A House Divided
May 25, 2025 Leave a comment
A case study of Mike (not his real name) from the archives of Primrose Path Behavioral Health Center. This session took place when Mike was 55. . .
Mike recalled that as a ten-year old he had gone out exploring the undeveloped area behind the new subdivision where his family had bought a house. He came across a page torn out of a magazine. It was almost hidden in tall grass. He described what he found.
On the glossy page were two barely dressed women. One was seated and bound with rope and another was standing over her holding a whip.
He thought about folding the page up and putting it in his pocket. But after five minutes he put the page down and walked away.
He related that a month before he had given his testimony and was baptized before a full church. He thought the world would somehow look different after that. He was given a baptismal certificate and was considered “saved and going to heaven.”
Mike reflected on that event. He said that after he was baptized no one prayed that he would receive the Holy Spirit. No one discipled or mentored him. No one came alongside. He was on his own. He felt “abandoned to his own devices and the osmosis of Sunday preaching and teaching about salvation, heaven and hell, and not being shameful.”
Mike shared that what he saw in the field that day affected him. He felt guilt and shame. He tried to put the image out of his mind but it kept coming back into his imagination.
To deal with this he said that he began mentally separating himself. On the one side was the good Mike –his baptized self-image that he could present to the world. On the other side– the desire for images that brought him pleasure – Mike would keep to himself.
He did this, he said, to avoid the conflicting thoughts and emotions brought on by the tremendous battle going on inside. He said that this compartmentalization carried on throughout his life. It was defense mechanism. He feared being found out.
By the age of twelve his parents had given him the “birds and bees” talk. But his sexual development had already formed with symbols far from what his parents presented.
He recalled looking for more and more images of the opposite sex. He had neighborhood friends who shared the porn magazines of their older brothers and fathers.
Mike began to tear out images from magazines. He would then take them somewhere to be alone – the bedroom, the bathroom, or the basement – and masturbate to them. He had a great fear of being discovered.
Mike felt that if anyone knew about his addiction to images, he would be considered a horrible sinner. The church denounced fornication but no one he knew in church or in life talked about this addiction. He did not view the church as a healing community. The church was there to scold. So, he continued to hide.
He felt that castigation was not enough to rid him of the addiction. He already carried shame and the fear of being outside rather than “a part of” a community. The scolding would only push him toward the comfort of more sexual release.
Mike felt that if anyone knew who he truly was, they would never accept him. He never accepted himself in this state. His self-hatred at being weak and fleshy grew.
Mike related that his seeing the first image was in the 1960s. When the internet came around, he began spending his time looking at porn on the computer. His sexual addiction escalated. Whenever he was alone, he’d be looking at porn.
Mike’s job had him traveling about sixty percent of the time. He was alone a lot.
He began going to strip clubs and was involved with women there. Women at this point, he said, were objects to comfort him in his loneliness, loneliness that he admitted had been brought on by his need to be alone with his addiction.
Mike’s porn sources included in-room-pay-for-view, VHS videos, adult magazines, the internet, and human interaction involving visits to strip clubs. The men he worked with would go to strip clubs. He said that he felt the need to fit in to keep up a persona of being a man and that persona, he felt, was needed for the job.
It was easy, he said, to convince himself to look at women as objects, as women were posing and what man doesn’t look at a woman?
His sexual addiction affected his marriages. They ended in divorce. He described being unable to be intimate with his wives. He said that porn was like another presence in the room and his conscience was another. The back and forth of the two kept him from intimacy with his wives.
Mike stated that in his fifties he came to the bitter realization after failed marriages and the financial and spiritual costs of his addiction, that the out-of-control sexual behaviors he engaged in were destroying him and hurting those around him. He said that his compulsive sexual thoughts, desires, and behaviors wreaked havoc on his self-image as a man, on his relationships with women, on his finances, on his body, and on his soul. All aspects of his life, he said, suffered.
He said that it was easy to feel misunderstood and on his own throughout his life because no one he knew had issues like his. The guys he worked with acted like it was a natural thing to go to a strip club and view porn. Nobody in the church ever talked about sexual addiction.
Mike learned through reading that the reason he kept coming back to porn was the pleasure derived from dopamine released during masturbation.
The loss of self-control and the negative consequences, Mike said, had him experiencing guilt, shame, hopelessness, powerless over his addiction, depressed, lonely, fearful, and anxious.
When asked if he was ever suicidal, Mike said “No. But something had to give. I was going crazy.”
Mike said he reviewed his options to deal with his sexual addiction. He could become a monk or hermit. He could move to Alaska and go off the grid and avoid all contact with porn.
He could, as Jesus taught, lose one part of his body so his whole body wouldn’t be thrown into hell. He then could, as Jesus said about breaking the bonds of marriage, become a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven’s sake as others had done.
