Now having said that, I also think that ‘moral decay’ is something of a problem. But I am not sure how I can equate that other than to say I worry about the influence certain things have on the moral growth of society. For example, while I have no objection to porn I dislike porn that brutalizes women even if that brutalization is ‘acted’. The problem with porn though is that the internet has exploded that market and in such a hotly fought marketplace straigh up fucking or naked girls are now commercially low-grade because there are billions of straight up boy fucks girl films out there. In order to gain a commercial advantage you have to have an edge, and that concerns me in porn because the edge is often stuff that I think is extreme.

Having said that though, I wonder if maybe I am just old fashioned? Back when I was a teenager hardcore porn was unavailable so me and my school buddies would exchange magazines akin to todays Playboy and that was fine, watching a fuck film was out of the question because hardcore porno was flat out illegal here in the UK so while it might have been ‘out there’ somewhere, it wasn’t easy to get for us teenagers. We had to make do, and were happy to make do, with just the standard pictures of naked ladies

Now, if you have the web you can watch some girl getting slam-bammed all over the place within 2 minutes of opening your web browser! My concern is that this acceleration of porn might have a seriously negative effect on the developing sexualities of the ‘internet generation’ who have not known a world without a http://www. But you can’t ban it. Men are always going to want to see naked ladies, and anyone who thinks banning porn will get rid of ‘moral decay’ is sadly the victim of brain decay!

I rather think that we’ve lost our ability to understand the concept of moderation. So while I have no real objection to porn, or drugs, or wealth, or work, I think that these things should be applied to our lives in amounts that won’t destroy us. But sadly society is trying to sell us a drug to make us fuck longer, a cell phone to make us work longer, a website to make us get what we need quicker and more often, etc etc.

If you ask me, our moral decay lies in the fact that we’ve largely lost our ability to know how and when to slow down and stop.

I would say that we Christians are fascinated with “moral decay” because of our own falleness. Nietzsche, in a piercing analysis of humanity, said that life is characterized by a will to power, which is expressed in two primary forms: reactive and active. In the reactive form, people establish who they are by looking around and finding examples of evil, and in response to those examples say, “because I am not that, I am good.” By contrast, the active expression begins with the self as the standard, and says “those who are not like me are bad (not evil, just inferior).” Nietzsche called the reactive form the slavish expression of life denying morality, and this was the charge he leveled against Christianity. By contrast, the active form he called the life affirming expression of noble morality that the Uberman embodies. The point is, we all seek affirmation through various means: money, status, sexual conquest, lots of friends, a sense of style, reputation for brilliance, etc. Christians are particularly prone toward grasping for affirmation through judgementalism. I don’t think that Christianity has to be this way inherently (Nietzsche would disagree), but rather it is the byproduct of an all too common spiritual immaturity in the Church. Those Xians that I have met who are infused and saturated with the Spirit of Grace are not like this. I am not saying that they don’t have the capacity to be critical, but that they don’t get a sense of who they are from being critical. Instead, like Jesus, who was confident in his identity, they are free to move in love and genuine service toward others.

As far as the 2000 year old collection of texts is concerned, I would say a more accurate description would be that the Bible is a confederation of texts written over a the span of a few millennia by various and diverse authors, who held a range of beliefs, values and prejudices, that was brought together in its present canonical form about 2000 years ago. Of course, for us Christians, the tension we hold is that this affiliation of texts expresses the word of God, that God was somehow involved in the vagaries of history, moving through the limitations of diverse people to express with integrity who he is and what his will for humanity is. I realize that you don’t buy into this latter part, but I don’t think it should tax your imagination too much to enter into a “willing suspension of disbelief” to understand why this text and what it says would be so important to us who believe. I mean, I can occupy an atheist’s point of view, and process the world from that perspective, and I can often provide a better critique of Christianity and the Church than most atheists or agnostics I meet. I think that understanding others is primarily an act of the will and not so much a matter of innate cognitive features or disposition.

Weird. Sorry, couldn’t help but comment.