Tactic #8: Party Lifestyle

This one kind of stems off the last one, but it bears its own section because it’s not really about censorship, but about values.  The enemy has convinced a whole generation that the goal of life is to have “fun,” though “fun” as a concept continues to evade a coherent definition.

Las Vegas is held up as the bastion of fun-filled excitement where you can get away with anything and it doesn’t matter, because hey, it’s Vegas.  You see commercials where normal people go berserk at the knowledge they have won a free trip to Vegas, or can afford a special trip to Vegas because of the money they’ve saved.

What’s so great about Vegas?  Gambling, legalized prostitution, porn peddled on the streets, strip clubs at every corner, professionally packaged entertainment shows that don’t disappoint the desires of the men in their audiences, hotels that cater to anyone who has anything to flaunt, and supports their desires wholeheartedly.

Now that I think about it, I’d like to go.  How much is a plane ticket these days…

Seriously, though.  This is what the “party” lifestyle is all about.  Las Vegas just epitomizes it, but the stench reaches across the world.  Live it up, because there’s nothing better to do while you’re alive.  (And I don’t care about all the “mainstream” fare also available in Vegas…the town is about doing whatever you want and damn the consequences, plain and simple).  Whatever feels good is good.

One of the founding principles in the Satanic bible is “Do what thou wilt.”  This precept has seeped its way into all aspects of our culture.  Do whatever is in your heart.  What does your heart tell you?  Trust your feelings and you’ll be fine.  As long as it feels right in your heart, it’s okay.  Do what you want to do.  We hear these kinds of things all over the place.

And this kind of thinking then gets confused with the concept of “freedom,” and you start to see why the censorship issue arises.  But Vegas and the lifestyle it promotes (along with many media outlets) are all about doing what feels good for you, today, and don’t let anyone tell you it’s wrong.  This too is the work of the enemy.

I was fascinated early in his presidency when President Obama encouraged Americans to forego a trip to Vegas, and instead to be responsible with their money in the economic downturn.  Remember that?  Obama got castigated–even by the so-called religious conservatives on the right–because his suggestion might damage the Nevada economy.  How dare anyone suggest that Americans give up their appetites for recklessness.  Not to mention how plainly obvious is our worship of money in this instance.  The economy rules above all else in the hierarchy of decision-making.

But why are people so taken up with this party lifestyle?  Is it the same as porn addiction?  Here’s a great verse from Job.

Job 36:21
Be careful, do not turn to evil; for you have preferred this to affliction.  (NAS)

Evil in many of its forms is preferable to present suffering.  Insecurity is one of two basic needs of the human soul, along with the desire for significance.  This is psychology 101.  When our insecurity grows, and we find no love around us, we will turn to something else.  Our souls can’t take it otherwise.

Job’s friend in this verse encourages him to be careful in the midst of his suffering (and he was doing some serious suffering, far more than most of our American culture can even fathom), because it is in these vulnerable moments that sin begins to look very, very attractive.  It looks way more comfortable over there than how empty, afraid, and insecure I feel over here.

The enemy offers the party lifestyle as the antidote to this.  What does this have to do with porn?  It’s simple.  How many people who go to parties leave them feeling fulfilled and satisfied?  All the ones that don’t (which is most of them) have just charged up all their sexual energy, and it now waits for a release.  Since no hot girls left the party to have sex with me, I’ve got to go do….what.  Well, in Vegas, there are endless choices.  Escorts, strip clubs, prostitutes, and everything in between.  Now, those things are in most cities, but Vegas has promoted itself as the place you can do these things without fear of accusation.

Imagine the poor bride after learning what her then-fiancé did at his bachelor party in Vegas the week before the wedding.  “How could you do that?  I thought you loved me!”  “Come on, baby, it’s Vegas.  It’s you and me from now on.”  And that’s all he has to say.  It’s Vegas.  Just like Jake’s friend says to him in the classic film, “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.”  The name is all you have to say, and you know the explanation and the rationale.

In a world with no clue about true morality, what can the devalued bride say back?  All she can do is hope she doesn’t make him too mad or reject his sexual desires no matter how extreme or uncomfortable they make her feel, or he might run back to his slavemaster to make his insecurity go away.  Or, she can go with him to the next strip club, under the guise of “supporting” him.  But inside, she’ll know she’s giving away something that seems like it ought to belong to her exclusively, but she’s lost the ability to put into words exactly what it is.

This is the state of many relationships today.  It is the work of the enemy.  Don’t be deceived by the distorted and shifting values of the world.  None of these people know anything about truth or righteousness.  I once challenged people I work with to explain to me why bestiality should be illegal, because they disliked the notion of other people telling them how they should live (but we still agreed that sex with animals is probably not a good thing).  The best they could come up with?  “It threatens the safety of the animal.”  Oh my…

Now we have an idea of what the young generation will look like in twenty years.