These options, he admitted, were severe but his compulsive sexual behavior was severe. He had repeatedly tried to abstain only to fall again and again. The repeated failures caused more self-hatred and more unresolved anger.
Everything he cared about – marriage, family, being a Christian, his soul – everything hung in the balance. He knew that the next relapse may be what took it all down. Every choice he made was “either the ascent of the soul or the descent of the soul.”
Mike told a previous counselor that he carried around a “hurt locker.” This was a term he borrowed from the 2008 film. It described the deep pain and psychological distress that he held on to and carried throughout his life.
He said that he never considered himself a victim in the Me Too sense except in that first instance of sexual abuse in the field at ten-years old. Seeing that first image was traumatizing. After that he came back to porn on his own.
~~~~~
01:55:36 Pornography
Controlling Your Dopamine For Motivation, Focus & Satisfaction
~~~~~
Resources for Combating porn:
Dealing with a porn addiction: Integrity Restored
Internet filter: Covenant Eyes
A book for junior high and high school level: Plunging Pornography
A book for the very young: Good Pictures Bad Pictures
Porn’s Effects on the Brain, Body, and Culture
With the invention of the internet, porn ceased being a back-alley issue and became easily accessible by anyone with a computer, smartphone, or tablet. Learn who uses porn and why it’s not merely a personal sexual choice, but a physiological, emotional, and even cultural problem.
https://www.covenanteyes.com/e-books/
Book: The Healing Church: What Churches Get Wrong about Pornography and How to Fix It
Porn is rewiring your brain.
Learn the top five ways porn rewires your brain and what you can do about it in Your Brain on Porn.
Download free copy: https://learn.covenanteyes.com/your-brain-on-porn-1/
https://www.ascensioncounselingutah.com/
~~~~~
Fr. Meyer: Why We Must Talk About Pornography in the Church
By Road to Purity
In this episode of the Road to Purity podcast, we sit down with Fr. Meyer from the Archdiocese of Illinois for a candid and compelling conversation about one of the most pressing spiritual battles of our time: pornography. Fr. Meyer shares how he addresses this issue both within the Church and in the wider culture, offering powerful insights, pastoral wisdom, and hope for those struggling.
Whether you’re in ministry, in the fight yourself, or walking with someone who is, this episode offers clarity, truth, and encouragement in the battle for purity.
Tell Them For Me – Catholic Sexual Integrity Podcast | Road to Purity
~~~~~
Instead of serving the devilish insanity of the lawless “Welcoming the Stranger” illegal immigration crisis created and financed by George Soros, do something to change lives. Support Prison Fellowship.
Prison Fellowship Founded in 1976, Prison Fellowship® is the nation’s largest Christian nonprofit equipping the Church to serve currently and formerly incarcerated people and their families, and to advocate for justice and human dignity both inside and outside of prison.
Because I support Prison Fellowship, I recently received a copy of I surrender: A 14-day Devotional Written by Prisoners. It is a blessing.
The Prison Fellowship Academy is “an intensive long-term, biblically based discipleship program that targets and address the issues at root in criminal behavior.”
“It’s statistically proven that the Academy dramatically reduces recidivism.”
I urge to you walk away from “Welcoming the Stranger,” the psyop conditioning that invites in more criminals and criminal activity (and chaos) and is a perversion of love such that a person values a “cause” more than his proper duty to himself or his neighbor.
Instead, support Prison Fellowship and the men and women who are incarcerated.
Right now, as the recent literature stated, there are 24,716 prisoners in Indiana.
“I was in prison and you came to visit me.” – Jesus, Matthew 25:36
~~~~~
Cindy Wity 
Snakes Alive!
May 11, 2025 Leave a comment
A countryman returning home one winter’s day found a snake by the hedge-side, half dead with cold. Taking compassion on the creature, he laid it in his bosom and brought it home to his fireside to revive it. No sooner had the warmth restored it, than it began to attack the children of the cottage. Upon this the countryman, whose compassion had saved its life, took up a club and laid the snake dead at his feet.
Aesop’s The Countryman and The Snake
~~~~~
The foolish take pity on snakes. Thinking to help creatures out in the cold cruel world, they bring them home and the creature’s true nature is revealed. Suffering follows.
The foolish do not take care to bestow their benevolence upon proper objects. And so, not having yet been bitten, the foolish continue to empathize with snakes.
Snakes on the Brain
The foolish take pity on and work to bring home MS-13 gang members, wife abusers, and human traffickers e.g., Abrego Garcia.
The foolish bring home a false premise of multiculturalism believing that all cultures are equal in some undefinable sense.
The foolish bring home DEI creatures and their true nature is revealed in the sorry outcomes.
The foolish bring home, with ad-hoc justice and zero-bail policies, criminals who are not fit to live in a community. Repeat offenders reveal their true nature.
