(Editor’s Note: I came on Anthony Russo’s blog a while back and was impressed with his writing. His last post was about Burger King and McDonald’s, and Calvinism – all juicy subjects. This one is important for every one of us who has a computer – as since this is a blog, that is ALL of us!)
Death by double-click. It’s that easy. For millions of us the internet is a necessity of daily living, like our car, our credit card, or cell phone. We may joke that those things are “necessary evils”, and maybe they are, but not in the same way the internet is. Our cars don’t throw provocative images in our face when we need to look at the speedometer. Credit cards don’t bombard our senses with unmentionables when we go to use them. We really can live with a no-frills cell phone if we needed to. The internet is a different kind of “necessary evil”. The “information superhighway” can also be the road to perdition.
Some estimates place worldwide pornography revenues at almost $100 billion annually. The speed, interactivity, and anonymity offered by the internet makes it a significant contributor to porn’s bottom line. Even mainstream news websites strategically place thumbnail pictures and enticing captions on their pages to entice readers. Often such arresting images amount to thumbnail-sized soft-core porn. Why? Because the simple math for ad-driven sites is clicks = dollars.
So, if the internet is a necessary evil (and I use that phrase idiomatically), and the dangers of pornography abound, what can be done? What follows are some ideas. (Incidentally, both men and women can become ensnared by pornography. The rest of the article, however, will assume a male reader for smoother reading that is less encumbered by gender-inclusive conventions.)
1. Install an internet filtering program on your computer. I use and recommend CovenantEyes. At $5/month you can’t afford not to afford it. If you have a company-provided computer, talk to your Human Resources department and your IT department about allowing you to install it or installing it for you. If they’re smart, they’ll realize that doing so could also protect the company.
2. Share your passwords. …No, not with a stranger; with your wife. Make sure she can sign on to any email account and social networking site you’re on, and vice-versa. Encourage her to do so, and if you walk in the room one day and she’s checking your Facebook page, thank her!
3. Keep the computer(s) in high-traffic areas of the house. Again, openness is the underlying motive here. A look over your shoulder is a blessing. Come on, who really uses a formal dining room anyway? It’s a great place to put the computer. I’m sure your pastor would rather visit and see a cluttered, mixed-use dining room than have to see your names on his counseling roster some Tuesday night at seven-thirty.
4. Always try to go to bed at the same time with your wife. Admittedly, this is not always easy to do. Sometimes your wife may be tired or sick and retire early or maybe you can’t sleep. As I write this I am still wired from coffee earlier in the evening and would only be staring at the ceiling. Still, if at all possible, make such times the exception, not the rule.
5. Pray together daily. I’m resisting the urge to put these ideas in any particular order, but if I did, this would be solidly at #1. As a man, it is your good gift to encourage your wife in the things of the Lord and aid in her sanctification. (Ladies, as a woman, it is your good gift to encourage your husband to practice spiritual leadership in the home.) As a couple who vowed before the Lord, you invited Him into your marriage the day you got married. What’s changed then? “A cord of three strands is not quickly broken” says Ecclesiastes 4:12, and nothing is stronger than the bond of prayer.
6. “As for me and my mouse…” I have a picture taped to the top of my computer monitor that says, “As for me and my mouse, we will serve the LORD”, paraphrasing Joshua 24:15. It’s cute, maybe silly, but I like it, and it makes its point. Sometimes I look at it just because I like the artwork, so it’s a great double-duty piece of monitor chachki. Feel free to create your own.
7. Remind yourself of the Gospel often. The Gospel is meant for daily use. Don’t let a day go by without reminding yourself that without Christ you were dead in sin and without hope. Remember the miserable pre-Christ life you lived and the beauty and light God has shone in your heart since He first revealed Himself to you. Remember your desperate need of Him every day. We all think we can live pure, holy lives without Christ. We can’t…get over it. Stay humble. Stay needy. Walk in His grace and mercy every new day.
8. Stay in God’s Word and prayer. Remember these two pithy quotes: D.L. Moody once said about the Bible, “Either this book will keep you from sin, or sin will keep you from this book.” About prayer someone once said, “Seven days without prayer makes one weak.” Hide God’s Word in your heart and stay close to Him. In fact, ask for courage to sincerely pray this sobering prayer: Lord, please kill me rather than ever let me stray in this area. The point is to pray as if your life depended on it…it does.
9. Talk. You don’t have to have a heavy duty, “we need talk” talk…just a talk. You can even use this article to break the ice by showing it to your wife and using it as a springboard for discussion. Hey, what do you think about this article? Want to try moving the computer into the dining room? Make the quest for internet purity a team effort.
I realize that much of what I wrote only applies to married couples. To my single brothers and sisters in the Lord I offer these modified thoughts: #1 – CovenantEyes offers the option to designate an accountability partner who gets an email report of your web surfing. Ask a trusted (same-sex) friend or family member to receive the reports and inquire about any site they may question. #4 – Ask your roommates if you can keep your computer in the shared living room or other common area (chances are they’ll gladly oblige). You may not be able to incorporate both, but even implementing one of these will go a long way in helping you pursue personal holiness.
