Posted on 08/24/2005 2:59:33 PM PDT by Crackingham
No sir, you are not.
"I'm just me and it drives my Preacher nuts."
LMAO! I'll just bet it does.
First Family Church, Overland Park, KS has Comfort Circles that help with any number of problems people face. There are about 21 such groups that meet most Monday evenings at 7:00 p.m. Pornography is but one. Others include: victims of rape or incest; alcoholism; drug abuse; abortion; eating disorders; domestic violence; divorce; wayward children; grief, etc. If anyone is in the area, or even planning to be their website is http://ffc.org.
once church becomes just a religious social club, you've become the ELCA.
LOL!!! The poor old ELCA...it amazes me that they even survive as a denomination. (ELCA = Evangelical Liberal Church of America.)
Seriously, it's nice that people like each other and get along together, but Christianity (for me, anyway) is about more than just having a good social life and "tolerance."
I noted his reasons. However, as the spiritual leader of his home, he has an obligation to have his family in a church that failthfully preaches the Gospel and God's entire Word, employs church discipline, properly administers the sacraments and worships God in spirit and truth.
I'll make sure to mention that to my wife, I'm sure she'll get a real kick out of it... Honey, as the SPIRITUAL LEADER of this home...
The people in my church are really good people...every last one of them is a Bible believing Christian. So while I have serious issues with the church leadership, even I must admit that the people in the congregation are a fine bunch of Christians.
Which only makes things even worse....
No it's a porn addiction ministry.
What happened?
The difference was that Janet Reno just did not like doing obscenity cases. She wouldn't prosecute obscenity violations when she was the prosecutor in Florida, and she didn't like doing it at the Justice Department. It's not that she's a bad person or anything; it's just that she didn't like doing it. Maybe she never saw it, or it wasn't properly presented. They still said that the Justice Department's units could do more extreme materials or organized crime people. But the idea that had started when the first President Bush was president -- we would enforce the federal law against everyone who was violating it -- that sort of stopped. ...
Out in the San Fernando Valley, they described the Clinton administration as "green lights and blue skies."
They thought, right from 1992 when President Clinton was elected, that all this stuff that had started in the Justice Department would go away. Now Janet Reno was the attorney general. She's a real prosecutor. And ... there were a lot of cases in the pipeline. No serious prosecutor is going to stop those cases. They're felony cases; they got to grand juries; federal judges have issued search warrants. So those in the industry thought that somehow Clinton or Reno would kind of stop all the cases that had started. That's not what happened.
A lot of the cases that started in 1987 to 1991-1992 were allowed to continue and finish, and most of those were wrapped up by maybe 1994, 1995. But as a result of that, in 1992, 1993, 1994, we're getting to trial. And a lot of these people who thought, "I thought you guys were going to go away; Clinton's our buddy," found themselves having to pay $1 million in fines and spend a year in jail. So it didn't work until, I think, the second Clinton administration, when he just changed the policy more and said, "Well, let's not go as aggressively against violations."
They also didn't get anything ... in the pipeline in 1993.
That's true. ... When Clinton was elected, they didn't encourage us to keep going. They told us to concentrate more on child pornography. They told us to find big gangsters and more extreme material. They didn't let the section continue with the projects with the mainstream hardcore porn industry. So that was becoming obvious, that we were going to get the people who had already been charged and investigated. But the people who hadn't gotten indicted in the first round probably wouldn't see another prosecution until there was a change in the White House.
Years ago, my church had a "special" porn-education session after the morning sermon. They made it off limits to all single people.
I wonder why so many married couples have men with porn issues. Is it because of past premarital sex? Or the woman who doesn't want to have any when she's older because of menopause? Or the young,nubile images as compared to a wife who has had a few kids and over forty?
One's spirit deteriorates either way.
DING DING DING!!! We have a winner!
I had to ask. A few years back, there was a "Strippers for Christ" ministry that actually featured strippers, well... stripping. It was a bit bizarre to say the least.
The teen oral sex thing was alive and well when I was in High School (1977-1981). Believe me ;-)
You assume that preaching is the sole reason for church attendance. The command is "Forsake not the assembling of yourselves," not for the sake of hearing the Word preached, but to "encourage one another" (Heb. 10:25)--in other words, because of the spiritual and social bonds forged in the congregation.
Hearing the Word has its place, and it is a high place at that, but it isn't the sole reason for church attendance, or the most important. A man can subsist spiritually in a congregation without a strong preacher, but the same cannot be said about the community of believers.
Gross is great.
He speaks at my college every year about just how serious porn is. You would not believe how many Christians, even at conservative schools like mine, view it and sometimes use it for sexual purposes.
It is a big problem. I have no doubt that in the pews, it is just as bad.
Although you raise valid points, I think it's much more basic than that. Studies have shown that men respond better to visual stimuli. The sex drive is, generally speaking, a man's strongest drive. The urge to copulate with as many women as possible is, depending on your viewpoint, either a natural and obvious by-product of natural selection, or the natural and obvious by-product of our sinful natures (as it is direct opposition to God's model of one man and one woman.) So, in porn, you have something that links all three - the sex drive, the visual stimuli, and the urge to spread one's seed as widely as possible.
No....this is what is kind of confusing.
Gross is actually ANTI-PORN, and his site is all about how bad porn is.
He comes to speak at my Christian college every year to tell people about the importance of God's design for sexuality etc.
He is a really great speaker, but the website name is obviously confusing at first.
"And tonight, we're going to have a special "adultery education" session after service. Since it focuses on adultery, we're going to make it off limits to all married couples...."
Talk about missing your target audience....
Makes sense....
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