Students vs. Porn (2 of 4)

Pornography’s harmful messages

• Pornography negatively impacts the emotional and mental health of a child.  
• A child will often become desensitized and will seek out more deviant, bizarre and even violent content.
• Children struggle to distinguish between the pornography “fantasy” and the reality of authentic, intimate sexual relations.  
• Kids who view pornography will often act out the behaviors they have seen.  
• Pornography often depicts sex without love and commitment and often pushes the limits of what is physically possible.
• Girls and boys who see pornography feel as if they can never measure up and often struggle to perform like the porn stars they have seen online.  
• Images can never be erased.                                                                                                                                                        These facts and statistics remind me of a book I just finished reading this past week about the dangers of pornography. The final chapter details the conversation that took place when Doctor James Dobson interviewed Ted Bundy just 17 hours before he was executed. Ted Bundy became one of the nations most notorious and feared serial killers for beating, raping, and then murdering at least 30 girls and women between 12 and 26. Two things really stuck out to me in this interview:

1. When asked about his childhood, Ted said that he was raised in a healthy, fine, solid, Christian home and was never physically, sexually or emotionally abused.
2. Dr. Dobson asked how it happened. "What are the antecedents of the behavior that we've seen?"  Ted answered "As a young boy of 12 or 13, I encountered, outside the home, in the local grocery and drug stores, softcore pornography. Young boys explore the sideways and byways of their neighborhoods, and in our neighborhood, people would dump the garbage. From time to time we would come across books of harder nature - more graphic. This also included detective magazine, etc., and I want to emphasize this. The most damaging kind of pornography - and I'm talking from hard, real, personal experience - is that that involves violence and sexual violence. The wedding of those two forces - as I know only too well - brings about behavior that is only too terrible to describe."                                                                                                                                      He later goes on to say that "The issue is how this kind of literature contributed and helped mold and shape the kinds of violent behavior. In the beginning, it fuels this kind of thought process. Then, at a certain time, it is instrumental in crystallizing it into something that is almost a separate entity inside." "Once you become addicted to it, you look for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material. Like an addiction, you keep craving something which is harder and gives you a greater sense of excitement, until you reach the point where the pornography only goes so far - that jumping off point where you begin to think maybe actually doing it will give you that which is just beyond reading about it and looking at it." 

Ted Bundy was executed at 7:15 a.m. the day after this conversation was recorded.

In closing, I think it is very important to point out one more thing - the most important thing:
It does NOT justify his maniacal behavior, but while in Prison, Ted Bundy did accept the forgiveness of Jesus Christ and became a follower and believer in Him. 

For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.

- 1 Peter 3:18