Latest Stats and Facts on Punography

[Jeff Lebowski]

I guess I see that as blunt but not mean-spirited. I did not mean to hurt them and wonder if that is possible in discussions like this one. I am in hand-to-hand contact with SU here all the time. I do think they were having a little joke at church members' expense, and I always dislike that. I don't sit around with my Catholic friends and make snarky comments about how weird I think transubstantiation is.

You don't ever joke or tease each other about aspects of your religion? I have a tough time believing that.

[LA Ute]

You don't ever joke or tease each other about aspects of your religion? I have a tough time believing that.

Now we are getting into nuance. I only joke with Jewish friends, for example, about Judaism, when it is clear that they welcome the ribbing or joking. Just seems like good manners to me.

But I do not want to blow this out of proportion. I'd rather talk about the other issues I noted than discuss whether Robin and SU look like jerks.

[Color Me Badd Fan]

A kid I went to school and Church with lost it all because of porn. He got married in the temple and my dad hired him to work for his company. My dad had to fire him when he found tens-of-thousands of images downloaded onto his work computer, he had turned his desk around so that the monitor faced away from the entry to his cubicle. According to logs, he would sit and view porn for hours a day at work. One night their infant daughter was fussy, so he volunteered to stay up with her. Awhile later his wife came downstairs to find him holding the daughter in his left arm while watching porn and masturbating with his right. They got divorced. Years later, an ex-girlfriend of mine was dating him. He would always claim to be out of town; one time he called her to tell her he was out-of-state and couldn't get home in time for a date, and then she heard the garage door of his house open (it has a distinctive chime apparently). She went over to his house, walked right in, and found him.

I'm not saying that he was this way entirely because of porn, but it had to have negatively influenced the defective personality he already had.

Yikes, remind me to block out IFC from my satellite. No more viewings of The Dreamers for me. I don't want to become the guy you're describing, maybe the scare tactics do work.

[wuapinmon]

wuapinmon personal experience seems to contradict this thesis.

I don't know much of his background, but it doesn't seem like his folks treated it like it was a big deal. It didn't seem like it was a big deal until he joined the church.

Of course wuapinmon can speak for himself.

It wasn't a big deal until I joined the Church. I was ashamed because everyone was always nervously talking about it. Before, I looked at porn. After I joined the Church, I 'abused' porn. The guilt was there. But one day I realized that I had wasted four hours looking for the 'perfect' image; it became an obsession. That's when I knew it was bad. I thought once I got married that I wouldn't need to look at it anymore, but I was shocked to realize that I had porn images in my head when I was with Mrs. wuapinmon, and I was too ashamed to tell her until right before our 1st kid was born. I came clean to her, completely. To her credit, she understood how it happened for me, and has never gotten mad about it, even when there were relapses.

Years later now, my brain still tries to make porn imagery out of people I see. To me a bad thing about porn is how it doesn't create an environment in which virtue can "garnish" your thoughts "unceasingly." I feel shallow when I look at porn. It also creates completely unreal expectations about sex.

Slavoj Zizek also has some interesting stuff about porn being a hyperreal accumulation of signs that tries to hide the awfulness of the Real.

[wuapinmon]

Yikes, remind me to block out IFC from my satellite. No more viewings of The Dreamers for me. I don't want to become the guy you're describing, maybe the scare tactics do work.

I'm not using it as a scare tactic. I merely responded to SU's request for something beyond an urban legend. I would've never brought it up otherwise. And, you'll notice that I said that porn only exacerbated ingenerate character flaws in his personality (and mine), not that they caused them.

[SeattleUte]

Now we are getting into nuance. I only joke with Jewish friends, for example, about Judaism, when it is clear that they welcome the ribbing or joking. Just seems like good manners to me.

But I do not want to blow this out of proportion. I'd rather talk about the other issues I noted than discuss whether Robin and SU look like jerks.

Ah, the old belief card. If an idea is wrong or even harmful, why should it be immune from attack because it is clothed in the garb of religious belief? The fact is religions should get no exemption, particularly when they intrude in matters of scientific and secular concern, which they inevitably do because fundamentally they are concerned with the same subjects as science and the law. (Anyway, is the "belief" I'm criticizing policy or doctrine or something else?)

You may think I'm a jerk calling out a given belief as illogical and/or harmful, but the norm in our society is that I'm doing nothing wrong. Huge bestsellers over the past year, including one that was short listed for the National Book Award and another by a leading evolutionary biologist, have done the same thing I have. So have Socarates, Mark Twain, Einstein and many others. If I'm a jerk so are they, and so is anyone who attacked Bob Jones University, the priesthood ban, etc. Here is a link to some very fine quotes of this sort.

http://richarddawkins.net/quotes

Here is one that makes me think of the priesthood ban:

The objections to religion are of two sorts - intellectual and moral. The intellectual objection is that there is no reason to suppose any religion true; the moral objection is that religious precepts date from a time when men were more cruel than they are and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow.

