Fake Love, Fake War

I want to direct you to an incredibly thought-provoking article.  It concerns the combined topics of porn and gaming addictions.  If you've never made that connection, then you've never really paid attention to a gamer before or you've not known or been a porn addict.  The similarities, on a purely initial-impression perspective, are striking.

The article is called Fake Love, Fake War.  It is written by Russel Moore and you can find it on the Desiring God blog.  Allow me to quote a couple of paragraphs that really grabbed my attention.

Near the beginning of the article, Moore makes this valid point:

Pornography promises orgasm without intimacy. Video warfare promises adrenaline without danger. The arousal that makes these so attractive is ultimately spiritual to the core. 

Satan isn't a creator but a plagiarist. His power is parasitic, latching on to good impulses and directing them toward his own purpose. God intends a man to feel the wildness of sexuality in the self-giving union with his wife. And a man is meant to, when necessary, fight for his family, his people, for the weak and vulnerable who are being oppressed.

It is so valid and so important to understand that what we wrestle with is not flesh and blood, but principalities and power... We are in a spiritual warfare.  If we don't recognize this, we become vulnerable to attack because of our naivety.

Near the end of the article he makes this statement... Which, when I read it, I may have given a quite verbal and vocal "amen!" or at least a "wow!"

Moreover, these addictions foster the seemingly opposite vices of passivity and hyper-aggression. The porn addict becomes a lecherous loser, with one-flesh union supplanted by masturbatory isolation. The video game addict becomes a pugilistic coward, with other-protecting courage supplanted by aggression with no chance of losing one's life. In both cases, one seeks the sensation of being a real lover or a real fighter, but venting one's reproductive or adrenal glands over pixilated images, not flesh and blood for which one is responsible.

Besides the importance of these words, especially as I attempt to raise my own boys into men, I absolutley admire Moore's ability to put to words things that I've thought in ways that make more sense than how I've thought them.

Read the entire article... It's worth it.  Click here.