10 Steps to Beat Pornography

Posted: 12 April 2015

Pornography is a big problem in modern society, actually no; pornography is a huge problem in modern society. Did you know that 10-15% of all search engine requests and 20% of smart phone searches are for pornography? Studies show that 90% of boys and 60% of girls are exposed to pornography before they are 18 years old. In addition 70% of young men and 20% of young women view pornography every week and pornographic sites have more monthly visitors than Twitter and Amazon combined.

While the numbers are high, especially amongst males, it is not true that all men view pornography, and we must not allow ourselves to believe that pornography constitutes normal sexual behavior. However, especially for young men, if any sort of regular pornography use is not dealt with swiftly is risks becoming a debilitating addiction.

The good news is that authentic religious observation and involvement has been shown to contribute in a major way to lessening pornographic use and dependence. The following then, are ten steps to help beat pornography. The steps focus on the spiritual life but some of them will require major changes in one’s practical life, but if we are sincerely determined to regain control of who we called to be as men and women in Christ there is no other way.

1) Commit to go to Mass and receive Holy Communion every day. Holy Communion is food and strength for the journey and if we don’t have it atop our list then we are not serious about the battle. Getting to Mass everyday will almost certainly require earlier mornings or shorter lunch breaks but how much do we want success?

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Is the Catholic Church Obsessed with Sex?

Posted: 7 December 2014

Without a doubt, the articles I write which attract the most feedback (positive or negative) are always those that discuss sexual morality and the Catholic Church. Nothing seems to raise the emotions of people more than knowing that the Catholic Church has an opinion on sex. And while it may seem that issues such as contraception, IVF, masturbation or homosexuality are all different, they really revolve around the one central hinge: the purpose and meaning of human sexuality. To get directly to the point, Christianity (Catholicism in particular) has a definite understanding of what human sexuality is, while the secular world has a vastly different understanding. In addition, this secular understanding has – for a host of reasons – fed into the minds of many Catholic people so that they no longer understand or agree with the Church’s stance on many of the basic moral issues. Instead of anyone actually seeking to understand the Catholic position, the Church is portrayed as having some sick obsession with matters of sex and telling others what they can (but mostly what they cannot) do.

As a case in point, following my last article which criticised the use of contraception by a Protestant aid agency in Papua New Guinea (PNG), I received an email from a dissatisfied reader. This particular lady – a practicing Catholic – was angered by my ‘narrow minded view’ and questioned whether I had ever been to PNG to truly understand the particular hardships endured by those people. I am grateful to this lady for taking the time to write and I am sure her words represent the thoughts of others – but it does demonstrate my point that there is a huge discrepancy in the public arena about the meaning and purpose of sex.

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A Stupid Nation Will Reap What It Sows

Posted: 21 September 2014

I was up later than usual the other night watching a fairly mainstream TV show on a fairly mainstream channel and in the break an ad appeared that initially caught me with its catchy tune. Then I registered the lyrics. The young men in their early 30’s were singing, “I’m looking for someone other than my wife…Ashley Madison’s right”, as they looked through images of equally young women on the computer. For those who may not know, Ashley Madison is an online dating service launched in 2001. The difference to other dating sites is that Ashley Madison targets those who are already married. Their slogan is ‘Life is short. Have an affair’. When the company launched in Australia in 2010 the Advertising Standards Bureau received a host of complaints and the television and billboard ads were subsequently withdrawn. However it is evident that there has not been enough pressure kept up since then, and the ads are back. (If you are one of those people who think a company marketing infidelity is problematic, and have time to let your feelings be known you can visit adstandards.com.au).

That our society seemingly approves marital infidelity and breakdown, goes some way to explain the ridiculous situation that transpired in Australia recently when it was discovered that the World Congress of Families (WCF) was due to hold a regional conference in Melbourne this past August. It all began with a misleading article on the popular but left-sitting website Mamamia accusing the group of just about everything short of war crimes. Whoever wrote the article suffered an apparent inability to separate objective statements about the goodness of traditional marriage and the nuclear family from subjective judgements about individuals who do not hold the same view. Read the rest of this entry »

Incest or Homosexuality: Which is Morally Worse?

