Jackie Treehorn Presents

National Porn Sunday was recently held in churches across the country. Darn it. First I miss "talk like a pirate" day and now I missed porn sunday. I guess I'll just have to go celebrate porn on my own time.

Monday morning, while I waited in line for coffee from my friendly coffee goddesses (aunt and grandma to an amazing girl), I happened to look over a campus paper that someone had left on one of the tables. According to the front page story the local St. Paul's church had brought National Porn Sunday to my campus.

I read "National Porn Sunday was started by Mike Foster and Craig Gross, founders of XXXchurch.com, a web site to promote awareness of pornography."
Huh? I think students' awareness of porn is probably rather high.

The article continued "Their main goal is to expose the truth in the porn industry and demonstrate how it affects families, children and marriages."

I didn't follow how the mere existence of porn is so threatening. I did a little more research this evening and discovered the National Porn Sunday guys are about promoting awareness of porn addiction. That is a little bit different then, isn't it? You just gotta love the campus newspapers for their in depth coverage though. In fairness, some campus papers are not as bad as ours.

I sipped my coffee and continued reading. I was hoping that the writer would have asked one of the folks who sponsored this program on our campus or the founders themselves (Foster and Gross) what they defined as porn but alas, no. What I did find were some amusing student opinions. Here's one that nearly made me spray my coffee:
"The students...were also asked about how God feels about pornography. As one student pointed out, he didn't think God watched porn..."

Now this just is plain funny. The presupposition is of course that there is a god and not just any god but God, which is a quite specific and culturally loaded concept. It's a he, and he's got a certain character and personality. He is also said to be endowed with certain powers, in fact those exact powers are what makes him God and not just some culture hero. Those would be things like omnipotence (which he doesn't exercise much these days or which he uses in mysterious ways, at least so go the common lines of reasoning) and omniscience. That means God knows everything and has been said on more than one occasion to "see" everything. I'd say the whole omniscience - all seeing thing means you can't really choose not to see something otherwise the omnisicience stops being a guarantee.

Which means that God DOES watch porn. In fact, God has seen every bit of porn ever made. I pointed this out to A as we hustled from the coffee shop to our building. A added that God has in fact seen every bit of porn that will be made, ever. We concluded that in addition, God has even seen porn that might have been made but wasn't or won't be.

So God watches porn or God is not omniscient. If God is not omniscient, then God lacks a defining feature of being God and should be demoted to either god or dismissed entirely. Therefore, if God doesn't watch porn, God, as such, does not exist.

I wonder if this occured to the boy, even after the fact. And what the fuck was his point anyhow? "God doesn't watch porn"? When I was 8 or so, a reporter from a local paper came to my elementary school. I think it might have been the Globe or possibly the more local Patriot Ledger. The students were interviewed about our opinions on the (then current) Iran Hostage Crisis. It was yellow ribbon and gas line time. We were in 4th grade I think. Why were they asking us? I really can't even remember what they asked, but I know they did. And I know I said something parallel on silliness to "God doesn't watch porn" and it was quoted in the paper. Being a fanciful child and also unbelievably devoted to my pets, I said something foolish like "My cat hopes they all come back safe". Yep. 4th grade reasoning and relevance. And this is what I think of when I read that God doesn't watch porn. It's something you'd expect from a little kid. Not a college student.

I don't believe necessarily that this apparent lack of adult reasoning or critical thinking in this current generation of college students means that the quality of adult intellect is in some kind of evolutionary decline. I think they are not adult yet. I think that we have as a society promoted a prolonged adolescence (or late childhood) and quotes like this (not to mention some lovely examples of analytical writing from the courses they take) reflect that high variability in expressive intellect that is one of the hallmarks of adolsecence.

At least I hope that is what's going on.