SALT LAKE CITY – In a world that, frankly, doesn’t have time to consider the veracity of sources, nothing says “instant credibility” like putting a bunch of items into a list and declaring them fact.

From enormously oversimplified legal and medical advice to statistics of entirely unknown origin, slap those factoids into a numbered list, and you have transformed what was once a load of random bullshit into Certified Internet Fact.

This is how I know “11 ways pornography is destroying your future,” an article by Gary and Joy Lundberg of the organization FamilyShare, must be true.

For starters, if there’s one thing the people at FamilyShare know, it’s the value of lists. On the organization’s home page at the time of this writing, you could find a ton of helpful information arranged into convenient lists, like the compelling “5 date night ideas to keep the spark alive” or the sensible “7 simple ways for a woman to feel gorgeous,” and of course the provocative “31 text message love bombs to send your teenager.”

There’s also an article called “What your newborn wants you to know,” but I’m not so sure I trust it. A fact with no corresponding list? Highly suspect, if you ask me.

Anyway, back to the ways porn is destroying my future. I need to find out quick, because the future is something which can happen literally any time after right now.

At first, I was skeptical. How can it be true there are only 11 ways porn is ruining my life? Then I remembered: This is a list on the internet, so I can just relax and learn, trusting the information to be accurate and comprehensive.

Topping the list of the ways porn is ruining my life: “1. It causes divorce.”

“If a partner doesn’t stop viewing pornography, there is a high possibility the marriage will end in divorce,” according to the first Bullet of Fact. “In testimony to the United States Senate, Dr. Jill Manning reported that ‘56 percent of divorce cases involved one party having an obsessive interest in pornographic websites.’”

I’m not sure if Dr. Manning’s testimony to the senate addressed whether every marriage that does not end in divorce also involves absolute zero porn consumption, but luckily we can infer this from the statement porn “causes divorce.” After all, if porn causes divorce, we already know people who stay married can’t be watching porn. It’s simple logic.

For opponents of same-sex marriage like the Church of Latter Day Saints, which owns FamilyShare corporate parent Deseret Digital Media, there is a bright side to porn’s divorce-causing nature (just trust me on this one, FamilyShare): a lot of gay dudes watch a lot of gay porn, so a whole lot of those sinful, abhorred-by-God marriages between two men should be ending in short order. (Lesbian marriages might be another story, or at the very least, another list.)

Sure, others who track information concerning divorce, like certified divorce financial analysts, persist in not listing porn among the top causes of divorce, but do you really trust these people? I mean, they don’t arrange their facts into lists and they aren’t backed by a church.

OK, so now I know my marriage is going to end, and porn is why. How else is my future being destroyed by porn?

“2. It’s addictive.” I’m skipping this one. It’s old news, and I already know how to beat my addiction. (Does the name Jesus ring a bell?)

Next up at No. 3, we find porn “spoils intimate relationships.” Currently, my only intimate relationship is with my wife, but since I already know porn is inevitably going to cause our divorce, I’m skipping this one, too.

According to item 4 on the list, porn “negatively affects your brain.” Now we’re getting somewhere! I haven’t done nitrous oxide whippets in a long while for the same reason, and honestly I think I enjoyed those more than porn.

Augmenting the claim, the article cites Gary Wilson, who gave a TED talk called “The great porn experiment.” I would watch it, but now that I know how dangerous porn is, watching some guy conduct “great experiments” with it seems fundamentally unwise.

The important thing to understand here is Gary Wilson is a scientist — and we all know how deeply the conclusions of scientists matter to the Church of Latter Day Saints. After all, it was a scientist named Dr. Joseph Smith who proved, conclusively, Jesus Christ appeared in ancient America after rising from the dead. I’m pretty sure I read that in his book, Eleven Fascinating Facts on the Origin of Species.

Next on the list, No. 5 informs me porn “causes you to lose respect for women.” Before I can give this any thought, however, I notice No. 6 telling me porn “causes you to lose respect for men.”

I guess after all these years of exposure to porn, the only people I have any respect for are hermaphrodites? Or do I double-disrespect them? As much as it pains me to say this of two contiguous facts found in a list on the internet, this pair might require further explanation.

Leaving no member of the family unit out of the equation, No. 7 informs me porn “diminishes connection with your children.” In my case, this would be difficult to do, as I have no children with whom to maintain a connection.

On the other hand, maybe this is the biggest cause for alarm FamilyShare’s list has reported thus far. Could it be porn literally murdered my children in advance, like some sort of time-traveling Erotic Terminator? If so, clearly FamilyShare needs to make room for: “12. It causes Terminators to travel time to murder your kids before they can be born.”

Four other items remain on the Porn Destroys the Future list: It “ruins careers and leads to job loss,” while involving viewers in “the crime of abusing women and children” and causing them to “set a terrible example for children,” inevitably leading to “shame and self-deprecation.”

Don’t get me wrong, all those things porn does to destroy the future sound pretty bad too, but at this point I’m so freaked out about the specter of time traveling Erotic Terminators murdering my unborn children that I don’t need any additional convincing — just handful of family-friendly Atavan and a nice, long nap.