An Inconvenient Truth: Smut for Smut

"How is it possible to hold such anger against something you don't believe in?"

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The above quote is the extent of my argument on the event Smut for Smut, where UTSA's "Atheist Agenda" holds an exchange of Biblical or Religious Texts for Porn. I am not here to argue nor am I here to condemn or judge. I've posted this because I want to fight for you. I have seen the repercussions of sin and hate; they only lead to utter destruction. My hope is not that you would change your mind or that you would 'think' like me. My hope is that you would see what sin (separation from God) could do and that you wouldn't suffer the same pain as the writer of the poem below.

The Reassuring Lie:

You have one life to live and its yours to do whatever you want with it. Lie to people and you will get away with it. Infatuate yourself with power, obsessing over money, people, and yourself -- these will make you happy. Follow your burning desire to pursue that person, they will satisfy you, they will complete you. Don't honor your parents, they weren't from your time period, and they don't understand anything you're going through. Take all that you need and take it in full, it's the Lord who is blessing you, no need to thank Him (he knows everything, right?)... The more you do to be "good", in your own eyes (of course), the more you will receive from the god you love and loves you in return with prosperity.

The Inconvenient Truth:

There is a God a Creator, the Christ, the One who dwells amongst us. He is vast and infinite, unknown by human hearts. We do not understand Him and because we don't, we don't like it, we don't like Him. This Creator is jealous for you. He said that this is/was/will be the greatest commandment, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength and the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself", and yet we all fail daily, by the hour, by the minute and by the second. We've given in to the reassuring lie.

It might seem inconvenient that a God who created us from the dust He breathed out of His mouth would want us to love Him and put Him as number 1 in our lives, that we would claim Him as our greatest good. Pursuing all other things is pointless in the midst of pursuing God. How inconvenient! How cruel! How dare this God who loves us, gives us breath, and wants for us eternal life ask us to give ourselves to him...

My heart cries out to those who do not know the Truth, that God loves them. He sent His only Son to die, so that we would accept Him and live our lives in Him and when we no longer exist on earth, we would be with Him in Heaven. Now, I realize the church is not perfect. There is no individual alive who is perfect... Adding a bunch of imperfect people does NOT make a perfect church.

I know that the exchange of Bibles and Porn will take place. But the thing is, we are either slaves to sin or a slaves to Christ. You are either living on the reassuring lie or soaking in the inconvenient Truth. There is no other way...

If you don't read anything I wrote above, at least read the poem below. Christian, atheist, agnostic, Buddhist, Mormon, Hindu, Jewish whatever you claim you are please read... This was written by a woman whose husband ran to the reassuring lie of pornography. This is her story.

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“I Looked For Love in Your Eyes”
I saved my best for you.
Other girls may have given themselves away,
But I believed in the dream.
A husband, a wife, united as one forever.

Nervous, first time, needing assurance of your love,
I looked for it in your eyes
Mere inches from mine.
But what I saw made my soul run and hide.

Gone was the tenderness I’d come to know
I saw a stranger, cold and hard
Distant, evil, revolting.
I looked for love in your eyes
And my soul wept.

Who am I that you cannot make love to me?
Why do I feel as if I’m not even here?
I don’t matter.
I’m a prop in a filthy play.
Not an object of tender devotion.

Where are you?

Years pass
But the hardness in your eyes does not.
You think I’m cold
But how can I warm to eyes that are making hate to someone else
Instead of making love to me?

I know where you are.
I’ve seen the pictures.
I know now what it takes to turn you on.
Women…people like me
Tortured, humiliated, hated, used
Discarded.
Images burned into your brain.
How could you think they would not show in your eyes?

Did you ever imagine,
The first time you picked up a dirty picture
That you were dooming all intimacy between us
Shipwrecking your marriage
Breaking the heart of a wife you wouldn’t meet for many years?

If it stopped here, I could bear it.
But you brought the evil into our home
And our little boys found it.
Six and eight years old.

I heard them laughing, I found them ogling.
Hands bound, mouth gagged.
Fisheye photo, contorting reality
Distorting the woman into exaggerated breasts.
The haunted eyes, windows of a tormented soul
Warped by the lens into the background,
Because souls don’t matter, only bodies do
To men who consume them.

Little boys
My little boys
Laughing and ogling the sexual torture
Of a woman, a woman like me.
Someone like me.

An image burned into their brains.

Will their wives’ souls have to run and hide like mine does?
When does it end?

I can tell you this. It has not ended in your soul.
It has eaten you up. It is cancer.
Do you think you can feed on a diet of hatred
And come out of your locked room to love?

You say the words, but love has no meaning in your mouth
When hatred rules in your heart.
Your cruelty has eaten up every vestige of the man
I thought I was marrying.
Did you ever dream it would so consume you
That your wife and children would live in fear of your rage?

That is what you have become
Feeding your soul on poison.

I’ve never used porn.
But it has devastated my marriage, my family, my world.

Was it worth it?

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