WE live in such a sexualized culture that even Christmas songs are lewd. Just go to my supermarket, and you will hear them. Everywhere people are induced into the Cult of Lust.
The sex hype isn’t a cause of progress, but a regressive force. Sexual license isn’t liberating; it’s animalizing. In reality, it causes mental and spiritual decline, and we see that everywhere.
Lust is so normalized, people don’t even use the word anymore because of its negative connotation. From The Spiritual Life: A Treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Theology by Adolphe Tanquerey, S.S., a reminder on what an overly sexualized existence does to human beings:
From the point of view of perfection, there is, next to pride, no greater obstacle to spiritual growth than the vice of impurity. a) When it is question of solitary acts or of faults committed with others, it is not long before tyrannical habits are formed which thwart every impulse towards perfection, and incline the will towards debasing pleasures. Relish for prayer disappears, as does love for austere virtue, while noble and unselfish aspirations vanish. b) The soul becomes a prey to selfishness. The love once borne to parents and friends gradually dies out; there is but the desire which becomes a real obsession to indulge at any cost in evil pleasures. c) The balance of the faculties is destroyed: it is the body, it is lust that takes command; the will becomes the slave of this shameful passion and soon rebels against God, Who forbids and punishes these unholy pleasures.
d) The sad effects of this surrender of the will are soon apparent: the mind becomes dull and weak because the vital forces are used up by the senses: taste for serious studies is lost; the imagination gravitates towards lower things; the heart gradually withers, hardens, and is attracted only by degrading pleasures. e) In some cases the physical frame itself is deeply affected: the nervous system, over-excited by such abuses, becomes irritated, weakened, and “incapable of fulfilling its mission of regulation and defence;”1 the various bodily organs function but imperfectly; nutrition is improperly accomplished, strength is undermined and the danger of consumption threatens.
Evidently, a soul that has thus lost its balance, no longer thinks of perfection. It recedes from it daily, considering itself fortunate if it can gain control over itself at least in time to insure its salvation!
He also writes in the section “The Nature of Lust:”
Just as God has willed to attach sense- pleasure to the nutritive functions in order to help man’s self- preservation, so He has attached a special pleasure to the acts whereby the propagation of the human species is secured.
This pleasure is permissible to married people, provided they use it for the purpose for which marriage was instituted; outside of this it is strictly forbidden. In spite of this prohibition, there is in us an unfortunate tendency, more or less violent, especially from the age of puberty or adolescence, to indulge in this pleasure even out of lawful wedlock. This is the tendency that is called lust and which is condemned by the sixth and ninth commandments:
“Thou shalt not commit adultery. ” “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.”
It is not merely exterior actions that are prohibited, but also interior acts, fancies, thoughts, desires. And this rightly so, for if one deliberately dwells upon impure imaginations or thoughts, upon evil desires, the senses become excited, whilst an organic disturbance is produced, which is too often but the prelude to actions against purity. Therefore, if we wish to avoid such acts, we must fight against dangerous thoughts and fancies.
Read more here.
