Porn is not a pastime. It’s a pathway. Research confirms it. It’s an addiction. It’s a romance killer. It’s a competition the woman you say you love will lose every time. Porn makes a promise it can’t keep. –Andy Stanley, The New Rules for Love, Sex, & Dating

That is a bold and brave declaration that I wish I made first. It is all true.

The next day I read this in the Washington Post:

“But just as the tobacco industry argued for decades that there was no proof of a connection between smoking and lung cancer, so, too, has the porn industry, with the help of a well-oiled public relations machine, denied the existence of empirical research on the impact of its products. The science is now beyond dispute so can this crisis change?”

I wonder. Can porn go the way that cigarettes have? Keep praying everyone!

Science is slowing emerging that porn is doing actual damage to brain development. This is taking this porn problem into a whole new area which may give the danger of porn the attention it deserves. Finally. As that Washington Post article was titled, “Is porn immoral? That doesn’t matter: It’s a public health crisis.” Do you see the new argument that may slow down this horrible evil called porn?

Meanwhile you will have the opportunity to do lots and lots of reading as this health crisis becomes a popular topic. In all of this reading, may your heart remain full of compassion because at its root there is always a human soul who is being damaged. In another article that I read to prep for writing this article, this young girl’s soul sticks in my heart:

“I’ll be hooking up with some guy who’s really hot,” confided a high school senior in Northern California, “then things get heavier and all of a sudden my mind shifts and I’m not a real person: it’s like, This is me performing. This is me acting … And I don’t even know who it is I’m playing, who that ‘she’ actually is. It’s some fantasy girl, I guess, maybe the girl from porn.”  Source.

May this young girl’s soul also stick in your heart.

If you find yourself changing because of the porn you have seen, talk about it with someone safe.  There is hope.  There really is.

Let’s keep praying. And may this young man’s opinion catch on:

“Quitting porn is one of the most sex-positive things people can do.”