Looking at Porn Leads People to Reject Their Faith?

It kills my spirit each and everytime so yes it leads people to darkness i.e. rejecting the Light regardless of what faith they may find it in.

 

I ended up an Agnostic at the worst of it. I was fapping to porn hours every day.

 

I think it's double edged. The more you slide into it, the more you understand the reality of the... moral dimension... the reality of virtue and vice, good and evil, and hence the reality of God.

 

It's logical. For a believer every time they experience temptations is a choice - Which God I'll choose in a while. Will it be God of the Bible or will it be the great lord Porno-Masturbator.
You can't serve two gods because you will love one and hate another.
Now a bit of human Psychology. Is it possible to be watching porn together with masturbating In the same time while you are praying?
The typical behaviour is that doing PMO ( serving the great lord Porno-Masturbator) a believer tries to reject every thought about God because it would disturbe them. Doing so on a regular basis for many hours a day ( as full addiction demands) we accustom the mind to disbelieve ( active rejection of God).
It can be the time when a Christian chooses a cult where PMO is not an obstacle or not mentioned like yoga, meditation, positive thinking, new age, tarot. You can choose a new religion which doesn't mention or doesn't condemn your two names' lord Porno-Masturbator.

When in binge I actively served my alternative god P-M and must admit that I was his faithful servant ready to sacrifice everything my salvation and soul including.

 

It also doesn't help your grades, your relationships, your income, your sleep, your workouts. . .
It may fill the pockets of those who push it, but it hurts everybody else in multiple ways.
It may have encouraged some to go into computing. After they had to work so hard to keep everything hidden, without history, and virus free on the family computer, they may have realized that they had developed some IT skills.

 

Exactly!
There are tens or hundred of tips on this and other anti PMO forums but you've nailed it. It's enough to follow only one:

I added to this tip my personal invetion - vows. But absolutely the most important is tip 1.

 

Interesting post.

The first thing I'd say is that truth is objective and external. I'm not here to tell you what the truth is, but I hope you can agree that whatever the truth is, it doesn't change whether you fap all your life or stay sober for many years. Your sexual behavior has no bearing or influence on whether or not God exists. It might change your opinion, but it will never change reality.

But if you're here on NoFap, there's a good chance that you belief life has meaning--transcendent meaning, or a higher purpose. If life was all about pleasure and satisfaction, there would be no reason to do NoFap. Instead, we'd all live by the philosophy of "eat, drink and be merry." But if there's a higher purpose to life than pleasure, then there must be a higher being that gives us that purpose. Otherwise our 'higher purpose' is simply a product of our own imagination, and thus not real.

100%.

"This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God." - John 3:19-21

People generally reject Christ because they love their sin and hate having it exposed by the light.

Edit: @Joyful Job you beat me to the punch with that scripture reference ... nice work.

 

What about if it helps you find faith? Indirectly of course but since I've been trying to kick my porn habit I've been drawn to Buddhism.

 

I'm not going to try to answer your initial question, even though it's a good one, but I think because you mentioned your struggle with Christianity and porn you might really enjoy this series by The Meeting House in Ontario, which was written for people like you and me.

 

Being a girl my porn and sex addictions were really heavy. Became unbearable. I had a clock alarm to go to Mass on Sunday but didn't go so many times. I felt unworthy of being a Catholic and then doing that. How could I? I chose to stay in my ex house having sex with my guy and keep feeding my addictions, it was a non-ending cycle for me

2 things made my addictions very painful:

1. the fact I am a girl and so the reaction from the other part was sometimes very sad for me and i would cry often about it
   
2. and the fact I am Catholic

Felt I was going against all the values i was raised with by my family, that i became the person i thought i could have never been, deeply disappointed by my sexual behaviour (i ended up avoiding looking at myself in the mirror for how digusted i was of what I did). God and my family helped me through all this. Without God i dunno what would have happened to me. I had recurrent suicidal thoughts too for months

 

Especially Catholics feel depressed and disgusted when addicted. They constantly treat it as a series of grave sins and innerly they don't recognise it as an ilness, addiction.
Do you know that we've got even the first saint who was to his death day an active opium addicted but simultaneously he tried to fight his addiction all the time?
His addiction saw God as an illness.
The Catholic faith says that as long as you fight ( even unsuccessfully) you commit no grave sin. You can even receive Holy Communion without previous Sacrament of Penance. The condition is only one you must honestly try to get rid of this addiction. Your sin is only a venial one ( when you do PMO).
Read the story of this Chinese saint and stop worrying about your addiction, about your past too:

St. Mark Ji Tianxiang


https://aleteia.org/2017/07/06/he-w...-the-sacraments-but-hes-a-martyr-and-a-saint/

 

This is a great conversation starter. So the first thing I'm going to challenge you on is to start watching Tim Keller's The Reason For God videos on YouTube. He brings in 8-10 non believers and they drill him with questions about God. It helped me get over the parts of Christianity I was struggling with as there is not one question he could not answer.

In regards to porn and rejecting your faith...I'm a pretty strong Christian after a long battle of saying I don't need Him and here's how I think now. Anything that harms you (alcohol, addiction, having bad relationships, wasting time on social media) is the darkness AKA Satan. This seems harsh, but if you think about it this way it makes sense. Most people want to improve their life, so when they waste money going out to drink, when they waste time on bad relationships or porn addictions or social media, all they're doing is creating less time for them to reach their goals. There's a quote I heard a while back, "If all you care about is getting drunk at the bars with your friends and not building a legacy for your family, then I will not call you a loser, but my friend you are not a winner." You can replace "getting drunk at bars" with anything in this case and with things like this I consider this the Devil trying to pull you away from Him. Anything that pulls you away from bettering yourself and building a legacy for your family is harmful, anything that is harmful is the darkness, anything that is the darkness - Satan.

I used to work in restaurants and all I would do is party all the time, get drunk, wake up hungover, watch porn, objectify women, and do anything possible to not look towards the light. Within 2 years of me finding God I doubled my salary at work (found a new, amazing career) and found an amazing woman who is now my fiancé.

 

I wouldn't say it's led me to reject faith, but it has most certainly kept me further from God. The time we spend indulging in pornography is time we could be using to grow in our faith. And perhaps another reason is feelings of guilt because we have sinned and the enemy tells us that He wouldn't be happy with us. Our heavenly father couldn't love us anymore than he already does. It's perfect and it's unconditional. It does sadden Him when we fall to lust and step away to cover ourselves. I feel that this addiction of mine is something that's God's spoken to me saying, "I'm trying to free you from this, you're going to have to let this part of you die and live again with me."