--Bertrand Russel

Doesn't this quote make you think of Mark E. Peterson spouting religious belief at a Mormon university in 1954?

So here's what I believe to a high degree of certainty about porn. It probably doesn't cause any more suffering and disfugurement in any given year than bicycle riding. Probably less. It's a symptom of a missing element in a life, an element that would be infinitely more satisfying and fulfilling. But so are video games and television. Compulsive behavior can have many manifestations, including tormenting one's spouse, obsessive neatness, work aholism, etc. Porn is not only legal, it's protected by the First Amendment as a fundamental right. Like alchohol, which indubitably has ruined and does ruin many lives, it shouldn't be illegal. I also think that porn is a convenient excuse for larger failings. It is far form the bogeyman Mormons make it out to be. This I believe and I submit I'm in the mainstream on this.

[DU Ute]

We have a Mark E. Peterson reference. This thread is now complete.

[SeattleUte]

I'm not using it as a scare tactic. I merely responded to SU's request for something beyond an urban legend. I would've never brought it up otherwise. And, you'll notice that I said that porn only exacerbated ingenerate character flaws in his personality (and mine), not that they caused them.

I'm sorry but a third or fourth hand account related by an anonymous person on the Internet citing disgruntled former girlfriends and spouses falls in the category of urban legend.

[I.J. Reilly]

So have Socarates, Mark Twain, Einstein and many others.

This is fast becoming a favorite of mine! I'll add it to my creepy list of SU personal favorites, along with #12, another favorite.

[SeattleUte]

We have a Mark E. Peterson reference. This thread is now complete.

Everytime LA ute says, "Leave us alone, this is a religious belief!" he's going to get Mark E. Peterson. It's a convenient short hand.

[Donuthole]

I'm sorry but a third or fourth hand account related by an anonymous person on the Internet citing disgruntled former girlfriends and spouses falls in the category of urban legend.

Kinky!

[ERCougar]

So here's what I believe to a high degree of certainty about porn. It probably doesn't cause any more suffering and disfugurement in any given year than bicycle riding. Probably less. It's a symptom of a missing element in a life, an element that would be infinitely more satisfying and fulfilling. But so are video games and television. Compulsive behavior can have many manifestations, including tormenting one's spouse, obsessive neatness, work aholism, etc. Porn is not only legal, it's protected by the First Amendment as a fundamental right. Like alchohol, which indubitably has ruined and does ruin many lives, it shouldn't be illegal. I also think that porn is a convenient excuse for larger failings. It is far form the bogeyman Mormons make it out to be. This I believe and I submit I'm in the mainstream on this.

Now I think you're going too far. If we can agree that sexual relationships are one of the most potentially fulfilling and rewarding experiences we can have, both for their bonding potential and procreative powers, and we can agree that pornography can act as a very weak substitute, preventing people from seeking the much more satisfying real thing and/or sabotaging its experience, then I think it's pretty clear that pornography use represents something a little more significant than television or bicycle riding.

[Donuthole]

Now I think you're going too far. If we can agree that sexual relationships are one of the most potentially fulfilling and rewarding experiences we can have, both for their bonding potential and procreative powers, and we can agree that pornography can act as a very weak substitute, preventing people from seeking the much more satisfying real thing and/or sabotaging its experience, then I think it's pretty clear that pornography use represents something a little more significant than television or bicycle riding.

Yeah. looks like spoke to soon about SU.

[SeattleUte]

This is fast becoming a favorite of mine! I'll add it to my creepy list of SU personal favorites, along with #12, another favorite.

I'm sorry you think it's creepy. I submit it's perfectly understandable to cite folks like Twain, Socrates and Einstein in response to an argument that only a jerk attacks a purported religious belief. No authority can be too high in response to an assertion of religious sanction. So I am in good company. Just pick up any mainstream publication that engages in any thoughtful covering of religion. Religious belief is attacked all the time as wrong and stupid and harmful.

[SeattleUte]

Now I think you're going too far. If we can agree that sexual relationships are one of the most potentially fulfilling and rewarding experiences we can have, both for their bonding potential and procreative powers, and we can agree that pornography can act as a very weak substitute, preventing people from seeking the much more satisfying real thing and/or sabotaging its experience, then I think it's pretty clear that pornography use represents something a little more significant than television or bicycle riding.

I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Personally, I think television is on similar moral ground as pornography. I consider it a collosal evil. But even television is not a root evil.