purity | Ain't Complicated

Seduced: He Went After Her

As I do six days a week, I went to a well-known payment processing site…and pondered the new graphic:

girl and boy kissing on a street corner a la Proverbs 7?

I thought of this right away:

For at the window of my house
I looked through my lattice,
And saw among the simple,
I perceived among the youths,
A young man devoid of understanding,
Passing along the street near her corner…
In the twilight, in the evening,
In the black and dark night.
And there a woman met him…
So she caught him and kissed him…
With her enticing speech she caused him to yield,
With her flattering lips she seduced him.
Immediately he went after her, as an ox goes to the slaughter…

Sad, isn’t it? I don’t ask that in a judgmental way. I ask it…sadly.

I still think of that when I go to that site. Sadly.

May God have mercy…redemptive, redeeming, restoring mercy…on men who seduce women and on women who seduce men. And those allowing themselves to be seduced.

And on me. I need that mercy also.

My intent is not to impugn the character of the two individuals pictured above. I’m just telling you I thought of the other two individuals mentioned in Proverbs 7.

Disclaimer: I modified the dimensions and corners of the graphic (and blurred out the text, of course).

Handy Pornography!

Way back in 1994, I wrote for our school and church a piece I called Handy Pornography! Here’s an excerpt from early in the article:

Why this increasing freedom of exposure? Well, facts are facts, you know. The news must be reported; stuff must be advertised and sold; anthropological discoveries must be made known; technological advances must be demonstrated. Do any or all or these explain or justify the increasing indecency? Hardly!

Is there news value in having a woman in ice skating attire flinging her leg way up toward the reader? No, the issue is not news. Did Scientific American need to use a picture of Marilyn Monroe with her dress flying up overlaid on a picture of President Abraham Lincoln? No, the issue is not advanced computer technology. Do bikinied women actually make a car or radio controlled airplane more attractive, or a soap more effective? No, the issue is not advertising and commerce. Do pictures of third-world, partially-nude women help us understand their cultures better than simply telling the reader they don’t cover themselves from the waist on up? No, the issue is not anthropology.

Folks, we have been snookered and taken in by a “conspiracy” of the enemy of our souls! Can you see how he is successfully wearing down our resistance to immorality? We still stand against Playboy, but will our children? If we allow in our homes what our grandparents called pornography, will our grandchildren allow in their homes what we call pornography? If we don’t bat an eye about these things which would have jolted our grandparents, will the things that still jolt us have any effect on our children’s children? Remember, what parents excuse in moderation, children justify in excess.

I urge you to read the entire article. Despite the title (Handy Pornography!) and the URL (www.anabaptists.org/writings/softporn.html), it is not pornography. Not even so-called soft porn.

Mafia this, Hot Pics that, She Searched For You the other, Hot Singles in Your Neighborhood something else — I got tired of nuking offensive ads on Facebook. More than that, why should I expose my mind to exploited (self- and otherwise) women exposing their superficial charms?

I looked for a way to adjust my Facebook settings so I could block certain categories of ads and fan pages.

No luck.

So, being a gung-ho Firefox user, I ended up with Adblock Plus and its filtering capabilities.

Here are the five custom filters I’m presently using:

facebook.com#*(id^=highlights_ad)
facebook.com#*(social_ad)
facebook.com#*(social_ad_advert)
facebook.com#*(sponsors)
facebook.com#*(sidebar_ads)

I also have the EasyList (USA) Filter Subscription enabled.

Presto! Voila! Bingo! WooHoo!

No more Facebook ads!

HT: The Ausbury Blog and Earle’s Notebook

Heavenly Minded

A day or two ago I was leafing through a homeschooling magazine we got in the mail.

Eventually I got to a page on the left with this at the top:

Raising Heavenly Minded Children

Very good!

Then I glanced to the page on the right and saw this:

Is this photo conducive to being heavenly minded?

As a man looking at that, I admit to being momentarily distracted from that whole heavenly minded business.

Yes, I flattened out the scanned image above. I couldn’t in good conscience and Christian purity leave the photo as it was.

Did the magazine editors not think about the contradiction between the article and its accompanying photo?

I don’t know.

Was the woman being heavenly minded by dressing that way and then offering that view to the camera?

Obviously I don’t know that either.

I’m simply appealing to Christian women to consider whether or not the decadent culture in which we live has caused you to inadvertently lower the decency bar too far.

It seems to me that Christian purity requires modesty in dress. Actually, purity also produces such modesty.

So allow me a play on words in closing:

Heavenly minded — how much does it cover?

Google Dictionary

I assume such a thing exists, but I don’t know.

So I used plain old Google for a Spanish dictionary earlier this morning. You see, I saw on a news site a Spanish word I didn’t recognize. Its context didn’t help me determine the meaning.

After I Googled the term and while I waited for the results to arrive on my very slow dial-up connection, I Alt-Tabbed around to other projects I was multi-tasking.

When I came back to Google, I was stunned at the images that were included in the Image Search portion of the search results.

😯

I quickly scanned the other results and discovered the meaning of the word.

Not a bad word at all.

But obviously a very useful one for promoting PornoImagery.

Lesson learned, I hope: Don’t use Google Search as a dictionary.

And, no, I won’t tell you what the perfectly innocuous word is.

The Poster

That’s the title of Andrée Seu’s latest piece over at WorldMagBlog:

There is an area in my house that, if you had a handheld radioactivity detector for spiritual intensity, would start ticking wildly as you approached. It is my daughter’s bedroom, and ground zero is a poster on her wall.

One day I had decided to go through all six rooms and dedicate them to God, asking Him to remove any defilement. (This is either madness or the creativity of the Holy Spirit.) I was inspired in part by shame over a wooden key rack in the kitchen that reads, “As for me and my house we will serve the Lord.” It has been a lie.

As I lifted my head from a prostrate position, I spotted the poster, a darkly beautiful woodland scene that seems to call to ancient legends and distant flute sounds, and whose colors and mood blend seamlessly into the forest décor of the bedroom. One hardly notices at first the two mythical female faces locked in a kiss, and then, if you look closer still, a trickle of blood leaking from the corner of their mouths.

You really ought to read the rest of it (the above excerpt is more than half of the entire article).

As a husband and father, I am challenged by her thoughts.

What music do I allow in my home?

What literature?

What radio stations?

What Web sites?

What language?

What “stuff”?

And why or why not?

And how shall I teach about it?

Many questions; few answers. 🙁

Test Your Movies

The Motion Picture Production Code

A Code to Govern the Making of Talking, Synchronized and Silent Motion Pictures. Formulated and formally adopted by The Association of Motion Picture Producers, Inc. and The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc.

There’s some amazing stuff there.

Those of you that watch “family friendly” or Christian movies, would you have them to watch if the above code were still in force?

(No, it isn’t in force — it’s from 1930.)

Though I don’t watch movies, I’m guessing that even many Christian movies of today would fail the Code test.

So tell me — what has happened to Christianity?

As in the days of Noah, things will get worse — much worse.