By Timothy Titus
Special to YNOT
LONDON – Thanks in large part to the anonymity of the internet, over the course of the past 20 years pornography has gone from something consumed by a relatively small number of extreme perverts to a cultural force so pervasive, the scourge of porn addiction has even infected churchgoing Christian men all over the world.
While a few fearless anti-pornography crusaders have boldly broadcast the truth of porn’s myriad evils, theirs has been a faint cry when measured against the relentless pro-porn drumbeat favored by the sinister propagandists of “progressive” mainstream media outlets.
Although technology has been important to the rise of porn, there’s some hope it might also hold the key to combatting porn. As recently noted by one of my esteemed Christian peers, given the amount of data being collected, stored, analyzed and cross-referenced, there’s a distinct possibility hackers might someday reveal the name and viewing habits of every porn user on the internet.
Whether or not this mass porn-outing possibility is really a possibility — there are some secular humanist technologists out there who have almost as little faith in hackers as they do the Lord — I’m hoping the mere threat of it might be enough to keep some of you sickos on the straight and narrow path.
Some might think it hypocritical for a Christian ethicist like me to endorse the idea of hackers blowing the whistle on porn viewers. Granted, I’m only an amateur theologian, but so far as I can recall, there’s nothing in the commandments that says anything like “Thou shalt not publicly shame thy neighbor for being into leather.”
I understand for many people there’s no such thing as a good hacker. They don’t buy the idea of “hacktivists,” because in their myopic view it’s never justified to invade someone’s privacy, steal their personal information and publish it on the internet.
In my book (the Good Book), a person’s right to privacy only goes so far — and how far it should go has a lot to do with context and the character of the people involved.
For instance, while I don’t think it’s any of the tax man’s business how much money my church collects, how the church spends it, or how much of it does or doesn’t go into a Swiss bank account I might or might not maintain, I do think we all have an absolute right to know what our neighbors are reading, watching, listening to and pulling on.
After all, if I don’t know my neighbor spends his evenings reading demonic filth like Harry Potter and the Proper Noun of Fictional Location, I might otherwise assume he’s a decent person — presumably one who spends his evenings contemplating the lessons of the New Testament, not checking out a website tab labeled New Uploads.
Privacy advocates, civil libertarians and other suspicious characters no doubt will argue a mass data dump of porn users might include a lot of innocent bystanders, due to things like rotating IP addresses, database mismatches or mischievous, otherworldly imps who routinely break into the homes of London-based Christian bloggers and surf gay porn on their laptops to make it seem like they’re into twink videos when they’ve never watched any kind of porn, so far as anyone can definitively prove.
I’m not worried about such collateral damage, because I firmly believe privacy is for the blameless — and since we all know the only blameless person in the history of persons has been Jesus Christ, it follows only Jesus deserves privacy.
This all works out pretty well if you think about it, because miraculous as he was, I’m pretty certain Jesus never used the internet to surf porn sites.
At any rate, my point here is threefold:
First, if you watch porn, it’s pretty much inevitable everybody will eventually find out about every video you’ve ever watched, including the one really disgusting Brazilian scat vid you clicked on by accident when trying to click the text link next to it, which promised a link to the slightly more alluring bigtitblondeblowjobfacefuckcumshotcompclip.mov.
Second, if you want to get into Heaven when you die, eventually you’re going to have to tell somebody about all the disgusting, shameful porn you’ve watched anyway, even if it’s just your pastor, or perhaps Jesus Himself. As such, when your porn-outing comes, don’t look at it as a humiliating invasion of privacy. Instead, look at it as a great weight being lifted from your shoulders and the first step toward life eternal — albeit one from which you will never recover, socially.
Third, because you never shut up about yourself on social media, everybody knows pretty much everything else about your pathetic, sinful, self-absorbed existence anyway. Why shouldn’t they also be informed about what really turns your nasty little crank? Personally, I’d much rather have a glimpse at your browser history than yet another picture of your obese cat.
So go ahead, all you perverts, voyeurs and adulterers of the heart: Watch all the porn you like. When the day of cyber-reckoning is come, we’ll see who has the last laugh.
On a related, please be advised: I regularly loan my laptop, smartphone and tablet to my downstairs neighbor, Ted — who I’m starting to strongly suspect might be a homosexual.
Timothy Titus is a London-based blogger, cyber-ethicist and amateur theologian.
