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The New Drug By Nathaniel Hille
There is a new drug. Well, it is not actually new. It is old. But it has made a comeback. I am writing about Pornography. I want to encourage you to not put this article down. Finish reading it. Your home and your church are at stake. Shockingly Awful Statistics If you do not think that Pornography is an issue, let me show you that it is with some statistics. According to fightthenewdrug.org , two different internet pornography sites officially released their 2019 annual review (I am leaving the names of the sites off). One of those websites had 42,000,000,000 site visits to it. Nope! That is not a misprint. 42 Billion site visits. Let us take a look at these numbers. That equates to 115 million visits per day. 39 Billion searches performed. 6.83 million videos uploaded. 1.36 million hours of new content. Here is a quote: “If you started watching 2019's new videos in 1850 you would still be watching today.” This is just one (1) pornography website! Here are some more stats for the technical people. 209 gigabytes per second; 753,041 gigabytes per hour; 18,073 terabytes a day; 6597 petabytes of data transferred. “If you copied all that data onto hard drives they would reach 62 miles/100km high to the edge of space” Every second 30,000 people are viewing porn on the internet. 42.7% of internet users view porn. I was at a homeschool convention and met a man: Barret Johnson. He was a speaker in one of the break out sessions. He started the session by saying, “What if I told you that of college students 88% of non-christians are addicted to meth, cocaine, drugs; and that 80% of christians of the same college students were also addicted? Would you think we had a problem on our hand?” He then went on to say that those are the numbers of college students who are having sex outside of marriage! 88% of people who claim to not be a christian are having sex outside of marriage and 80% of professed christians are also having sex. Now I am certain that in our day of easy-believism and decision regeneration that some of those “professed christians” are nominal christians. Nevertheless..those are some staggering numbers. Do not think that these numbers are unattached to the usage of pornography. There is a correlation between pre-marital sex and porn. Here is another question he asked: “What is the average age of a boy and girl when they are first exposed to pornography?” In my head I thought, well 12, 13, 14 for a boy and a girl, I have no idea. WRONG! The average age for a boy: 8-10; The average age for a girl: 10-12. I am going to re-write that because it bears re-writing. The average age that a boy is exposed to pornography is 8-10 years old. The average age that a girl is exposed to pornography is the age of 10-12 years old. Now, I know what you are thinking, “Not my babies, not my kids...no, we go to church, we go to Sunday School, Sunday Morning, Sunday Night, we do not even have a tv (by the way I have a T.V.), my kids know better. Brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers...remember these are little sinners and do you remember what sinners do? They sin. No one is exempt from this sin. NO ONE! A few years ago I was preaching and I mentioned the word “sex” from the pulpit. Later, after I had finished preaching, a member of the church, a wonderful man, who was full of faith, and sound in the doctrines of our Savior said, “I have never heard the word 'sex' in the pulpit before.” I replied, “Well, that sure explains how we got to where we are today.” No one is talking about it. Parents are not talking to their children about it; children are not talking to their parents about it. It is an uncomfortable subject for those of us who are parents today. I cannot speak for everyone, but I was not home-schooled. I went to a public school. And we had sex-education. Guess what? They do not teach what God says about sex in the Bible in the public school sex-education class. Also, if you are a home schooling parent...YOU ARE THE SEX EDUCATION INSTRUCTOR. So you better get ready and prepared to talk about it. And this includes pornography. Here is another staggering statistic: A survey taken by 1300 pastors at pastors.com (a site I have never been to) revealed that 54% of pastors had been to pornography sites on the internet in the last year (a 2012 article), and 30% had looked at pornography in the last 30 days. Look, I know that these are most likely not Sovereign Grace, Landmark, Missionary Baptists, but let us not think that we are exempt because we put certain adjectives that describe our doctrine before our name. Every one of us in the pulpit are sinners (hopefully saved by grace, and called to preach by God). Let Us Talk Money The Pornography business is a $13 Billion (with a “B”) a year