Lust, Chastity, and Winning a Wife
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode, I talk about the challenges young men face today, particularly young men in the church, are facing, and how to overcome them. I also talk about why it's not enough to just obey orders, it's also important to understand why they're given them.
Transcript
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So in my last video, I was discussing how, with the shift of the locus of morality towards the secular world, more and more, we are approaching Christianity, we're approaching the church in a way that's not too dissimilar from the Pharisees, where we are observing the letter of the law, we're observing the rituals, but we're missing the spirit.
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Now, in this video, I'm going to be talking about the sort of challenges that young men face today, particularly young men in the church.
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And I'm actually going to be talking about doing the exact opposite.
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Instead of worrying about how well you're performing the rituals, worry that you're pursuing, are you pursuing, the spirit behind all of these rituals?
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And it's going to sound, I worry that it's going to sound like I'm making an apologetic for sinning.
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One time, during my basic training, I asked my master, Jack, why do we do things this way?
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I forget what topic it was specifically, but I said, why do we do it this way?
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Like, I'm not saying I'm refusing to do it this way.
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But the ten principles of leadership from the Canadian military, one of them is ensure your subordinates understand the intention behind your commands.
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It's not enough for a troop just to follow orders.
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They're supposed to be thinking individuals that can react, who can adapt and overcome to any situation.
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And a similar thing, a very similar thing with morality, with why we're here, why we go to church.
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We don't go to church just to follow all the rules.
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We go to church to become better versions of ourselves and hopefully achieve the beatific vision.
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So if you say you shouldn't do something because it offends God, well, okay, yeah, and you should follow orders because you were told to.
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But it's also incumbent upon you to understand why the order was given.
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Now, it doesn't mean that if you don't understand, you can just do whatever you want.
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But you're supposed to understand why you're doing what you're doing.
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Listen, fear of court-martial or fear of hellfire are both good motivators to not be an idiot.
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You are not meeting your potential if the only reason you're obeying is because somebody told you to obey.
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You are supposed to be a co-participant in this reality.
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I'll give you an example of this, a rather simple example of this.
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Because we're going to be talking about sex, so let's start off with something a little bit less tempting for most of us.
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You know, last week, I was at the store, and, you know, I had a hankering for a chocolate bar.
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And then the next day, I felt like a chocolate bar again.
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So I bought the exact same chocolate bar, and the bloody thing tasted like wax.
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Because, I mean, it's a cheap $1 chocolate bar from the store.
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And I kind of chastised myself for buying a chocolate bar two days in a row, because I never do that.
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And my reward was, I got a chocolate bar that tasted like wax.
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Why do we eat dessert after dinner, instead of starting out with cake and ice cream?
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Well, part of the reason is that eating cake and ice cream before dinner ruins your meal.
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Part of the beauty of this universe is that eating is a source of pleasure.
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You know, the sitting down with your family to eat dinner, and having a really good, a healthy, fulfilling, nutritious,
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some chicken and mashed potatoes, and having a good conversation with people you love is a wonderful, wonderful thing.
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And then finishing it off with a little bit of ice cream, a little bit of cake at the end.
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And actually, the sugar even kickstarts the digestive process.
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And so if you start off eating cake, you aren't going to enjoy, you know, the turkey.
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Furthermore, you are going to quickly lose the enjoyment of it.
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If you're eating cake every day, it's not special, it's not fun, it's not delicious.
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And you are becoming obese from eating all of this.
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Not only are you enjoying the food less and less,
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you're not able to enjoy life as much as you used to because you're overweight.
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The purpose of eating is both nutritional and enjoyment.
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But if you eat in the wrong way, it's going to make you miserable.
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So yes, you shouldn't eat the cake until after dinner because your parents told you not to.
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But you should also understand that you're going to enjoy the cake more once you've had a nutritious meal.
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So with that said, let's consider the catechism and what it says about the purpose of sex,
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specifically regarding masturbation, but also where it's appropriate, why we do it, what it's for.
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And this is, if you want to follow along, this is Part 3, Section 2, Chapter 2, Article 6.
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Now, I trust that you all understand that the purpose of marriage is both procreative and unitive.
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I'm not going to read you the whole catechism on that.
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Humans are one of the few species that has sex even when the woman is not fertile.
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You know, like, look, God could have designed us like every other species that, you know,
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the only time, you know, the mare is aroused, the only time she's sexually available is when
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Lust is disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure.
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Sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative
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When you're eating cake every day because you like sugar, not because you're hungry,
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and not because it's the correct time for cake, you know, that is a disordered gluttony.
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By masturbation is to be understood the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to
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Both the magisterium of the church, in the course of constant tradition, and the moral
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sense of the faithful, have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation
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is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.
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The deliberate use of the sexual faculty for whatever reason outside of marriage is essentially
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The correct place to use sex is with your wife.
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Being open to the procreative act while also using it for the unitive act.
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Let me read you some of the earlier parts in this.
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Because this goes back to the context that I said earlier.