The foolish take pity on unvetted (legally and health wise) invaders and bring them home by creating “sanctuary cities” and alerting them to the approach of the countryman, and by hiding them.
The foolish take home Hamas sympathizers and warm them by the fires of Marxist/critical theory/anticolonialism ‘higher education’. Thus embraced, their true nature is revealed. Their “freedom of expression” is to bite those empathizing with them.
The foolish take pity on invaders and rally behind rogue district court judges appointed by Biden and Obama who act unconstitutionally to block deportation of the invaders.
The foolish take pity on CCP snakes by letting them purchase U.S. farmland where they can breed.
The foolish take pity on and want to hold on to government programs of waste, fraud, and abuse that produce more snakes and snake bites, including “sex changes, LGBT activism, a “DEI musical,” a transgender opera, and birth control,” and terrorism, e.g., USAID.
I have known some as bad as the Snake.
Those with no sense will not only take a snake to their bosom, they will also take fire to their bosom, as Proverbs 6:27-35 tells us.
Disorder in the House
The foolish order their Mr. Rogers neighborly affections with Progressivism’s morally-relativistic calculus that breeds chaos, injustice and societal harm.
In the current cultural milieu given to Marxist victim-oppressor ideology, taking pity on a snake, a lowly creature, can provide a feeling of dominance and power. It can also make the snake-pitier feel virtuous. Benevolence upon improper objects follows: take pity on snakes, say nothing of their bite, and virtue signal your empathy to the world.
It helps Progressive sensibilities that the deep state media doesn’t show the consequences of snake-pity and holds snake-pitiers innocent of any biting consequences and that social media “Likes” flow with snake-pity empathy, and there are handshakes after sermons that wrangle scripture to have it mean that bringing a snake home is a loving thing.
And why not. Doesn’t the Good Book tell us to love? Isn’t that the Jesus way? And isn’t that the Woodstock way e.g., “Love the one you’re with?” Isn’t that the abstract universalist platitude way, e.g., “All You Need is Love?” Isn’t that the sentimentalist way, e.g., “love is love?” Isn’t that the social justice way, e.g., “Love is picking winners and losers?”
Prudent people bestow their benevolence upon proper objects. Prudent people focus on ordering their loves and not on joining fools who take snakes to their bosom. Here, I address the latter group, Progressive Christians who misplace empathy and disorder their love.
Empathy that cedes wisdom and objective reality for acts of trendy “social justice”, love so disordered will come back to bite them and the ones they love and those who go on to live with the consequences of their ‘empathy’!
Should we prioritize the foreigner above our family, our community, and our church? Isn’t the well-being of those closest to us more important than the migrant pursuing opportunism by crossing the border illegally? (Many illegals wave the flag of the country they left behind.)
Oh, I forgot. Many SJWs ‘exist’ on social media and in pulpits but don’t live in the communities affected. Snake bites – the raping and killing and stealing and fentanyl deaths and the zapping of community resources – Deep State Media doesn’t mention consequences of snake pity. Instead, Deep State Media is focused on vilifying snake deportations. (No pearl-clutching, please.)
A state government using taxpayer dollars to pay for housing, medical, legal and other expenses for the invaders is not on your radar – yet. Empathy that results in rape, murder, harm, and loss to your family, your community, your church, and your country – that snake hasn’t bitten you yet.
The Progressive snake preys on the naïve, on the sentimental, on those lacking wisdom and discernment. Figures in Christianity have brought home that snake and its dangerous nature. The result: moral relativity; prioritizing political correctness over truth; prioritizing the foreign over the familiar, the stranger over kin; abstract humanitarianism over the concrete needs of one’s community; disordered ordo amoris.
Disordered love is the basis of much confusion and chaos and corruption today. Disordered love can result in political disarray, protests, cultural demise, and a moral relativity that abstracts reality to gain social credit.
The breakdown of ordo amoris (order of love) explains benevolence upon improper objects It explains bringing home a snake. You cannot claim to love “the world” if you harm those closest to you in the process. And closing one’s eyes to the consequences of mis-placed empathy isn’t loving.
Order in the House
Imagine you are invited to a symphony orchestra concert. The program features atonal music.
The music lacks a tonal center or key. It sounds off, as it does not conform to the ordered system of tonal hierarchies and harmonious structures that characterize classical music.
The vagueness and generality of the sound is annoying. Dissonant and jarring, it is characterized by disorder – pitches in new combinations and familiar pitch combinations in unfamiliar settings.
By the end of the first movement, you’ve heard enough and walk out.
~~~
The new pope Leo XIV, the first Augustinian Pope, criticized J.D. Vance’s views on the Catholic teachings on caring for others, as well as President Trump’s immigration policies.
