Dr Paul Allen

Voddie Baucham exposes the pornographic nature of our culture and provides men and women with a key tool necessary to fight addiction.

Addiction vs. Moral Responsibility More often than not, when Christians respond negatively to recent developments in neuroscience, the fear is that by dissecting the organ of all our feelings, thoughts, and decisions, we will somehow lose our belief in moral responsibility. If I come to believe that porn has warped my brain, I can eventually say, “I’m not responsible for this problem. My brain made me do it.” The field of neuroscience is actually bringing a much older conversation to the foreground, a conversation that has been present in addiction recovery circles for the better part of 80 years: Is addiction a disease ? Bill Wilson , the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous , was among the first who likened alcoholism to a disease. He didn’t actually believe alcoholism was a disease, but that it was like a disease. It was a pragmatic description: he felt the disease metaphor helped men and women open up about their problems. Once you were in the doors of many AA meetings, however, it wa...

Tim Challies Author. Pornography is ubiquitous today; addiction to pornography , especially among men, is equally widespread. Young men are often introduced to pornography long before they are able to understand what it is and what it means. Many a young man's first awakening to sex and sexuality is by exposure to pornographic sex and nudity. This is sadly, increasingly, the case with women as well. Some Christians can take a kind of refuge in the fact that so many others share in the struggle. "We are all in this together" can minimize the weight of it. Yet the ubiquity of porn and porn addiction does nothing to lessen the horror of it. I want to ask you a question. But not quite yet. Read on… Desecration and Titillation There is an inescapable consequence to the fact that human beings bear the image of God : there is nothing God values more than human beings. Bearing God's image is an extraordinary privilege and brings with it extraordinary worth. Jesus asked, ...

There’s little doubt that pornography is a modern-day plague. Though pornography has always existed in one form or another, the Internet has created a medium through which it can be disseminated both widely and discreetly. Almost an entire generation of boys has succumbed at one time or another, with a new generation quickly falling into all of the same traps. And it has not just been boys; many men have found the temptation irresistible (and, of course, not a few women). While there are some who try to downplay pornography’s impact on life and marriage, evidence is mounting that it is a terribly destructive force. Two new books from New Growth Press address the issue head-on. One targets men who are struggling with pornography or any other manner of sexual sin and the other brings help and healing to women who have found that their husbands have an addiction. David White ’s  Sexual Sanity for Men  seeks to help men “understand that sexual sin starts in thei...

Recent research indicates that porn use can cause sexual dysfunction by numbing the body’s response to normal sexual pleasure, according to a report published in  Psychology Today . The report was authored by Marnia Robinson, and originally published in “ Cupid ’s Poisoned Arrow: Biology Has Plans for Your Love Life,” a book Robinson co-authored with her husband, Dr. Gary Wilson.  Marnia Robinson, co-author of “Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow: Biology Has Plans for Your Love Life.” Robinson explains that the brain can become desensitized to dopamine, the neurotransmitter that activates the body’s reaction to sexual pleasure, through the kind of over-stimulation readily available via the internet’s porn culture. The result is that users fall into a chemical dependency , requiring larger doses to achieve the same effect. This phenomenon drives the market for “extreme genres” of porn and decreases an addict’s ability to respond to real life sexual encounters. “It’s all free, easy to a...

By Tim Challies . A short time ago, while posting a poem titled “ I Looked for Love in Your Eyes ,” I lamented that while there are many, many books written to help men overcome an addiction to pornography , there is very little written to help the women who have been victims of a husband ’s addiction. Shortly after I received an email from Vicki Tiede who has written just such a title. Her book, titled  Mosaic Heart: Spiritual Healing in the Midst of a Husband’s Addiction to Pornography  (working title - this will likely change) will be published by New Growth Press, probably about a year from now. I asked Vicki if, in the meanwhile, she’d be willing to do an interview to offer some words of help to women who are struggling with the effects of their husband’s sin. She was kind enough to do so. Here is what I asked her: What is the scope of this problem? How many women are struggling with the effects of a husband’s addiction to pornography? For nearly every ma...