Saturday, June 12, 2010

An excellent post on the dangers of pornography

I just had to write a bit about this excellent post and the discussion that happened thereafter in the comments.  A friend, Ryan Peck,  who is becoming a dear friend of mine that I met at the incredible SonRise New Frontiers program in May wrote an excellent post about the dangers of pornography.  Before I forget I want to direct all interested parties to my church's very excellent website combating pornography.
In the comments I wrote a few different things, but here is the most relevant.
From a Christian point of view it's really not much of a debate on the dangers of pornography.  The scriptures clearly teach about lust.  There have been several great books and articles from about keeping one's "thought life" clean, the living prophets have spoken out again and again and again on this subject.
There are a few things I need to say here.  First is I've fought this fight, and for many years I let pornography get the best of me.  It left me feeling bad about myself, much of that was because of my insanely awesome tendency to beat myself up.  Part of the reason I felt bad was because the spirit of the Lord does not dwell in unholy temples, and that means I didn't have the spirit with me during and after participation in these activities, so naturally I felt a decrease in all the qualities that the spirit brings and magnifies in ourselves (see Galations 5).  OK so that's pretty well established, but what about those who may not share my faith. This may not be all that obvious.
So let me say that I'm calling pornography bad, and when I say bad I mean specifically that I'm setting up a system of make believe.  Every system of make believe like science, religion, disciplinary training, communities of practice, etc has what they consider to be good and bad things, and what they mean is they want them (good) or don't want them (bad).  This idea of making believe I'm borrowing very liberally and with attribution from Barry "Bears" Neil Kaufman several of his books.  The reason why it's bad is that it leads to thoughts about sex with people other than your spouse.  For me, that means away from my wife Vanessa who will be my eternal companion if we choose to stay true to the sealing that was promised to us in the San Diego Temple.  What I'm saying is I'm calling an eternal family a good thing, something I want.  In the simplest possible terms: there is no possible way that pornography will not lead you away from a forever family, let alone a happy and enduring relationship in this life.  This is why I call pornography bad, well not just bad, VERY bad.  Note that I'm not making any kind of judgment on those who use pornography, but rather the thing itself, and the resultant consequences that show up in peoples lives.  What I'm saying is that I'm not a bad person because I felt addicted to pornography for all those years, and those other people who freely choose to do so either, but there are certain unavoidable consequences, and I didn't want that in my life, and those who DO use pornography and say they want the same things that I do are, like I was, totally deceiving themselves.  There is no half way, there is no "just a little won't hurt" there.

2 comments:

  1. Good stuff! I'll steal that link to the help website from your church.

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  2. @Ryan Please do! It's a really good resource in terms of content, and unlike some other efforts by the church is really well done from a design perspective.

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