Tag Archives: pornography

Blogs, Socials

Filtering Images, Videos, not just Websites

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This is the kind of tech we’ve been thinking should have been active for years. Justin Taylor says Canopy has “the most effective technology on the planet to block pornography.“

Canopy’s CEO says, “One of the big challenges of navigating the digital world is that explicit content no longer is limited to pornography websites. It can appear anywhere and everywhere, which renders many of the traditional safeguards ineffective.”

Canopy, an expansion of an Israeli tech developer, has developed a smart filter that “can detect sexually explicit content in real time and seamlessly remove it.” They also fight sexting by scanning images stored on the filtered device, flagging them, and offering the user to either delete them or send them to their parents for review.

Religion

If Your Eye Causes You to Sin, here’s a Knife.

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I read an article the other day criticizing a renewed push by some U.S. House conservatives as well as some writers to ban pornography in America. The writer took no moral stance for or against it, but defended it as a point of individual rights. But what is freedom if it is not moral freedom? What is law if not moral law?

I almost linked to this First Things article arguing for ways we could regulate and restrict it, but I feared it was misguided. And maybe I feared other things.

It’s hard to ignore the implicit cries for help seen on Twitter by survivors of sexual abuse who say a parent groomed them with dirty images or that criminals are fueled by it. But being only one person, what can you do?

One of our favorite authors, Jared Wilson, points out the shock factor in Jesus’s words in Matthew 18:8-9, “And if your eye causes you to fall away, gouge it out.”

He says, “It’s not the temptation that leads you away—it’s your ‘foot.’ It’s not the sinful vision that leads you away—it’s your ‘eye.'” And the stakes for continuing in sin are far higher than you want to admit.

Uncategorized

Understanding Pornography Through Tolkien

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“‘No, I am afraid not, Sam,” said Frodo. “At least, I know that such things happened, but I cannot see them. No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me. I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire.”

Samuel James says, “I don’t think I have ever read anything that more poetically expresses what it’s like to be addicted to pornography than that passage.”

“As someone who was rescued from severe bondage to porn, I can feel the contrast in my life now versus my life then much more keenly than I can describe it. I feel emotional lightness, I suppose, and I no longer live in that withering dread of exposure that colored every human encounter.”

Coffee, Tea, Drinks, Reading, Religion

Stories You Won’t Want to Miss

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Here are some articles on a variety of current topics.

  1. 50 Books J. I. Packer Thinks You Should Read
  2. Refuting 5 False Theories About Jesus, including theories he was just a pagan myth or violent revolutionary
  3. 9 Truths About a Multi-Generational Church, such as the young should follow and the old should humbly lead
  4. Like bitter foods, like coffee, beer or dark chocolate? You might be a psychopath.
  5. Porn can’t be sold ethically. “The truth is that when a feminist performs the role of sex object in order to transgress and/or reclaim heteronormative constructs of femininity, her audience is excluded from the alleged meaning of her work. Men don’t go to peep shows so that they can self-critically reflect on women’s sexuality and the politics of desire. To ignore this is not an act of radical female autonomy, it’s an act of dangerous and narcissistic irresponsibility.”
  6. Porn and the Gospel, a talk by Joseph Solomon
Fiction

The Vicious Satire of Lolita

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abandoned dollPeter Leithart quotes from an Ira Wells piece on how we’ve forgotten who Lolita originally was, the 12-year-old victim of a monster.

Forgetting Lolita is also a problem because the book has never been as relevant: “the novel itself constitutes a vicious satire of a culture that fetishizes young girls . . . while simultaneously loathing pedophilia as an absolute moral evil on par with genocide.” We are that culture.