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"How does the Bible ban porn? It’s not clear.

I know the mentality. I grew up Evangelical. We’d convinced ourselves that porn was one of the Ten Commandments, and God ideally wanted us covered up, ideally not moving, or touching. (We didn’t like dancing either.)

If you can stop thinking about other people— that was ideal. Isn’t that “lust”?

But how do we actually find a ban on porn in the Bible? I know the Bible pretty well and I’m stumped. For God, sex is good, or “very good” (Gen 1:31)—from the beginning to the end of biblical narrative.

“For everything God created is good,” Paul affirms in 1 Timothy 4:4.

God loves humans, clothed or unclothed. If a clothed person who is loved is looking at a naked person who’s loved . . . that’s bad?

Jesus says not to ‘worry’ about clothes (Lk 12:22; Mt 6:25). Isn’t an anti-porn stance violating that?

Christians might dart to the effects of porn. Is it enslaving, obsessive? Does it take focus away from your job, your family?

They wouldn’t be thinking through the issues seriously. It’s just using the Bible to ban things. Scientists have studied the issue. Studies show—Christians are fascinated by porn.

And even as “negative” effects of porn use do seem to be driven by religious conflicts over porn.

It might even seem that Christianity causes the very problems it attacks.

How about some Bible facts?

The word ‘pornography’ isn’t a biblical word. A later Greek coinage, it means ‘writing about prostitutes’. But the Bible does that, so as a technical point, the Bible itself is ‘pornography’.

No ban on looking at naked people can be found. There were naked people in the ancient world, as it turns out, so the silence of the Bible on this point must be seen as deliberate.

The narratives seem not even to problematize the activity of looking at naked people. David dances all but naked in 2 Samuel 6:14, and the girls who see him, in v.20–22, are telegraphing sexual interest. That’s all right.

In the Song of Songs 7:1, I’m being prompted to look at a woman’s leg. “The curves of your thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a master craftsman,” the man says.

I suppose her leg has to be unclothed if I’m to appreciate its divine shape?

Well, a Christian might say, these people are married. But actually, the lovers are never said to be married. Christians just say that."

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