Perversion of the Good

In one sense, the issue of pornography is not new at all. . .

Read the whole thing here.

Tim Keller: How does the Gospel conquer pornography?

Published on July 15, 2010 in Gospel and Pornography. 0 Comments

HT: Z

Does your son have unsupervised access to a computer?

Published on May 28, 2010 in Pornography. 0 Comments

Would you buy your son a stack of pornographic magazines? from Randy Alcorn on Vimeo.

Justin Taylor: Steve Jobs, Iphones, and Porn

Published on May 20, 2010 in Pornography. 1 Comment

Justin Taylor (quoting Pete from Grace City):

Pete from Grace City has a post about Steve Jobs, Apple, and porn. An excerpt:

“Jobs has argued that he wants his portable computer devices to not sell or stock pornography.

When a critic emailed him to say that this infringed his freedoms, Jobs emailed back and told him to buy a different type of computer.

Steve Jobs is a fan of Bob Dylan. So one customer emailed him to ask how Dylan would feel about Jobs’ restrictions of customers’ freedoms.

The CEO of Apple replied to say that he values:

‘Freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin’ and some traditional PC folks feel their world is slipping away. It is.’

The interlocuter replied:

“I don’t want ‘freedom from porn’. Porn is just fine! And I think my wife would agree.”

In the most revealing line, Steve Jobs dismissed the critic thus:

“You might care more about porn when you have kids.”

Pause for a moment and consider what the above emails represent.

The CEO of one of the wealthiest, most successful international companies, responds to the email of a customer. Business prospers on the mantra ‘The customer is always right.’ Business wants the customers’ money.

But in this case, over the moral issue of pornography, Jobs is happy to tell customers to buy a different product. He argues that children and innocence ought to be preserved—and that trumps the dollar.

Google (with their motto ‘Don’t be evil’) rake in billions through pornography. Ranks of employees spend their time categorising and arranging advertising for pornography. (I know, I spent some time discussing the difficulties posed to a Christian who worked in their UK HQ.) Pornography is huge business, yet here is the CEO of Apple telling the pornography businesses to take their dollars elsewhere.”

Good for Jobs.

The rest here.

Hijacking the Brain: How pornography works

Published on February 12, 2010 in Pornography and Recommended Reading. 0 Comments

I have not yet read Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain .  But, every pastor probably should.  In the mean time, I have scanned Al Mohler’s thoughts.

Al Mohler:

We are fast becoming the pornographic society. Over the course of the last decade, explicitly sexual images have crept into advertising, marketing, and virtually every niche of American life. This ambient pornography is now almost everywhere, from the local shopping mall to prime-time television.

By some estimations, the production and sale of explicit pornography now represents the seventh-largest industry in America. New videos and internet pages are produced each week, with the digital revolution bringing a host of new delivery systems. Every new digital platform becomes a marketing opportunity for the pornography industry.

To no one’s surprise, the vast majority of those who consume pornography are males. It is no trade secret that males are highly stimulated by visual images, whether still or video. That is not a new development, as ancient forms of pornography attest. What is new is all about access. Today’s men and boys are not looking at line pictures drawn on cave walls. They have almost instant access to countless forms of pornography in a myriad of forms.

The rest here.

See also:

A study on the effects of pornography

Published on December 16, 2009 in Pornography and Recommended Links. 1 Comment

Be sure and read the comments at the end of Ed Stetzer’s post on pornography.

A new study done by Patrick F. Fagan examines the effects of pornography on individuals, marriage, family and community. Fagan is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Research on Marriage and Religion at the Family Research Council. He specializes in examining the relationships among family, marriage, religion, community, and America’s social problems. This study is important for everyone to read as it demonstrates that it has damaging effects on individuals and families. In the summary Fagan explains,

Pornography is a visual representation of sexuality which distorts an individual’s concept of the nature of conjugal relations. This, in turn, alters both sexual attitudes and behavior. It is a major threat to marriage, to family, to children and to individual happiness. In undermining marriage it is one of the factors in undermining social stability.

Social scientists, clinical psychologists, and biologists have begun to clarify some of the social and psychological effects, and neurologists are beginning to delineate the biological mechanisms through which pornography produces its powerful negative effects.

Some of the findings inside the study include:

    • Pornography is addictive, and neuroscientists are beginning to map the biological substrate of this addiction.
    • Users tend to become desensitized to the type of pornography they use, become bored with it, and then seek more perverse forms of pornography.

Read the rest here.

“We live in a pornified culture. So how do we raise sane, healthy children in this cesspool? What do you think?”

