Pornography and Idolatry

Throwback post from March 1, 2014

When my wife and I are too brain dead for the epic political machinations of Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, or House of Cards, we watch the various TLC or Discovery channel “streaming” series on Netflix.  My wife refers to these series as “Trashy TV,” largely because they exploit their audience’s interest in people’s seemingly freakish behavior.  One show we recently watched was called “My Strange Addiction.”  Lost among the episodes in which people ate Comet or drywall 10 times a day for the last 30 years (these were an actual cases!), was one truly bizarre episode involving a young man named “Davecat.”  You can read Davecat’s story here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2439522/Davecat-40-shunned-organic-women-marry-synthetic-doll.html 

Davecat (a name he received via online gaming), is currently in a “relationship” with a life-sized doll.  When “My Strange Addiction” was being filmed, he was merely living with the life-sized doll in question.  Since then he has taken it to the next level.  He is now an activist for the right of people to marry life-sized dolls.  Moreover, he has also purchased other life-sized dolls, and is presumably building a life-sized doll harem.

Admittedly, even by the standards of our deeply confused sexual culture this is extremely weird.  That being said, I think what Davecat is doing is simply a more extreme version of the principle at work in pornography; and, as we know the use of porn is not out of the ordinary in our culture.  At its heart, I believe Davecat’s situation and pornography reveal something deeper about the human soul in our fallen state.  Ultimately, pornography and idolatry come from the same dark place.

First of all, as I point out to my world religion students, just as ancient people lived in a world full of idols, so too do we live in a world full of pornography.  And both reveal something about human nature on a fundamental level.  Pornography is a form of sexual idolatry.  Just as idols are lifeless, distorted, images of God, so too pornographic images are lifeless and distorted images of human sexuality.  Davecat simply takes things to the next level and has purchased a lifeless woman for himself.  It is not unlike a lifeless statue of a god in ancient Greece or modern India.

Moreover, just as we know that there is a real, God-given human sexuality out there because the Internet is full of pornography (why create it, if it isn’t a substitute for something real?), one of the reasons that we know that the true God exists is because the world has historically been full of idols.  When atheists say that there is no God, because the world is full of distorted images for God, it is as illogical as a person finding the Internet full of pornography and then claiming that the human need for sexual intimacy is a pure illusion (or a merely sublimation for something else!) and that there is no real sex out there.