Tag: pornography

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Porn as a Drug to Conceal Truth

“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
“Remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more.” The Matrix, 1999
Morpheus offers Neo the truth. It’s a key scene in the movie, a crucial moment. Do we want to know the truth–or would we rather just go on believing “whatever you want to believe”?
Recent, secular recognition that pornography is bad for us is evidence that some Americans see the truth about the harm porn causes. But does that mean we will act on this truth–or will we choose to look away?
The Kansas City Royals are trying to discourage porn usage among the team members. A recent seminar for players featured speakers from a “non-religious” organization called “Fight the New Drug,” a group that invites participants to make an “informed decision regarding pornography by raising awareness of its harmful effects using only science, facts, and personal accounts.” Continue reading “Porn as a Drug to Conceal Truth”

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Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option: A Review

“[T]he Benedict Option is a call to undertaking the long and patient work of reclaiming the real world from the artifice, alienation, and atomization of modern life. It is a way of seeing the world and of living in the world that undermines modernity’s big lie: that humans are nothing more than ghosts in a machine, and we are free to adjust the settings in any way we like.” Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (236).

If you’re a Christian, don’t read this book unless you are truly willing to face the deep realities that Rod Dreher presents within its pages.

But if you are a Christian, you really should read this book.

It will move you to change your life.

And you will find it is not the same book some critics have described.

The Benedict Option is not a call for the faithful to cloister ourselves in a monastery or don white robes and sit on a mountaintop awaiting the Apocalypse.

Dreher calls us to a more focused faith walk, to “be the church, without compromise, no matter what it costs” (3, emphasis Dreher’s).

He calls us to a deeper prayer life. A life steeped in community with other faithful Christians. A life that looks very different from the lives many of us lead–pursuit of consumerism and busy-ness with splashes of church sprinkled between. Continue reading “Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option: A Review”

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Shaping our brains; shaping our souls

In When Breath Becomes Air, neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi tells the story of a patient who insisted on having a brain tumor removed against the advice of his surgeons.
The tumor was situated in a critical speech center in the brain. Excising it was likely to render the patient speechless for life.
Kalanithi was about to ask the attending physician why the surgery was proceeding when he received his answer. He met the patient.
The man dished out a “litany of profanity and exhortation” demanding that the doctors get “this thing out of my [expletive deleted] brain” (111).
At the operation’s conclusion, Kalanithi had a new question:”How was he still talking?”
He surmised that profanity “supposedly ran on a slightly different circuit from the rest of language. Perhaps the tumor had caused his brain to rewire somehow” (112). Continue reading “Shaping our brains; shaping our souls”

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HEADlines–Planned Parenthood, Porn, and Bathroom War Updates

Here are some updates on recent blog topics.
CBN.com “Sale of Baby Body Parts Hearing–Our Humanity Should Be Repulsed.”
A House committee is investigating whether abortion clinics are illegally selling body parts of unborn children for profit.
“For crying out loud, this is the Amazon.com of baby body parts,” Rep. Joe Pitts, R-PA, commented. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-CA, charged that the hearings were designed to “restrict women’s healthcare.”
Killing babies isn’t healthcare. Making this allegation is a red herring–designed to get us to look away from the topic at hand–the babies. Continue reading “HEADlines–Planned Parenthood, Porn, and Bathroom War Updates”

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Flying on Splinted Wings

Yet those who wait for the Lord Will gain new strength; They will mount up with wings like eagles, They will run and not get tired, They will walk and not become weary. Isaiah 40:31. 
Flying was the “forgotten dream” of a bird with a broken wing.
As he was walking one day, my grandson saw a bird that couldn’t fly. He wrote the incident in verse. The wounded creature could see other birds aloft but could not join them in the “fields of blue and white.”
People are supposed to fly. I don’t mean in the theoretical sense of the old saying that if God had intended our flight, He would have given us wings.
He did give us wings–wings of heart and soul. Sometimes, life crushes those wings. Crushed spirits can only watch others fly. Pornography is a monster that crushes the spirits of men, women, and children.
But America is double minded about pornography. Here is an example: Continue reading “Flying on Splinted Wings”

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Pernicious Porn Plagues the Church Too

Last week, I invited my high school English students to select the technology they thought was most important. If they could choose only one, would they choose the printing press, the automobile, or electricity?
I was a bit surprised that, among a group of new drivers or soon to be new drivers, no one selected the car. And to my disappointment, not many of them selected the printing press either. Even so, some of their arguments for choosing electricity were sound: medical advances, food preservation and storage, ease of access to useful information.
Continue reading “Pernicious Porn Plagues the Church Too”

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