Pornography

1. Pornography is also addictive. It impairs decision-making capacities and it “hooks” its users, drawing them back obsessively for more and more. A man who had been addicted to pornography and to hard drugs wrote me this comparison: “In my eyes cocaine doesn’t hold a candle to this. I have done both. … Quitting even the hardest drugs was nothing compared to [trying to quit pornography]”
   -Pornography, Dallin H. Oaks ( April 2005 General Conference)
   
   
2. Satan has become a master at using the addictive power of pornography to limit individual capacity to be led by the Spirit. The onslaught of pornography in all of its vicious, corroding, destructive forms has caused great grief, suffering, heartache, and destroyed marriages.
   -To Acquire Spiritual Guidance, Richard G. Scott ( October 2009 General Conference)
   
   
3. Over the past twenty years a plague of pornography has swept across most countries of the world with increasing momentum and devastating impact. What began a few years ago as a few crude picture magazines that startled sensitive people has grown to hundreds of publications, each seeking to outdo the others with increasingly shocking content.
   -Personal Morality, David B. Haight (October 1984 General Conference)
   
   
4. Some persons struggle to differentiate between what they term “soft-core” and “hard-core” pornography. Actually, one leads to another. How applicable is Alexander Pope’s classic, “Essay on Man”: Vice is a monster of so frightful mien As to be hated needs but to be seen; Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
   -Pornography—the Deadly Carrier Thomas S. Monson-(October 1979 General Conference)
   
   
5. We also recognized there is virtually no place on earth that cannot be impacted by salacious, immoral, and titillating images. This is one reason why pornography has become such a plague in our day.
   -Can Ye Feel So Now?, Elder Quentin L. Cook (October 2012 General Conference)
   
   
6. Remember that those young wives said their husbands’ infidelity began with an attraction to pornography, but immoral activity is not just a man’s problem, and husbands aren’t the only ones offending. The compromise available at the click of a mouse—including what can happen in a chat room’s virtual encounter—is no respecter of persons, male or female, young or old, married or single.
   -Place No More for the Enemy of My Soul, Jeffrey R. Holland ( April 2010 General Conference)
    
7. Avoid any semblance of pornography. It will desensitize the spirit and erode the conscience. We are told in the Doctrine and Covenants, “That which doth not edify is not of God, and is darkness.”5 Such is pornography.
   -True to the Faith, Thomas S. Monson ( April 2006 General Conference)
   
   
8. Pornography will sap spiritual strength to endure. Pornography is much like quicksand. You can become so easily trapped and overcome as soon as you step into it that you do not realize the severe danger. Most likely you will need assistance to get out of the quicksand of pornography.
   - Press On, Joseph B. Wirthlin (October 2004 General Conference)
   
   
9. A diet of violence or pornography dulls the senses, and future exposures need to be rougher and more extreme.
   - Rated A, Marvin J. Ashton (October 1977 General Conference)
   
   
10. We place ourselves in the path of these spiritual hurricanes when we indulge in anger, alcohol, and abuse; lust and licentiousness; promiscuity and pornography; drugs, pride, greed, violence, envy, and lies—the list is long.
    -Spiritual Hurricanes, David R. Stone (October 1999 General Conference)
    
    
    

    I had a buddy who’s dad collected Playboys. They had joined the church a couple of years before. I was baffled that his dad had all these magazines and that they were available to anyone who wanted to look at them. Needless to say, his house was a place that all the boys liked to congregate. That was 30 years ago. If you wanted to look a naughty picture you had to go to Todd's now its just a click away. When I was first introduced to the internet the guy I worked with was eager to show me how easy it was to find porn. Like drugs, smoking and alcohol its inviting but I put its true allure closer to gambling. Escape is what it offers but you don’t ingest it or breath it in you invite it in. You search it out with the hopes that it will bring you something greater. Relationships die and bank accounts dry up all on the false hope that it will make you real. At the beginning of this project I really didn’t think this subject should be one of the four we had to do and I believed that until the end. That is until I found, what would be the last of the quotes in this activity, quote number ten. We are greater that the hurricanes that society sends our way and we have the strength to overcome them.