Posted: 2 August 2014

The bizarre nature of modern logic was on display once again when an Australian judge recently compared incest to homosexuality. In dealing with a criminal case of incest between siblings, Judge Garry Neilson, said that just as gay sex had once been socially unacceptable, “a jury might find nothing untoward in the advance of a brother towards his sister once she had sexually matured”. The bizarreness I am referring to though, is not on the part of the judge, but rather the response to the comments by politicians and media.

First to clarify; the case that was being tried was against a 58 year old man who was accused of raping his sister in their family home in 1981 when he was 25 and she was 18. The man had already pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting his sister some years earlier when she was only 10 year old. The judge did not allow the prosecution to admit the evidence of the earlier assault, stating that the two events occurred in different contexts, and by the time of the incident in question, when the woman was 18, she had already been in sexual relationships with two men and had a young child. The judge went on to say to the jury, that the “only reason” incest is still a criminal offence is because of the high risk of genetic abnormalities from consanguineous relationships, but, “even that falls away to an extent [because] there is such ease of contraception and ready access to abortion”.

The day after this story reached the media, the State Attorney-General, Brad Hazzard, took the rare step of involving himself in a criminal trial, referring Judge Neilson to the Judicial Commission for review, and moving to prevent the judge from sitting on any further criminal trials until the matter had been investigated. Mr Hazzard was “extremely concerned” and “appalled” at the judge’s comments and made the somewhat definitive statement that, “Incest is completely reprehensible, unacceptable, disgusting and criminal”. Media agencies reported on the judge’s remarks as “ill-informed”, “disgraceful” and an insult to “every gay and lesbian person in Australia”. Perhaps they would be interested to know that consensual incest is already legal in France, Russia, Belgium, Argentina and China, amongst other nations. Read the rest of this entry »

There Are No ‘Gay’ People

Posted: 19 July 2014

The words ‘hashtag’, ‘selfie’ and ‘tweep’ were among 150 new words added to the Merriam-Webster’s dictionary this year; and with selfies being taken by everyone from Barack Obama to Pope Francis to Kim Kardashian, it’s little wonder this word is among those making the list. While the evolution of language has, with technology, become all the more rapid, language remains one of the most vital tools underpinning a society. It is language that shapes reality for the members of a society, allowing us to attach meanings to things. Words convey reality and the better a language is used, the more precisely concepts can be understood. Inversely, the poor use of language can misinform a person or a whole society, about a particular truth.

Enter the word ‘gay’. Originating in 12^th century England the original meaning was ‘joyful’ or ‘carefree’. By the end of the 20^th century, the word gay became the recommended and preferred term for persons experiencing homosexual feelings. While I am not losing sleep that a word once meaning joy has become the key identifier around homosexual actions, what does concern me greatly is the usage of the word gay in direct reference to a person. “My friend is gay” or “He was born gay” are two of the most common examples. Even in talking to people who consider homosexual actions wrong, (and note that judging objective moral action is always different to the subjective judgment of an individual person), they will still refer to a particular ‘gay’ person as if that term is completely descriptive. In fact, this usage has become so normalised that the nuance is not often understood, so allow me to be more specific.   Read the rest of this entry »

Should I Destroy My Rolf Harris CD?

Posted: 9 July 2014

By now we all know that the Australian-born and British-based entertainer Rolf Harris was convicted on twelve counts of indecent assault against four girls aged as young as seven years old. He was sentenced to just under six years in prison for crimes committed between 1969 and 1986. As soon as the jury reached its verdict public murals of his were being painted over and plaques that had been put up in his honour were taken down. He was stripped of music industry awards and even an honorary doctorate from the University of East London. On the off chance that he is still alive when his sentence is over, there is very little possibility the man would ever be able to redeem his name.

