Get Your Holy Ghost Water Wings

Motivational speakers make a living retelling lies. One famous lie is, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” I love that one. No, that’s not insanity. That’s persistence. Insanity is thinking you’re a chicken or running down the street naked, rubbing your own excrement into your hair. Thinking the CIA put listening devices in your fillings is insanity. Doing the same thing over and over is pretty much normal; we all accept the fact that doing things right often produces bad results, so we don’t give up.

Isn’t telling the same lies to different crowds (who don’t improve) insane, according to the motivational-speaker definition?

Another big lie is the frog story. You put a frog in a pan of cold water, and you turn on the heat. The water heats so slowly, the frog doesn’t realize it. Eventually it boils to death. Yeah, okay. Try that and see what happens. Even a frog knows when it’s being scalded.

Nonetheless, the frog lie illustrates a valid point: human beings don’t notice slow change. Somebody has to slap us to get us to see it.

Case in point: Internet filth.

There was a time when you couldn’t say “condom” in front of your grandmother at the dinner table. That all changed with the venereal disease explosion in the 1980’s. Driven by gay promiscuity, AIDS seemed to threaten to kill all of us, and suddenly, we were shamed for being unwilling to talk about condoms at every conceivable opportunity.

That was gross, but the Internet made things a lot worse. Today, unfortunate phrases like “nip slip” and “upskirt” appear not just on porn sites, but on the evening news, and while I wouldn’t swear to it, the President has probably used the word “d*****bag” at least once in the State of the Union Address.

The water is hot. The frogs haven’t noticed.

I’m surfing the web in order to procrastinate. I guess I’ve put in half an hour. So far, without going to a porn site, I have seen two naked people and one woman wearing a bikini that reveals a big percentage of her pubic region. One of the naked people was a woman straddling a man. I’m not even trying, and this stuff is coming at me.

I wish we could go back to 1975 and transport people into 2016 for brief visits, so we could show them TV and the Internet and see what they thought. They would probably go back and start smoking and overeating, hoping to die before they got here. We are surrounded by lust and perversion, along with every kind of uncleanness. Gay marriage. Transsexuals in the military. The idiotic pro-public-nudity movement. We live in a time when people who say homosexuality is wrong are treated like child molesters.

If the change had occured in a day, we would be shocked beyond words, but it took 40 years, so most of us don’t even know it happened.

The big problem with this is that it wrecks our relationships with the Holy Spirit, who is our only source of help. There is a limit to how intimately he will associate with a filthy person who doesn’t listen. The devil knows that, and he’s terrified of God, so he spreads filth everywhere.

When I was in high school, I read a funny book called Superfolks. It was about a Superman-like hero who had gone soft. He was from the planet Cronk, and he was allergic to matter from his planet, appropriately called “Cronkite.” His arch enemy neutralized him by putting Cronkite in everything. Over time, the hero turned into a mushy couch potato who posed no threat at all.

Satan must have read that book.

Most people don’t think about the assault we’re experiencing. They think it’s fine, because they have no idea who the Holy Spirit is, what he can do for them, and how much they need him. They don’t think about minimizing the filth in their lives, because they don’t know it repels God. They welcome filth. If the average male sees something dirty pop up on his TV or monitor, he’s happy about it, and he stares intently. The people who produce this junk promote it with no sense of shame at all. They’re very proud of it. And I’m talking about people like network TV executives, not Larry Flynt.

Once you start trying to clean up, you realize how bad the problem is. Even if you don’t deliberately seek out sexual stimulation, it pounces on you from unexpected directions. You can’t go to the beach. You can’t turn the TV on. You can’t walk through a mall. Thanks to the breastfeeding fanatics, you can’t even sit in a restaurant.

You don’t realize how broken something is until you try to fix it.

Liberals and other God-haters keep saying we should be more concerned about violence and cruelty than sexual sin, but that’s stupid. The sexual urge is very, very strong, especially in men. It is extremely persistent. The urge to be violent or cruel is not like that. It’s not universal, it’s weak, and in most people, it only flares up briefly, on isolated occasions. Most of us try to resist it, because we think it’s bad. It offers the enemy less power over us than sex.