This past February, then-Cardinal Prevost challenged Vice President JD Vance on X, repeating a headline from The National Catholic Reporter: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”
I find such criticism rather strange and out of touch with the Order of St. Augustine that Prevost joined in 1977. The criticism sounds like Progressive politics that appropriates Jesus because it has no moral authority its own.
St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas said that love must be ordered. One must love God first, then family, then nation. (The following summaries are from The Order of Love by Sean Ring. Document below.)
Augustine’s hierarchy of love can be summarized as:
God above all – The highest love is due to God, as He is the source of all good.
Self properly ordered – We must love ourselves rightly, seeking salvation and holiness rather than selfish pleasure.
Family and kin – Natural obligations to parents, spouses, and children take precedence over others.
Community and nation – A just love of one’s people and homeland follows from natural bonds.
Strangers and humanity at large – Charity extends to all, but not at the expense of higher obligations.
St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica says that love should be given according to moral proximity, explaining that natural law thru justice and governance dictates a preference for those closest to us:
We owe special care to our families because they are an extension of ourselves.
The common good of a nation is more relevant than abstract global concerns.
Charity is universal, but obligations are graded, meaning the duty to kin and community is stronger than to distant strangers.
Ordo Amoris
Put God first – Moral order flows from divine truth.
Prioritize family and community – Nations and families are not arbitrary constructs but natural hierarchies of love.
Exercise prudent charity – Helping others should not come at the expense of justice or the destruction of one’s people.
Reject false universalism – Love for all does not mean an equal obligation to all.
~~~~
Today’s education system is focused on a Marxist victim-oppressor ordering.
Christian education should focus on Ordo Amoris, the order of affections. Children must be taught the order of priorities: what is most important and what is least important. This isn’t to say a given item is bad, but that it’s not as high in our affection (or priority list) as something else.
Teaching that involves such wisdom and discernment would be a guide to relationships and moral obligations and a protection against the modern sentimentality that distorts true love.
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man:
“St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinate affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful.”
The apostle Paul: “So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all and especially for those of the family of faith.” Gal. 6:10
Charity begins at home. Societies thrive when love is ordered correctly. But fools bring snakes home.
In pity he brought the poor Snake
To be warmed at his fire. A mistake!
For the ungrateful thing
Wife & children would sting.
I have known some as bad as the Snake.
Aesop’s The Farmer and The Snake
The apostle Paul: “So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all and especially for those of the family of faith.” Gal. 6:10
~~~~~
The Budget Savvy Travelers@thebstravelers
A Danish man—just a regular guy—gets confronted in his own country by a group of migrants who flat-out tell him: “This isn’t Denmark anymore. We’re taking over.”
That’s not integration or assimilation. That’s demographic conquest. These aren’t whispers in the back alleys—these are bold, open declarations: “We have 5 children, you have 1. In ten years, you’ll be gone.”
You’re not going to hear this story on CNN, MSNBC, or from the latte-sipping globalists at the UN—but this is what’s REALLY going on in Denmark right now.
While the mainstream media distracts you with puff pieces about Trump trying to “buy Greenland”—like that’s some kind of planetary emergency—the REAL crisis is happening on the streets of Europe. The globalist experiment is unraveling, and the social engineers want you asleep at the wheel.
Let me break this down for you—this is not immigration, this is replacement. It’s part of a globalist plan, and they’ve been cooking this up for decades: flood sovereign nations with unvetted mass migration, break down cultural identity, dilute national pride, and then centralize power in unelected bureaucracies like the EU and the World Economic Forum.
And yet—what’s the big scandal on the evening news? “Trump wanted to buy Greenland!” Give me a break! That’s not a scandal, that’s strategic resource acquisition! But they don’t want you thinking strategically. They want you guilty, distracted, docile, and outbred.
This is a warning. This is a five-alarm fire for Western civilization, and they’re telling you it’s a candle flickering in the wind. Denmark is the canary in the coal mine. What happens there will echo across Europe and the West if people don’t wake up, reclaim their identity, protect their borders, and stand up for truth, sovereignty, and survival.
WAKE UP, BEFORE YOU’RE ERASED.
~~~~~
Why, in a land that prides itself on welcoming migrants, are so many gang members from migrant communities? And is it Swedish society that is the ultimate culprit, or the migrant communities themselves?
How Sweden’s multicultural dream went fatally wrong
~~~~~
Added 5-14-2025:
THE MATT GAETZ SHOW EXCLUSIVE: FIRST LOOK INSIDE CECOT’S TREN DE ARAGUA WARD
~~~~~~
Rate this:
Filed under 2025 Current Events, Christianity, Immigration, Political Commentary, Politics, Progressivism Tagged with Bible, Christianity, Empathy, God, Immigration, Jesus, ordo amoris, politics, progressivism, religion