For fifty years Rolf Harris was considered a living treasure of both the United Kingdom and Australia; loved by children and adults alike for his brand of unique music, mastery of the ‘wobble board’ and eclectic mix of paintings, (including a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II to commemorate her 80^th birthday). His conviction brought forth a range of reactions from shock to anger to relief, as well as a fresh range of allegations from other women about supposed indiscretions.

My question is though, what do I do with my Best of Rolf Harris CD? Admittedly, I find Jake the Peg rather catchy and still have fond memories of the primary school Christmas concert when we sung Six White Boomers. I have read the news reports of people burning their autographed wobble boards and consigning their Harris paintings to the bin but I am just not sure if this might be an overly hasty response. Not for one moment am I excusing Rolf Harris or attempting to lessen his crimes which are amongst some of the worst possible, but can the good that he has produced in the arts and entertainment still be seen for what it is; good? Read the rest of this entry »

More Sex and Less Happiness

Posted: 21 June 2014

If you want a good insight into the state of a nation’s happiness keep an eye on sex and relationships. While health, education, defence and the economy are the standard priorities of most governments, beneath the surface of those rather generic pursuits are the hearts and desires of actual people, from the greatest to the least. On our business cards we may be teachers, plumbers or lawyers, but in the privacy of our own lives we are individuals who have varying degrees of success relating to other individuals. And my premise is that we are failing – absolutely abysmally – in our priorities and methodologies regarding sex and relationships.

As a first thought, witness the incredible rise of online dating. In Australia, a country with only 22 million people, the two most popular dating websites claim to each have 2 million members; allegedly 51% of the population has either tried online dating or would consider doing so. Alongside this search for love sits the rise of couples moving in together, and this is not necessarily as a pathway to marriage but increasingly with marriage not even considered a possible future reality. Directly corresponding to the rise of cohabitation is the fall of marriage rates, the two lines intersecting sometime in the 1980’s as they headed in their new directions. Perhaps it is little wonder that marriage is taken up less frequently when the example of good marriages continue falling. More than one third of marriages are ending in divorce and the figure rises to sixty per cent for second marriages. After the divorce, floods of individuals head back over to online dating sites to begin again the search for ‘someone special’.

And flowing through all of this is an era and society that has never been so carefree about sex. Any ‘consensual’ sexual action between two or more people is not only tolerated but – as is seen in the case of the vocal gay lobby – it is often applauded. A dating relationship without sex is almost deemed to be no relationship at all. Pornography has become an addiction and is estimated to be a $14 billion per year industry with 25% of all search engine requests being pornographic. Our free sexual appetite though is costing us dearly. Rates of sexually transmitted infections are skyrocketing (and even normalised in government health campaigns), while the use of antidepressants has doubled since the year 2000. Read the rest of this entry »

The Problem with Porn

Posted: 23 November 2013

You may have already heard the boiling frog story but it goes something like this: if you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will frantically jump out, however, if you place the frog in a pot of lukewarm water that is slowly heated, the frog will not notice the impending danger and allow itself to be boiled to death. Pornography in our modern Western society is somewhat like that pot, it has been heating up over the last few decades and is at such a boiling point that it completely pervades culture. Ironically, while this complete pervasion is more visible – like the frog – we are mostly unaware at the effect it is having upon us.

Considering the problem with pornography one could choose any number of different areas. We could discuss the physical harm that is done to the bodies of ‘actors’ in the porn industry; we could study the neurological effects of pornography on the brain of the person who watches it, or, we could analyse the harmful social effects that come about as a result of engaging in pornography. But let us leave aside all those aspects to consider the way that pornography harms the basic dignity of the human person.