Look at it this way: how many people do you know whose lives were screwed up through sex, and how many do you know who ruined their lives with violence or cruelty? The list of violent people will be way, way shorter. Sex is simply not as dangerous, on an individual level, as violence. The devil knows that, and it’s why he works harder to promote sexual sin.

Many, many famous people have been destroyed by sexual sin, whether their own or that of others. Let’s see. Marvin Gorman. Jimmy Swaggart. Charlie Sheen. Bill Clinton. Denny Hastert. Anthony Weiner. Larry Craig. David Vitter. General Petraeus. Ted Haggard. Jim Bakker. Eliot Spitzer. Rock Hudson. Liberace. Prince. Michael Jackson. Anthony Perkins. Freddie Mercury. Amanda Blake (yes, Miss Kitty), Rudolf Nureyev, Brad Davis, Peter Allen, Paganini, Karen Blixen, Al Capone, Oscar Wilde, Ryan White, Arthur Ashe, Kimberly Bergalis…how many names do you want?

There are billions of people with sexual addictions. There aren’t many people who are addicted to violence. If the condition exists at all, it’s sufficiently rare to be considered a mental illness. We think intense lust is normal. And guess what? Many famous prolific murderers, if not all, are actually sex offenders. They murder in the pursuit of sexual pleasure. Think I’m making that up? Have you heard of Ted Bundy? Jeffrey Dahmer? John Wayne Gacy? Gary Heidnik? Wayne Williams? Richard Speck?

Serial killers keep souvenirs from their crimes so they can look at them later while they pleasure themselves. It’s like pornography to them. One investigator got a murderer to talk by putting one of his souvenirs where he could see it. He became sexually aroused by the memory of raping and murdering a little boy, and he dropped his guard. The son of my dad’s former law partner was raped, murdered, and dismembered by a sex-driven killer.

God-haters tell us sexual sins are victimless. Tell that to the children of a divorced couple. Tell it to hemophiliacs who have AIDS. Tell it to people who were born with syphilis. Tell it to a first wife. Good luck with that.

I know I’m not going to change anything by writing this. That’s not my motivation. I’m just commenting on something I find remarkable. I feel like I’m looking out the rear window of the Enola Gay, remarking on the explosion.

God gave me a sudden supernatural increase in my own self-control. I could never have managed that on my own. I used to think sexual sin was just fine, or that I had an expense account in heaven, so I could do what I wanted as long as I asked for forgiveness. I worked sexual iniquity deeply into my being, over decades. I could not have gotten rid of it on my own. The Holy Spirit lifted me to a better level, without my help. All I did was ask and wait. Without his help, I would still be walking in the same circle. If he stops helping, I’ll go right back.

Most other people aren’t going to receive his help, because they aren’t even asking. They think nothing is wrong; people will actually pay for phony pills to increase their sex drive. They will never have good relationships with the Holy Spirit, so they will be weak and defeated until they die. They will think defeat is victory.

Remember the book and movie, Hannibal? Dr. Lecter decided he didn’t like a pedophile, because as a murderer, torturer, and cannibal, he was morally superior. He gave the pedophile drugs, which the pedophile liked, and then he told the pedophile to cut his own face off and feed it to his dogs. The whole time, the pedophile was enjoying himself. Lecter was supposed to be helping the court analyze the man, but here Lecter was, being the best pal ever, helping him fool the silly old judge. Then the pedophile woke up with no face and a broken neck. Oops.

That’s what life without correction is like. The devil convinces us to destroy ourselves, and the whole time, we think we’re winning and that our fangs are dripping tiger blood.

It’s great to beat your enemy when he fights back, but it’s a thousand times sweeter to get him to destroy himself while you watch. Satan loves deceit, because it turns us into our own murderers. And it certainly saves work.

I wish I had something useful to say, but I don’t think that’s the case, so I’ll just settle for interesting.