Those in recovery for various addictions often use the acronym “H.A.L.T.”, don’t let yourself get Hungry, Alone, Lonely, or Tired. Any one of these factors are dangerous red flags that often lead to failure, multiple at the same time are perilous. Knowing your own “H.A.L.T.” limits may halt you from sin.
Most importantly, let me encourage you with Hebrews 4:15, “For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.” Obviously Jesus did not have the internet during His earthly ministry. Yet, Scripture comforts us in this passage with the shocking truth that He too was tempted with lust. To put it plainly, Jesus knew the allure of a second look.
You are not alone. Yet, Jesus is our Great Example. He overcame temptation that you and I never could. In the next verse the writer of Hebrews builds on these beautiful truths. “Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” See in each moment of your life your twin needs of mercy and grace. Live prayerfully before the throne of the gracious Lord who lavishly gives them to His own and He will guard you to keep you pure.
I think this is a subject of great importance.
When I was 18, I wouldn’t have known where to go get pornography if I had wanted to find it (other than a Playboy or something). Now, we have to fight hard to defend ourselves against the onslaught of suggestive, explicit, and pornographic “entertainment.”
If you wish to discuss this “anonymously” (for obvious reasons), just put “Anonymous” in the name line. Your privacy will be maintained.
You don’t even have to go look for porn anymore as it will find those who are vulnerable. My sons are always looking for “cheats” for their video games and a lot of those sites will have pop ups and links promising better cheats that actually take you to porn sites. Our problem is some filters, filter out too much and then the kids complain that they can’t access ToonTown, but then some filters won’t filter out popups or links to other sites. Animi Porn is a problem for filters too. Our boys our pretty good and our computer is right in the middle of everything, when the porn sites are reaching out and grabbing them it’s tough.
You are absolutely right about that, Bess. Most of us are only about 3 clicks away from a porn site. You find something interesting, and you click it. Then, there is a link there to something else that seems interesting and harmless, and you click it. The next site has another link and you click it and voila – you are where you ought not to be, and you didn’t want to get there and you don’t know how it happened!
At least in my day, the porn shops were in a seedy part of town where you had to go intentionally.
Hi Bess,
Thanks for your thoughts. Not having kids myself, I hadn’t even thought about this from the aspect of kids. Wow. Thanks for commenting with that aspect.
One of the frustrations I have with Fox News is that their website has some pretty racy photos right amongst the “Entertainment News” section. It’s not “pornography” that will get blocked, but it’s right there, when you’re trying to read other news.
Kind of like the check lane at Walmart. I’ve seen more there than I need to as well. And the first questions my kids have had about sex have been based on the article titles of Cosmo and such. Irritating.
Yeah, Fox is one of my chief websites for news. In reality, when I said what I said – that you are only about 3 clicks from porn, I think I’m thinking about their website. Unfortunately, you’ve got to be careful when you launch out from Fox News.
Funny you say that…that is exactly the website I was thinking of when I wrote that part of the article.
At our WalMart they have put the Cosmos in boxes so only the name at the top appears. It’s insane that you can’t stand in line at a grocery store without your kids being assaulted with trashy headlines.
I’ve noticed that with commercials on TV. You can be watching a show that seems reasonably acceptable, and all of a sudden a commercial comes on that is pretty shocking.
I work my DVR pretty hard. It’s especially dangerous, I have noticed, to record programs late at night!
We live in a sick, twisted world.
Orrrr…. watching the sports programming of your choice, my hubby is oftern heard going off on a speil about not being able to watch a football game with his sons without a quick finger on the remote.
And the thing that got me really really irritated as a mother and as a woman – got a soda one time from Hardees drive thru and it had a picture of a scantily clad woman – I think the promotion was for the thick burger or something.
So many people are becoming so desensatized to the sexism/sexual exploitation that is being shoved in our faces all around us. Tickling ears and calling evil good and all that. I can’t imagine that there has been a more difficult time to be a young Christian male.
It’s frustrating, we don’t have cable, just antenna, so there is a limited amount that we can watch. This is by design, but even what we pick up, we can’t watch as a family, including the great Arkansas Razorbacks because the commercials are either to sexed-up or too violent for us. So, we’ll watch some, then blank it out.
I wonder when some of these companies will realize their marketing model is wrong anyway and not helping their sales?
Doug, I’m not a sports guy (never was) but I really have a hard time understanding how guys can go to church on Sunday mornings and then sit and watch football all afternoon, given the cheerleaders and commercials. A few years ago a church we attended hosted a Superbowl party and displayed it on the big screen (the merits of which are a whole ‘nother topic) and I was embarrassed by what was being shown…just kinda scratchin’ my head at the incongruity of it all.
By the way, my comment was not directed at you personally and not meant to “judge” anyone. It was just an observation of mine. (Just a point of clarification.)
It’s a valid observation. And part of why I keep up via ESPN Gamecasts a lot of times.
Although I discovered that CBS and ESPN stream some games, and without the commercials at all, that was nice.
One thing that helps to remove porn is to tighten up on your browser security settings. As a default: don’t allow JAVA, don’t allow add-ins, don’t allow ActiveX controls, etc.