Tactic #7 Freedom vs Censorship

This tactic can get me into trouble for talking about it, because it’s a little more political in nature.  This issue, however, is one example of why politics and the events transpiring around us matter.  It’s why we need to know what’s going on, what people think and believe, what kind of battle we’re up against.  It’s not good to be oblivious about world events and beliefs.

Back in the 1970’s, the feminist movement marched on the streets against the exploitation and degradation of women as they correctly saw it happening in the emerging porn industry.  I’ve always thought it fascinating that a worldly movement, often derided by conservatives, was out there on the street in the formative years of this industry, because they saw the danger it posed for the culture.  Yet the conservatives, and the churches…where were they?  Were they in denial?  Were they even aware of it?

I wasn’t born yet, so I don’t know.  But what shocks me today is how the feminist movement has failed to transmit its values and understandings of the world to the next generation.  I have sat and listened to women who call themselves feminists today–young women in their twenties, professionals, well-educated–sit there and complain and ridicule boorish male behavior they have either experienced firsthand or heard about from a friend.  They go on and on about how inappropriate it was what that guy said, or how he treated her, or this or that.  Legitimate gripes, I might add.  No one wants to be treated like a sexual favor.  No one wants to be cheated on, and no one deserves it.  No one wants to be verbally degraded, in private or in public (or through gossip, even worse).

This is all consistent with what any good feminist (or any woman, for that matter) would think.  But today, unlike thirty years ago, these same women will sit there and defend the rights of these same men to be able to access and engorge in the most extreme and vile forms of sexual perversion.  I’m talking bestiality, gang rape videos (they’re only actors, so it’s okay…and they’re paid.  Wait a minute…er…), sexual humiliation, and it can be far worse than that.  These “feminists,” if they are even deserving of the title, defend all this stuff as legitimate free “speech” because the girls are over 18 and paid for their services.  We can’t censor (make illegal) this stuff because oh, it’s the slippery slope.  The “slippery slope” delusion is the irrational and unfounded fear that if we make it illegal to film 300 men all having sex with one woman (yes, this has been done, more than once), then it will lead inevitably to books like Romeo and Juliet being banned from your child’s public library.

The absurdity of this argument eclipses almost any possible response I can come up with.  But here’s my best one: Then why is child porn illegal?  Couldn’t that lead to the same “slippery slope”?  Aren’t Romeo and Juliet teenagers, and don’t they have sex?  I mean, come on, the similarities are obvious.

And of course, the truth is, there are no similarities.  As a politician once said (I’m paraphrasing a little), “I don’t know how to define porn, but I know it when I see it.”  Exactly right.

So don’t let the censorship vs freedom false dichotomy deceive you any longer.  These things are not in opposition.  There is censorship every day, everywhere, all the time. And everyone–everyone, every single person, including the ACLU–is for it.  They are?  If you don’t think so, then try and find me five rational people who think the footage of the 300 men with one woman should air at 4pm on CBS?  To be safe, let’s air it without commercial interruption and rate it TV-MA.

Why isn’t there hard-core (or even “soft-core”!) porn on TV in the afternoon on the major networks?  Why can’t we watch people get beheaded on the news?  Why don’t we film executions and broadcast them into the schools?  Because someone, somewhere, made the simple and obvious decision that this was not appropriate for those audiences.  Some things aren’t appropriate for any audience.  I suggest you ask survivors of the rape of Nanking what they think of gang-rape videos being sold as “entertainment.”

Censorship happens all the time.  Yet it gets paraded about like it’s a cuss word.  When these groups cry “censorship,” it’s really just their expression of fear that their moral beliefs will be declared immoral.  They don’t want to be told their conduct is evil.  That’s for the child pornographers.  We know they’re evil, those sickos.  But the adult film star who wants to be paid to let 500 strangers come and have sex with her?  That’s fine!  Come on, what’s your problem, you prude!  You can’t censor that!

As always, the debate over this stuff gets shifted from the real issue.  Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s good.  And some things should be illegal.  What would God say about all this?  Does God believe “free speech” includes simulated gang rape?  Does God even hold free speech on the high pedestal we have placed it?  The world loves to criticize the Bible for its harsh punishments of things we think aren’t that big a deal, especially in Leviticus.  I’m not going to get into that here, but looking at it broadly, what does it say about God that He would punish these kinds of sins so severely?  What does it say about the sin, and how destructive it must be?

