Earlier this month the U.K. press hailed as a scientific discovery that if you feed a youngsters brain with porn they will develop a sensitive area which will “light up” to such stimuli. Dr Valerie Voon, a neuroscientist at Cambridge University and a global authority on addiction, expressed astonishment as the results were similar to those hooked on drugs or drink. This led to the conclusion, “If porn does have the insidious power to be addictive, then letting our children consume it freely via the internet is like leaving heroin lying around the house, or handing out vodka at the school gates.”

Because both the viewing of this stuff and the sensitising of the brain is unseen by parents and friends it is not easily detected.

There is also the fallacy that “it’s all part of growing up”. A girl added, ‘On Facebook, you just scroll down and it’s there. If any of your friends like it, it comes up on your home page.’ The same could be said of Utube.

Another fallacy is that these things happen to other people not me or mine!

We are all involved. The fear of being found out curtails speaking about it. The U.K Prime Minister recently said it was ‘corroding childhood’. I would add it is laying the foundation for a lifelong struggle with addiction which many find impossible to break.

A third fallacy is `you are not harming anyone but yourself`. Sexually explicit material colonises the mind, produces a secretive behaviour and distances the addict from normal relationships. Unless it is acknowledged like other addictions the person lives in denial and acquires a dysfunctional identity that blights family and other relationships.

In the battle for a clean mind we are all involved – the question is which side are you on? Watching salacious material or cutting it out?

Can the Bible help?

Jesus was for cutting it out – actually cutting it off, eye plucked out and hand cut off (St Matthew Chapter 18 verses 1/9). In other words, not mutilation, (you would continue to sin with the other eye) but a separation from the problem even if it is as painful as the loss of an eye.

In Romans Chapter 1 verses 21/32 St Paul spells out how God exercises judgement over evil today. It’s not the shaking of the earth variety but three times in the passage we read “God gave them over”. Judgement in this day and age is – you choose to disobey me by the way you live then I will give you more of the evil you have chosen.

Elsewhere, St Paul emphasises that he is writing with the authority of the Lord Jesus, “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor” (1 Thessalonians Chapter 4 verses 2/4).

St John in his first letter recognises the need to turn from the things we hide, to the light of Bible truth. “If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.”

Faith in his atoning death makes us pure in God’s sight and restores fellowship with Him and with one another.