industry. That is more than the top tech companies: (MicroSoft, Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Ebay, NetFlix, EarthLink) COMBINED! Selling sex is one of the oldest businesses in the world and right now, business is good. In the United States alone, every 30 minutes another pornographic film is made; 89% of pornographic web pages are constructed in the United States. Another article: The Valley Exposed (from 2007) stated, “The 200 adult-entertainment companies operating in the San Fernando Valley rake in an estimated $1 billion a year, but little of that makes it into city tax coffers. Tax exemptions granted to all types of movie production companies – including adult entertainment – allowed them to pay just $1.4 million in city business taxes last year, a fraction of the $435 million collected in the entertainment capital of the world.” One chart from a previous mentioned article gave these numbers:
While tax dollars are not really being generated from the actual industry, the revenue that those participating in it does create tax dollars when it is spent. So do not look to the politicians in your state capital or in the congress/parliament or the office of the president. More than likely, with the numbers we posted earlier, they are probably engaged in viewing pornography. More than 200,000 people in the United States spend more than 11 hours per week looking at pornography. 58% of those who watch pornography suffer considerable financial loses and one-third have lost a job. Pornography Within The Genders Pornography is a male dominated sin. However, you may be surprised at the rising numbers of the females involved in Pornography. Visitors to pornography sites: 72% Male; 28% Female. Males are 6 times more likely to view porn and spend more time viewing it. 17% of women say that they struggle with a pornography addiction. We stated earlier that the average age for boys being exposed to pornography is 8-10 years of age and for girls it is 10-12 years of age. Pornography and Marriage There is a profound effect on the marital relationship. Marital infidelity is increased by more than 300% due to pornography. 56% of divorces include one party having an obsessive interest in internet porn. The divorce rate in the United States is hovering at around 50%. That means that about 25% of marriages are ending in divorce with an obsessive interest in internet pornography being a sited issue in the paperwork. Pornography and the Brain “It is enough that we have devised a form of heroin 100 times more powerful than before, usable in privacy of one's own home and injected directly to the brain through the eyes” DDr. Jeffrey Satinover of Princeton University describing porn's effect to the United States Senate. Pornography has a similar effect on the brain as Cocaine. Cocaine and opioids make users feel high by triggering our brains to unleash dopamine at extremely high levels. Want to guess what else does? Porn! Yet, the pornography of today is so much different from that of years ago. Thanks to the internet, pornography now mixes the most powerful natural dopamine release the body can produce with and endless stream of variety, and every time the high starts to fade, you can flip to an new image to keep dopamine levels elevated for ours. Pornography and the Bible Galatians 5:19-21—“Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.” The word “fornication” is the translation of the greek word “Porneia”. It is from the Greek word “Porneia” that we get our English word Pornography from. Pornography is a work of the flesh. There is nothing spiritual about it. It in no way glorifies the Lord. It in no way edifies the saint spiritually. Just like any sin, pornography can be overcome. It is one more thing that we can have victory over though our Lord Jesus Christ. There are men who were once drunkards, but the Lord saved them. Men who at one time smoked cigarettes, used other drugs. Yet some men having been saved never had a desire to drink, smoke, or use drugs again. Others have stated it was a daily challenge to overcome such things. Such is the same case with pornography. Yet, it is the blood of Christ that cleanses us from all unrighteousness ((1John 1:9). The New Drug The ease with which pornography is accessible today makes it the new drug. I remember at school hearing of a boy who had a magazine. But now with the internet and especially the smart phone, pornography is but a “click” away. There is a disconnect between parents and children over the dangers of this drug and the easiness of access to it. I want to encourage pastors, to equip the parents with the dangers of pornography. That we preach a sermon upon it, if the Lord leads. That we at minimum address it with the parents that they might be aware of the reality of this danger in our present day lives. AMEN. |
