Minyan Man wrote:We hear a lot in church about Pornography but, we hear very little about shame.
A teenage boy can get aroused by a warmer breeze or just about anything else.
The mere fact that he can get aroused is not a sin. The implication is that he should feel
shame when he gets aroused. Doctor Brene Brown talked about it (shame) in the article.
The church should talk more about shame & less about pornography. What it is & what its not.
If a teenage boy should feel shame every time he is aroused, he would feel shame every
10 to 15 minutes. (If I'm remembering correctly.)
I think, my personal experience, is what really feeds the Pornography addiction cycle. A screw up occurs, shame get applied, the Holy Ghost vanishes (takes a vacation) and something steps in that draws towards wrong material. Effort is made to do what the Church has suggested to fix the desire to look/shame induced stuff, when failure occurs (a screw up happens), the push works a little faster this time. As the push increases in speed, the shame helps fuel the need which causes the push. Before long, not only does Pornography cause problems, but it feeds its own shame so that you feel shameful about using it and feel shameful so it gets used. The guilt is still there, for sinning, but is now overshadowed by the shame.
Shame weakens one's ability to connect with God, which ends up being caused by the Church, which frankly is just handing a freebie weapon to the other side. Lucifer doesn't need to do much to make full use of this, because the Church is providing all the material He needs. As long as the Church can't stop producing shame with guilt in those who make sexual mistakes, Satan can keep manipulating them freely. The Church needs to remove the shame, keep the guilt, and encourage a different way of thinking that strips power away from the shame and pornography. The Church also fails to provide real encouragement of the problem and only barely recently has anything about been able to fix the problem with help has been showing up in any talks. GAs rarely have actually spoken in a way to encourage those affected to remove the problem, and has flat-out dumped down on everything. The Natural God given sexuality is treated as being shameful, while the true "natural man" is ignored. God gave us sexuality, but we as a church can't seem to tell the difference between it and what the bad natural man is. When you get programmed/indoctrinated by the Church to view God's sexuality as shameful, then the actual bad natural man gets to move in and replace it, causing all of these problems or helping them along. That needs to change.
Even more important, the Church leadership needs to stop just talking about the problem and encourage its members to use their political ability to fight it. The big smash against smoking recently that has hurt the industries who make the smoking objects was due to public ads about what happened when using it, removing away all of the glamour placed on smoking in society. That has not really happened enough with porn and the church seems reluctant to do anything but continually criticize those who get caught in the problem. The Church has also taken a while to where they are willing to promote groups for recovery. I think the Church doesn't like having to acknowledge that it simply doesn't how to help and that it failed to act properly when porn was just beginning to start being the problem it is being described as today. The Church is having to play massive catch-up due to its previous failure which has helped let the problem grow.
