The question …
I recently received an email note from a friend. She wrote:
"I am curious if anyone knows of some Christian articles dealing with internet flirting or cyber sex … I just can't seem to find anything that I can relate to or identify with, and I know that there must be some other folks who have encountered the same thing."
Not just a guy thing …
Indeed, there are a number of articles online dealing with this issue. Reviewing them reveals something interesting, if not downright scary. Pornography usage and cybersex traditionally have been viewed as a "male problem," because men are thought to be more easily excited by what they see. But now women are at risk too.
Okay, this is just irresponsible.
ChristiaNet, billing itself as "the world's most visited Christian website" recently offered a web-based survey asking visitors to answer "eleven questions about their personal sexual conduct." A press release from ChistiaNet trumpeted the results.
After receiving 1,000 results, ChristaNet asked Second Glance Ministries to help evaluate the responses:
"The poll results indicate that 50% of all Christian men and 20% of all Christian women are addicted to pornography."
Further:
- 60% of the women have significant struggles with lust
- 40% of the women committed sexual sin in the past year
- 20% of church-going women struggle with looking at pornography on an ongoing basis
This is nuts. These survey results are not scientific data. I don't believe for a second that one of every two Christian men are addicted to porn, and I certainly don't buy the assertion that one of every
These are a few of the things I've recently found interesting, but don't have the time to properly blog on. I don't necessarily like or agree with the links here, I just think they're interesting. And just in case you do, too, enjoy.
(You can view past Del.icio.us links here or subscribe to my Del.icio.us feed here. 
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Yesterday my blog stats tripled. Nay: quadrupled. With six new random comments on my previous Justin Berry post (“Justin Berry: From ‘camwhore’ to water-baptized witness for the State”), I figured there’d been another major media piece on Berry’s recent lifestyle change and cooperation with the Feds. Little did I know that both Justin Berry and Kurt Eichenwald had appeared on the local media-diva’s talk show: Oprah. And I didn’t even Tivo it.
The links to the Oprah show content follow my comments.
“She can not take it any more, Captain!”
One thing concerns me, even more now that I’ve seen Justin’s hollow-eyed, thousand-yard stare in the Oprah.com screenshots: Justin is ripe for a meltdown-burnout-crisis. There’s a scriptural injunction against “laying hands” on anybody suddenly—it’s not a proscription against Pentecostals 
praying for strangers, and it’s not advice about
Today I felt my heart lifted even as my gut was wrenched. Kurt Eichenwald, writing for The New York Times, ditched a traditional rule of journalism by becoming a compassionate part of the story. And The NYT pulled out all the stops, backing him every step of the way. Three cheers for Eichenwald and the NY Times!
Update 12/30/05: Kurt Eichenwald updates us on the aftermath his series of articles have at least temporarily wrought in the online pedophiliac camworld. From the article: “The shutdown of the portals, all of which have been in operation for at least four years, came days after an article in The New York Times described how minors, often with the assistance of their online fans, had begun operating pay pornography sites featuring their own images sent onto the Internet by Webcams.” Child Pornography Sites Face New Obstacles (New