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We are here to become better versions of ourselves.
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Not to just blindly follow the rules because we were told to.
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Chastity, which means pursuing sex at the right time and for the right reasons.
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Chastity includes an apprenticeship in self-mastery, which is training in human freedom.
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Either man governs his passions and finds peace, or he lets himself be dominated by them and becomes unhappy.
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You don't want to eat cake before dinner because, A, it ruins dinner, and, B, you get fat.
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Furthermore, whoever wants to remain faithful to his baptismal promises and resist temptations will want to adopt the means for doing so.
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Again, training, developing yourself, learning about yourself.
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Understanding, again, the intellectual understanding of the correct purpose for sex.
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And then learning when you are most tempted and how you are most tempted.
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You know, there's nowhere in here saying that I shouldn't be drinking this.
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And so I need to be cautious about the, I need to enjoy this, but I need to be aware of the means for enjoying it properly.
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This last paragraph, 2344, because the young man that was asking me about this is beating himself up about failing at this.
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Chastity represents an eminently personal task.
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For there is an interdependence between personal betterment and the improvement of society.
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That is a hugely important statement right here.
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Listen, when I was doing basic training, about three weeks into it, you know, one of the guys in my tent said,
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Hey, have any of you guys noticed that, you know, we don't want to masturbate?
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And we started doing all this, like, oh my God, are they putting saltpeter in our food or what have you?
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The reason that during basic training is that nobody was tempted to masturbation is, well, first of all, they were working us like dogs.
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Two, well, actually, two is really the important one.
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Okay, the major reason is because there was no temptation being shoved in our faces.
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We weren't seeing half-naked women on magazines.
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We weren't seeing billboard advertisements with a chick's ass that's ten feet high.
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We weren't constantly being titillated by women who were wearing low-cut tops and then complaining that guys stare at their tits.
00:16:00.100
Right now, the challenge of chastity is extremely difficult.
00:16:17.860
You know, one of the times I broke recently, I was watching, I think it was The Evil Dead or one of those classic zombie movies.
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And there's this one bit where one of the girls just starts stripping naked in the movie.
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And it was like a hot wire, you know, came in through the eyeballs, straight down the spine to the bright red chakra down there.
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You know, you never know when it's going to happen either.
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And so, yeah, remaining chaste, remaining focused is very, very, very difficult.
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You know, if we lived in a world where everywhere you went, there were free, delicious chocolate bars being offered,
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Just because free chocolate is everywhere doesn't mean it's okay to be fat.
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Just because it's easy, just because you're constantly being tempted does not make it okay.
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It doesn't make it okay to be a little bit fat.
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And if you're engaging in masturbation, you are going to be squandering your masculine energy.
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But at the same time, you are being really tempted.
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And the important thing is not, and to go back to the beginning of this,
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is not to be a Pharisee and obsess over the literal, the literal obedience to the rules.
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It's about understanding yourself, mastering yourself, not in spite of the temptation,
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but using that temptation to understand yourself better and thus master yourself despite the extreme temptation.
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What I'm getting at is really, stop worrying so much about it.
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Because in a certain sense, worrying this much about it,
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if you're constantly focused on this thing here,
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you're not going to be looking to where you're going.
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but focus on the turkey and the salad and the mashed potatoes that you have en route.
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You know, have that ultimate destination in mind while also living in the moment.
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and ultimately to attract a good and decent woman
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but is nonetheless focused on that destination,
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what you need to be doing is cultivating your masculinity.
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And see, that's probably the worst thing about this constant temptation.
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You know, the worst thing about lust is that it's,
00:20:05.760
You are regressing to this childhood understanding.
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you know, like once a year, we take them out on Halloween,
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and they get to learn from that experience, hopefully.
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Similar thing, if you're constantly indulging in lust,
00:20:24.280
you are reverting to a very boyish understanding.
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when it comes to game and picking up women and all this stuff,
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if you are sinning really hard in this direction,
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because remember, virtue is all about a balance.
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A brave man is not going to be completely blind to the dangers.
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But he is going to boldly step forward when it is the correct time.
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And so if you are all the way on the cowardly side of things,
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you know, maybe the way to break out of that is to be a little bit foolhardy.
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but, you know, you're course correcting the whole time.
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And you're learning about yourself, and you're getting better.
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Guys that have never been inducted into masculinity,
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and learning that chicks actually kind of dig jerks
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being a man is somewhere in between those things,
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and it's somewhere a lot better than those things.
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So what you need to be doing is focusing on that.
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Okay, like you're supposed to have a high sex drive.
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So you don't need to go to reconciliation every week
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or a chick wearing a short skirt or what have you.
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But reconciliation is about reorienting yourself.
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and that you're learning about yourself from it
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that our locus of morality is so far from the church
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that we've forgotten so much of art, culture, theology.
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Yeah, that's terrible, but it's also the modern day.
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You know, if they start talking about vanity or gossip,
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they'd have a lot of trouble understanding that.
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You still need to get that grace inside of you.