New Warhorn Media post by Tim Bayly:
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3 posts were split to a new message: Problems with WarhornMedia.com images
I guess the short answer is that we do both. We had a discussion about this very thing in our pastors meeting this past Tuesday. The online form provides a low-hurdle way to ask for help, but coming to one of the pastors and asking for help is, of course, welcome and encouraged as well.
Not to mention the countless times the pastors and elders have noted a concern and taken the initiative to address it with somebody.
Edited to add: sometimes things are obvious in 30 seconds. Lots of times they aren’t, though.
I do not have any contact forms on my website or social media.
I bet you miss some introverts this way. There are a lot of us who would do pretty much anything to avoid having to make a phone call.
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I’m sure this is in response to what I wrote, but that puzzles me. Why would what I wrote indicate we avoid personal contact with fellow believers, sticking instead to email or social media?
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And if I’m forced to make a phone call, I’ll either delay it or forget about it. Horror of horrors. 
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Do you keep a list of suggested resources and would you mind sharing?
The most helpful antidote to looking at naked flesh is loving our wives. Second is loving our daughters. Active love of wives and keeping in mind the flesh belongs to some man’s daughter helps to bring the requisite revulsion and shame. Other things I won’t mention in a public forum. If smartphones are a problem, dumb phones. “False Intimacy” by Harry Schaumburg. Up the ante with meeting with elders and suspension. Preach on it. Lucas and Joseph will have more to suggest, I’m sure. Love,
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Tim is absolutely right: real intimacy is the key to fighting false intimacy. This is so essential for men who have grown up in our porn-saturated culture. And we must do the work of exposing the lies and destruction of false intimacy that we see all around us.
Confession is also essential, of course. It’s critically important that we have the faith to bring our sin into the light so that it can be covered by the blood of Christ. This requires a flesh and blood brother who will hear your confession and pronounce the forgiveness of God to you.
While additional programs and tools cannot be used as a substitute for what has already been mentioned, they can be very helpful. The program announced above uses this course from Wilson, Sumpter and Durbin as part of their curriculum. False Intimacy has already been mentioned, and Schaumburg has another, more recent book called, “Undefiled.” There are other good books.
Finally, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the fact that everyone now carries around in their pocket more porn than they could watch in a lifetime. It’s truly insane, and I don’t think it’s a tenable situation. It’s one thing for a man to resist that temptation while he’s running around busy during the day. But for a single man to resist that temptation at night in the privacy of his bedroom when he doesn’t have a wife? I’m not excusing the behavior to point out that that is a terrible situation to put someone in.
And so… dumb phones. Leave your computer in your car outside and lock it. Or downstairs. We need to be sensible and matter-of-fact when we deal with our sin. It’s not a mystical, mysterious problem - it’s actually pretty predictable and obvious.
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This reality is a huge failure of Western elites. We put a man on the moon, and we could have easily segmented porn onto a part of the internet that was difficult to get to. We didn’t. And now here we are.
Technically, perhaps, but not culturally. In this day of sexy selfies and Shades of Grey, you could wipe the whole internet clean and jail every pornographer, but the next day a bunch of stuff would be put up again by attention-seeking women.
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It would certainly be impossible to police things like SMS, but something like Instagram would be quite feasible.
That would be a vast improvement over what we have today.
Come to think about it, I believe nudity is banned on Instagram, so it’s already being done there, and could be done on other platforms also.
Kicking bad actors off the Internet would be a very effective punishment, more so if there were a dirty Internet where they could flee and leave the rest of us alone.
A place where only bad content is allowed, kinda like the Super Friends’ Hall of Justice vs. the Hall of Evil?
I’d probably just make that place largely un-policed, like what we now call the Internet. But you get the idea.
Content filtering on social media, search engines, etc., has become pretty good it seems, so I think one must go looking for trouble to get into it. Of course, it is easy to go looking for trouble.
Yes, but it is accomplished by paying many thousands of people to watch the most horrific things imaginable in order to filter them, and even then they rely on normal users like you and I to first see and report things—something I’ve done many times. And even then they fail sometimes. I experienced that as well once where one of the most sexually explicit images I’ve ever seen was part of an account’s profile pic, but when I reported it they didn’t catch it. Here’s a long article on who “they” are and what they have to do. https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona
[language warning, among other warnings]
Yes, it is true that somebody has to censor material in order for censoring to occur. That has always been the case. What is different now is the volume of material and the vividness (video in comparison to photos in comparison to text). The only way to cut down on that would be to punish malefactors to discourage uploading, but that is something for which there is little cultural appetite. As I alluded to upthread, even if you were able to get rid of the professionals, there would still be an army of ordinary women uploading stuff for the attention it gains.
@ldweeks and I have been thinking a lot on the issue of filters since reading Technopoly. Filtering is absolutely essential. Censoring is just one type of filtering. I’m not opposed to filtering or censoring, but I think as Christians we’re going to have to create our own filtering mechanisms. And I suspect that is most effectively done by working on the volume side of the equation—reducing how much we consume and the sources. Thus, getting rid of your smartphone is an example of reasonable filtering, not a failure per se. It’s not a bone we throw to our weak self control. It’s an exercise of self control.
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