God does not condone any of this.  Porn is one of our modern idols.  We worship before it and exalt it as a god-given right and a means of sexual release, especially for all those cooped up prisoners.  There was a prison that banned porn a few years back, and some people criticized them because they felt it would increase the tension in the prison, since now they don’t get to look at naked women all day and masturbate.  I’m not making this up.  It was a real argument in opposition.  Simply incredible, how low the standards of human behavior have sunk for what we believe is possible.

When we declare it is possible for teens to abstain from sex until marriage, we get laughed at, called prudish and naive, and run out of town.  Well naturally, if everyone around them is telling them how impossible it is to abstain, it’s going to be impossible to abstain!  I abstained.  I know lots of other people who abstained (by the grace of God).  I’m not saying it’s easy.  Nothing good ever is.

The enemy has used this censorship argument to expand the peddling of porn around the globe and to utilize an unregulated, unfiltered internet, where a single errant keystroke can land a kid in the midst of filth that will distort his sexual innocence and healthy development in ways we can barely imagine.  There are no scientific studies on this, because it’s only within the last ten years or so that the internet has become so prolific.  What will this generation of youth be like twenty years from now?   No one can say, but the effects are sure to be long term.

It’s like when those in favor of homosexual marriage say, “Hey, gay marriage has been legal for a year in Massachusetts, and it hasn’t damaged anything!”  And then they call us naive.  If, and I do mean if, gay marriage is going to cause any harm to the culture, is anyone so stupid as to think that this harm will manifest itself in one or two years?  Are these people serious?  Whether or not it’s going to cause any harm, we won’t be able to perceive it for at least a generation.  No significant social change can be properly evaluated for at least that long, which is generally regarded as about twenty years. Psalms 36 describes the heart of ungodliness in this way:

Psalm 36:4
He plans wickedness upon his bed; he sets himself on a path that is not good; he does not despise evil. (NAS)

Those who extol and promote sexual perversion have lost the capacity to properly evaluate the morality of their actions.  They do not despise evil.  A recent story about a male porn actor who contracted HIV said that his situation is a good indicator that “We need to come up with a system that works.” (Seattle Times, December 9th, 2010, from the Associated Press).  This guy’s mind is so warped that even contracting HIV–because of his work as a porn actor–is not enough to break him out of his myopic moral perspective .  He thinks the answer is to promote safe sex on porn films.  Nowhere does it even occur to him that the porn itself is the problem!  They have invented a problem, and now need a solution for it.  Those who cry “Censorship!” at the sign of any restriction on porn are the same way.  They do not despise evil, and now we have all these problems as a result that the government has to find solutions for.  Many Christians are also the same way.  We tolerate far more than we should in our homes, on our televisions, in our movie collections, in our web surfing, language, recreation, on and on.

Our immoral culture often talks about all the harm that will come if we censor anything, anywhere (even though, as I’ve shown irrefutably, we already do it all the time).  How come we never talk about the reverse?  What harm could possibly come if we didn’t have porn shoved in our faces everywhere we turn?  What harm could we do to our children by raising them in a world free from exploitation or dehumanization of girls and women?  Where no one profits off the sexuality of another person?  (Imagine all the people….)  I want five people to explain to me how this harms anyone.

And don’t even try to tell me about the financial harm.  That’s not harm.

As you can see, this is a hot topic for me, but it’s because it has been foisted on this nation and the world by the enemy with the express purpose of legitimizing the most extreme forms of perversion, so that more and more people can be enslaved by it.  These feminists I mentioned at the outset who defend all this perversion and yet complain about how their men treat them represent the success of the enemy in this area.  They do not see the connection between what they approve on one hand and what they rue on the other.  They deny that crude and selfish male behavior toward women has anything to do with the bombardment of porn (and porn values, something the book Pornified explores extremely thoroughly) throughout the culture.

Fifty years ago, did a man expect a woman to have sex with him after three dates?  Did he whine and moan and insult her if she didn’t put out for him after a few weeks?  Does this happen a lot today?  Why is this pressure put on women?  And why are more and more women not even seeing it as pressure?  They just go ahead and do it, as if it’s normal and expected.  It hasn’t always been this way.  What caused this enormous social shift in relational behaviors?  What caused this harm, which has been with us for at least a generation?

I’m no expert, but it sure is interesting that the modern porn movement started in the 70’s (or the 50’s, if you consider Playboy the beginning), and the young men from those days are now running the families producing the children who are acting this way.  If, of course, the men are even still around, and haven’t gone off for a younger, prettier flame.  I wonder how that behavior became so prevalent.  Hot Teen Whores #24, anyone?  Anyone?  It’s on ABC today at three.