Obviously no one is offended at the sight of a naked cow or chicken. Why? Because a cow is just that, a cow, there is no more to it. But we are persons, human persons, male and female, and we have the capacity to think, to dream and most importantly, to love. In other words we have a spiritual dimension to us, we have a soul. The soul has been identified as part of the human person from Aristotle to Augustine to Aquinas.  In philosophy the soul is referred to as the form of the body.  In fact, when a person dies we refer no longer to John Smith but to the body of John Smith, even our language recognises that the essence of the person is deeper than his or her physical make up. Pornography however does not make this distinction; it looks upon men and women in the same way as we would look upon cows and chickens, as animals with no deeper reality. Read the rest of this entry »

Men and Wedding Planning

Posted: 18 November 2012

I am getting married at the end of the year to a lovely woman named Jane, and so my life in these last five months has involved an inordinate number of decisions around the height of cakes, the thickness of paper and the width of rings. I have also been informed on numerous occasions, by a wide variety of people, that the wedding is Jane’s ‘special day’ and that all major decisions, including what I will be wearing on the day, belong to her. Thankfully Jane has all along seen our wedding as a joint effort but this very common idea, that the wedding is a day for brides, needs some questioning.

While I am certainly pro-marriage I am not so sure that I am pro-wedding. I do not like the way in which the burgeoning wedding industry has taken the ideas of fidelity and self-giving love and associated them with make-up trials, chair covers and expensive cars. Interestingly the rise of the wedding industry and the amount of money spent is almost in direct correlation with the fall in the understanding of the nature and purpose of marriage. Read the rest of this entry »

Modesty. A Sign of Respect for Men and Women.

Posted: 4 November 2012

So there I was at the train station minding my own business when a young lady walked past wearing a pair of tights. At least I think they were tights. It might have been black body paint for all I know, as it looked like she was wearing nothing at all below the waist. I have since been informed by a reliable source that tights are very much in fashion, which would explain why so many women seem to be getting around in them.

Now I am all for fashion, (after all it was in the name of fashion that I sold my maroon microfiber suit on eBay), but I question the appropriateness of an item of clothing that only serves to draw attention to the body and not the person. Regardless of why she was wearing the tights, as that young lady walked down the platform the message she sent was ‘don’t worry about who I am, just have a look at my body’. And that is exactly what an array of men did as they watched her move down the platform. I am certainly not stating that all men’s fashion is worthy of the human person either, but there is no question that women’s clothing that has the most tendency to be provocative. Read the rest of this entry »

Are We All Sexual Perverts?

Posted: 21 October 2012

Recently the Sydney Opera House hosted the Festival of Dangerous Ideas which brings together a host of speakers on a variety of controversial topics. Not one to shy away from controversy I attended a couple of sessions including We are all Sexual Perverts by an American psychologist Jesse Bering, whose basic premise was that each person has within them certain desires that others would find offensive and indeed disgusting. Professing himself to be an active homosexual, Bering believes that while society has become accepting of homosexuality (once called a ‘behaviour’ but now popularly referred to as an ‘orientation’) we should consider why we might be less accepting of the approximately 547 other ‘paraphilias’ ranging from arousal by stuffed animal toys (plushophilia), machines (mechaphilia) or even trees (dendrophilia).

While many of the stranger paraphilias raised laughter amongst the audience, Bering also spent time considering more well known philias such as paedophilia and zoophilia (bestiality), posing the question of how we might respond to someone who had a tendency towards these even though they had never acted upon them. Bering believes that all paraphilias should be accepted and respected because the inclination has nothing to do with whether or not the person has committed some kind of social transgression. Interestingly and correctly Bering did state that without belief in some type of divine creator who had mapped out a design for sexuality who were we to judge a person’s interior sexual desires as more or less worthy than our own. Bering admits that his interest in the whole topic is attributed to his own homosexuality and a childhood lived among “conservative and religious” people which had led him to a sympathy for others who find themselves in minority sexual categories. Read the rest of this entry »

Same-Sex Marriage…Ending Discrimination?

