Thanks so much for posting the Randy Alcorn link. I’m actually blogging on it myself now. Such critical information for parents on protecting our children from such an immense danger!!

Google is taking over the world! Crazy!

I once posed the question in a small group church gathering: Is our contemporary church more like a mansion at the end of a cul-de-sac or a city on hill? As we examined the programs and attractional, “build it and they will come” modus operandi to which many of us had grown accustomed, we began to challenge the core of who we had become in contrast to what we believed scripture was calling us to become more like (ie, Revelation/Acts, etc.) Needless to say, the contrast with a city on a hill/New Jerusalem motif was pretty sharp.

Aside from the fact that our church structurally was a literal mansion on a cul-de-sac smack dab in the middle of suburbia, we came to see how even most of our church programs were closed, exclusive, unconnected, and ciricular, just like the cul-de-sac (and in juxtaposition to a city’s interconnecting streets that flow like rivers and feed one another). There were a lot of other parallels, as you can imagine. It was a really cool discussion.

One thing that sort of bugs me about the Alcorn video. At one point he says, paraphrased, “If you give your son private access to the internet, you might as well give him a huge stack of magazines and tell him not to look at them.”

Two things here. First, its possible to use the internet access in a good and constructive way. It’s not possible to use the magazines that way. So, what private internet access is really like is giving the kid a huge library filled with books of all types. Some helpful, some pornographic. The pornographic ones are, for the most part, labeled, such that he’d have to go looking for them to find them.

Second thing- his argument is geared towards children, or at least young adults, but really the logic extends to all men. Replace “son” in my paraphrased quote above with “husband”.

Also, its worth noting a teenage son is a scant few years from being outside his parents’ control as far as internet usage goes, at which point he’ll be confronted with this issue even if his parents saw fit to deny him private internet access while he was living at home. With this reality in mind, a parent’s ultimate goal should not be “prevent my son from accessing internet porn while he’s living at home”. That’s a worthy thing, but it ignores the fact that very soon your son won’t be living at home. No, the ultimate goal should be, “prepare my son so that, when he leaves home in a few years, he’ll be able to resist the temptation to access porn when my authority no longer prevents him doing so.”

With that goal in mind, it may be advisable to, at some point, give the kid private access at home if the parents think he can be trusted. That doesn’t mean he won’t stumble. But, if he does, he’ll be doing so while still part of a parent/child relationship in which you can speak truth to him and, hopefully, correct his behavior.

As an aside- in keeping with Alcorn’s remark that “I’ve been a 7th grade boy”, so have I. And I can tell you one doesn’t need porn to sink into an abyss of lust, fantasy and obsessive self-gratification. I wonder, would Alcorn let his sons close the door when they go to the bathroom? Take a shower? Are they ever allowed to close their bedroom doors? Are they allowed to sleep in a bedroom by themselves? I mean, you have to draw the line somewhere. If you can’t trust a kid to be alone with a laptop without looking at porn, how can you trust him to be alone in his bedroom at night without acting out in other (obvious) ways?