For Internet Explorer: Go to “tools”, then “internet options”, then “security”. Then make separate settings for “INTERNET” and “TRUSTED SITES” :
1. Add “TRUSTED SITES” on a case-by-case basis by adding ONLY specific URLs into your trusted site list. For trusted sites, you can allow a full gamut of operations.
2. For all other sites, make your “INTERNET” settings very restrictive. When you do this you will significantly degrade your experience on most sites that use popups and add-ons or link to sites that do. This sometimes involves sites that come up “on top” (or near the top) from search engines such as Google or Bing. To such sites I say: “good riddance to bad rubbish”.
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Another thing is to remove sites out of your favorites list. For example, I took CNN out of my favorites and dumped it. I have also done the same with many sites run by news and media outfits — including TV networks and newspapers. The only decent news site I can personally recommend is PBS Newshour.
In the last three months this porno situation has gotten out of hand. People are very desperate to monetize the internet. Porno attracts people. There is a bounty out there for “clicks” which causes otherwise supposedly “legitimate” web operators to stoop to new lows.
In view of this, I think Christian organizations will be more selective in their use of the net. They will inevitably gravitate to sites they control. I predict that usage by Christian groups of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter will significantly decrease in the next few years as these types of sites become increasingly desperate to monetize the viewer experience.
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I am a software engineer. There is a particular site that I access which contains useful information but also is very lax in terms of including links to add-ins to various commercial sites — including porno. I solved this problem by developing my own “miniature” browser using the Microsoft Visual Studio. My application takes the raw HTML coming back from the site and keeps the stuff I want while throwing the other junk — including all JPEGS — in the trash. For the stuff I want, I parse the HTML myself and then I display it myself in picture boxes and/or list boxes and/or rich text boxes that I’ve setup in my program.
Due to the “disconnected” nature of the Internet Protocol, the server I’m talking to has no way of knowing that I’m not a commercial browser — such as Chrome or Explorer.
Examples of this coding can be seen in books such as Visual Basic 2005 Recipes or Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook. The control in the VB toolbox that you need to learn about to do what I’m doing is the WebBrowser control. This allows you to “build your own” web browser.
The example I’ve described uses Visual Basic 2005. But you can do the same thing in C# 2005. The thing common to both is the .NET functionality which is a ton of “controls” and “functionality” that you can use — either from Visual Basic or C#.
To use Microsoft jargon: you will be writing “managed” code. Managed code is Microsoft’s term for building your application on top of the .NET environment.
I have my own website. I’ve developed it myself from “raw HTML”. If you go there I don’t shunt you to any add-ins and I don’t use any “templates” from third parties. I think churches will have to resort to such methods in the near future. No more “commercial” prototype web development schema which to one degree or another rely on a canned set of pages that you customize UNLESS you know that there is no data harvesting going on behind the scenes [which go to some 3rd party] when your users go to “your” site.
Example: A church I know here in OKC issued tickets to a Christmas Performance via the internet. They linked to some “generic ticket issuing site” in San Francisco to provide this support. What is keeping the site in SF from harvesting information about everyone who ordered tickets via the internet for the Chruch’s Christmas performance and then selling it to a third party as a “mailing list” [actually an E-mail list] for some specific demographic — in this case, people in OKC who might be Baptists?
Roger K. Simpson — Oklahoma City OK
Looks like some good tips, I’ll check on that. Somewhere, I know I’ve seen how to make sure your YouTube embedding on a blog doesn’t pull any recommendations, because those can get crazy too.
Roger, thanks for the helpful software engineer perspective. Before seminary I did computer support for 20 years, so I saw things from the hardware/end-user perspective. I’ve seen guys get fired for stupid things like printing a porn story on a network printer and leaving it on the printer, etc. One guy had tons of images on a company server (getting backed up nightly, mind you) and even had the nerve to neatly categorize them in folders. Again, thanks for providing the IT perspective I could never really think in…sounds like you know your stuff!
I do think it’s important to remember, as much as I complain about ads or Wal-mart policies or whatever, that lost people will act like lost people. If we want to protect ourselves from these types of things, it’s our responsibility as Christians to be accountable among ourselves about it. We cannot expect a world which does not recognize Christ as Lord to help us honor Him as Lord.
Just my two cents on that. Glad somebody’s Wal-mart helps them out. Ours has those boxes, but whoever stocks magazines usually puts excess issues out of them. A lower down. Or in front of “Country Weekly.”
An interesting article two things really stuck out “go to sleep with your wife” I am not married and sleep is an interesting aspect of my life, I have gone past seven days with no sleep and 3 or 4 hours a night is considered a blessing. The “you are not alone”, I wish the Church would stop it with that, yes we are for the most part. I know we are to be in community and all the rest of it, but on every single practical level, we are alone, if we have family maybe not as much but in the faith community, yes we are. I understand that we need to give a hat tip to the we are community tripe but in reality at the local physical level of community, you bet we are alone. We consist of individuals that are together for mutual effectiveness, nothing more, unity is completely utilitarian, and it always has been. There would be much less pain of folks would just admit that.