Posted: 16 September 2012

It is amazing the way that the same-sex marriage debate has taken such a strangle hold on discussion and commentary in Western society. Who would have thought that in the space of just a few years popular opinion could swift to such a degree that to simply hold marriage as the union of a man and a woman could be labeled as intolerant? Yet this is where we are at.

One recent move for a change in legislation has come from Tasmania where a bill to legalise same-sex marriage was introduced into the Parliament with Premier Lara Giddings imploring the members of the House to “open their hearts and minds to remove this last bastion of discrimination”.

Now if there is a buzz word in the same-sex marriage debate it is most definitely ‘discrimination’. In the 21^st century it would be better to be accused of anything rather than be found to be discriminatory. Yet we seem to have forgotten what the word actually means and that each of us discriminate every day of our lives. Read the rest of this entry »

Violence again Women. Australia says…Yes

Posted: 7 July 2012

In 2004 the Federal Government funded a $20 million campaign with the slogan, ‘Violence against Women. Australia Say No.’ The campaign was to bring awareness of violence occurring behind closed doors. As part of the campaign a TV ad was produced with a selection of men justifying why they assaulted women and the slogan making it clear that such behaviour was not tolerable. More recently a government campaign was launched called ’The Line’ which encouraged young people to consider where they would draw the line regarding issues such as ‘hooking up’ sexually at parties. The message in response to this possible quandary was not to engage sexually with someone unless there was mutual consent.

It may seem on face value that Australia is serious about stamping out abuse but I wonder just how serious we really are. While all these sorts of campaigns are of some value they fall into the interesting category of a secular government trying to teach morality. While a government may make laws to try and enact a particular behaviour they are seemingly unable to plug the illogical and confusing holes that appear in their attempts. Read the rest of this entry »

Abortion…And The Pain in Our Society

Posted: 16 October 2011

Abortion is one of those topics that make people really, really uncomfortable. Nothing destroys the conversation at a pleasant weekend barbeque more instantly than talk of the morality of abortion. A couple of incidences recently made me consider about why it might be that the topic is so divisively painful and I thought they were worth sharing.

If you approach a train station on a weekday afternoon, chances are you will have a complimentary copy of the MX newspaper flung into your hands. There are regularly articles in the MX commenting on moral/ethical issues so I often text in a couple of sentences for the feedback pages. A while ago I sent in a comment regarding a story they ran about hundreds of mothers in India giving their baby girls sex change operations to make them males. I questioned which was worse, the goings on in India, or, the 90,000 annual abortions taking place in Australia. The message was published and expectedly attracted a barrage of messages both for and against abortion. To the credit of the newspaper they published messages on both sides for several days and in those days there was a definite progression of thought. Initially there were angry messages that the ‘foetus’ is not a human life, following that there were messages from others outlining how science unequivocally states that the unborn baby is indeed human. And lastly there were messages which stated that even if the unborn baby was ‘human’ it was certainly not a ‘person’. In reading the messages what was evident struck me was the length people would go to justify the notion that abortion could somehow be acceptable. Read the rest of this entry »

Smoking and ‘Safe Sex’ – The Great Hypocrisy

Posted: 22 September 2011

Last month, the Federal Government unveiled draft legislation to introduce plain packaging laws for cigarettes. Health minister Nicola Roxon was unequivocal in her determination to put the final nail in the coffin of the tobacco industry.

Showing off the new compulsory olive green packaging with the vivid images of clogged arteries, cancerous gums and gangrene-infected feet, the minister declared, “We are going to ensure that in Australia there are no remaining avenues for tobacco companies to market and promote their products, particularly to young people. Gone are the days when people can pretend that cigarettes are glamorous.”

I have never smoked, have never had any desire to smoke and nothing frustrates me more than walking down the street and breathing in the secondhand smoke of the person puffing away in front of me, but this latest legislation push does cause me to wonder about the haphazard approach that federal policy takes to the health of its citizens. Read the rest of this entry »