Published on July 16, 2009 in Pornography and Uncategorized. 1 Comment

Rob Dreher asks this question in a recent post, “We live in a pornified culture. So how do we raise sane, healthy children in this cesspool? What do you think?”

My initial rambling answers to Dreher’s question:

  • Point people to the grace and love of Christ.  Gospel, gospel, gospel.
  • Pray, pray, pray.
  • Be in church and be filled with the Spirit as we speak to one another with Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs(Eph 5:18-20).
  • Fight spiritual battles with spiritual weapons (2 Cor 10:4).  “They have divine power to demolish strongholds.”
  • Hate it.  Hate evil.  Hate the pain it causes.
  • Warn; Warn our sons; warn our churches –  about how addictive and destructive pornography can be.
  • Take radical action to get help if we’re struggling – - that was Jesus’ point (Matt 5:27-30).  Gouge out your eye.  Cut off your hand.  In the words of Frederick Dale Bruner, “better to go limping into heaven then leaping into hell.”  If this is your struggle, get help today.
  • Warn our daughters to watch for signs of pornography in the men they meet.
  • Rinse our minds with the Word often.
  • Be willing to have our children think we’re too protective.

See also Vitamin Z’s insightful points on this question (click here).

Excerpts from Rob Dreher’s post which includes dialogue from James Dobson’s interview with Ted Bundy:

Recently I had dinner with a friend who teaches in a private (secular) high school. He mentioned at one point how much he worried about his students, who were heavily into watching pornography. Notice the placement of the comma in that sentence. Porn is so ubiquitous and normalized among the (well-off) kids in his school that it’s considered the usual thing to partake of it. My friend went on to say that the situation was the same at the well-known (and relatively conservative) Christian university he’d attended. Among the male students, he said, “The question really wasn’t, ‘Do you use porn?’ but rather ‘Do you feel guilty about the porn you use?’”

He said he worked in a counselor’s role there as well, and routinely dealt with students who were seriously messed up by their porn habits. For example, he said, he believed that many of the guys he worked with had no idea how to relate to women in a healthy way; the power of pornography, working consciously and subconsciously, caused the men to have badly distorted views of women, views that stunted and even paralyzed the men emotionally.  .  .

You probably heard about serial rapist and killer Ted Bundy’s jailhouse confession to Dr. James Dobson (who is a psychologist — many people don’t know that) about the role pornography had in shaping the monster he became. Excerpt:

JCD: For the record, you are guilty of killing many women and girls.

Ted: Yes, that’s true.

JCD: How did it happen? Take me back. What are the antecedents of the behavior that we’ve seen? You were raised in what you consider to be a healthy home. You were not physically, sexually or emotionally abused.

Ted: No. And that’s part of the tragedy of this whole situation. I grew up in a wonderful home with two dedicated and loving parents, as one of 5 brothers and sisters. We, as children, were the focus of my parent’s lives. We regularly attended church. My parents did not drink or smoke or gamble. There was no physical abuse or fighting in the home. I’m not saying it was “Leave it to Beaver”, but it was a fine, solid Christian home. I hope no one will try to take the easy way out of this and accuse my family of contributing to this. I know, and I’m trying to tell you as honestly as I know how, what happened.

As a young boy of 12 or 13, I encountered, outside the home, in the local grocery and drug stores, softcore pornography. Young boys explore the sideways and byways of their neighborhoods, and in our neighborhood, people would dump the garbage. From time to time, we would come across books of a harder nature – more graphic. This also included detective magazines, etc., and I want to emphasize this. The most damaging kind of pornography – and I’m talking from hard, real, personal experience – is that that involves violence and sexual violence. The wedding of those two forces – as I know only too well – brings about behavior that is too terrible to describe.

Read the whole thing here.

Pornography and the Disintegration of America

Published on February 26, 2009 in Culture and Pornography. 1 Comment

Al Mohler has written a post that documents the alarming spread of pornography.

The scourge of pornography is now so pervasive that it begins to define the culture at large.  America is fast transforming itself from a society that allows and markets pornography into a culture that is pornographic.  Boundary after boundary is being transgressed.

Adding insult to injury, courts have ruled that public libraries have no right to use filters that prevent viewing of pornography on public computers.  Now, the marketers of pornography are looking to mobile devices and cell phones as the next frontier.  There is no safe place in a society that embraces pornography as a major industry.

Just when you think you are past being shocked, The Washington Times now reports that pornography “is a major workplace problem in contemporary American society.”  Just look at what the paper reports:

The porn-at-work phenomenon is pervasive enough, a 2007 survey by the American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute found, that 65 percent of American companies use porn-detecting software – a dramatic increase from 40 percent in 2001.

Read the whole thing here.