Avoiding/Overcoming Addiction

You live in a world of terrible temptations. Pornography, with its sleazy filth, sweeps over the earth like a horrible, engulfing tide. It is poison. Do not watch it or read it. It will destroy you if you do. It will take from you your self-respect. It will rob you of a sense of the beauties of life. It will tear you down and pull you into a slough of evil thoughts and possibly of evil actions. Stay away from it. Shun it as you would a foul disease, for it is just as deadly.

-- President Gordon B. Hinckley, Priesthood Session

How corrosive is the daily diet of pornography, immorality, dishonesty, disrespect, abuse, and violence that come from so many sources. If we are not careful, it will shake our spiritual moorings. Once we internalize these evils, it is very difficult to purge ourselves of them. Elder Dallin H. Oaks gave wise counsel on this subject while serving as president of Brigham Young University:

We are surrounded by the promotional literature of illicit sexual relations, on the printed page and on the screen. For your own good, avoid it. Pornographic or erotic stories and pictures are worse than filthy or polluted food. The body has defenses to rid itself of unwholesome food. With a few fatal exceptions bad food will only make you sick but do no permanent harm. In contrast, a person who feasts upon filthy stories and pornographic or erotic pictures and literature records them in this marvelous retrieval system we call a brain. The brain won't vomit back filth. Once recorded, it will always remain subject to recall, flashing its perverted images across your mind and drawing you away from the wholesome things in life." (New Era, Feb. 1974, 18.)

-- President James E. Faust, Priesthood Session