Purity and Freedom: Powerful Concept for Your 7th or 8th Grader

                  Purity is a difficult topic to address these days.  The way you frame your ideas can make it seem as if you're talking down to people, especially if speaking to a younger generation.  It can seem like a list of don'ts and shouldn'ts that you must follow, but you won't get any personal good from doing so (besides avoiding punishment).  You do it because someone in authority wouldn't be happy if you don't, or because you hold fear that once you break this law, you'll be condemned by society, friends, family, God, and yourself, and rightfully so because you're a terrible person who's committed the unforgivable sin.  However, as famous behavioral psychologist BF Skinner strongly believed, punishment, or the avoidance thereof, is an ineffective way to change behavior.  People respond much more effectively to positive reinforcement--which means doing what one should will yield some sort of reward.

                  We can approach purity as something that, when done "right", will be inherently rewarding for us.  Today, people seem sucked into the belief that in order to be truly happy and free, we must be true to our every desire, suppressing nothing.  The idea of sin is archaic and outdated, so people will approach life just trying to live for pleasure and satisfy every little hunger that arises.  However, this can turn into a prison, just as much as an overly restrictive and instructive way to preach purity can.

                  Speaking of generation gaps, speaking to a group of middle schoolers (2:25pm all week for me) about this subject can be a very tricky task.  It can sound like the droning of an old, hardened, cynical war veteran sitting in a nursing home and lamenting the way kids are today, how things ain't how the used to be, how everything used to be harder and therefore the people were better.  This can make children not only feel bored, but guilty about growing up in the time period they're in (which they truly can't help).  However, at the same time there are things about today's society that are just plain wrong, and children should be knowledgeable about these things and alert that they're vulnerable to the allure of "party culture", "free sex", and other dangers that threaten one's purity.  There are things out there like pornography that can easily suck you in.

                   And these dangers pop up everywhere.  Take the media, which is quite obviously influential and really unavoidable.  TV, radio, magazines and music will promote the idea that it's okay, even good, to fall into mainstream society's tendency to advocate hedonistic living.  Television has come a long way from I Love Lucy and Leave it to Beaver.  Music promotes a party culture and places beer in the role of God.  MTV was once really about music.  Now it's difficult to turn it on without seeing suggestive dancing in suggestive dress to a suggestive song.  It's easy to be drawn into this because it's popular, and it may be fun and mostly harmless at first, but it always has the potential of spiraling into addiction.  The ever-wise and all-knowing (not really) Dictionary.com defines "addiction" as:

The state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma.

                  Enslaved.  And here we thought that giving into our urges would bring us freedom.  But the fact is it is very dangerous to become addicted to something that is a basic need we as human beings have.  We don't need drugs, but we do need food--but we can become addicted to both.  But you can't cut out eating cold turkey like you can with smoking pot or drinking beer.  Knowing it's a basic need makes it a lot more complicated and difficult to conquer your addiction than it would if you were addicted to something that's not a basic need.

                  Same goes for sex.  It is a basic and primal desire, and yes, God created it and we as humans have urges.  In fact, we wouldn't survive as a species without it (duh).  But being addicted to it is complicated, particularly if you're married.  Going "cold turkey" could damage potentially your relationship, but wouldn't it make things so simple to be able to eliminate sex completely from your life if you were addicted to pornography?   What is extremely difficult is learning to associate this act with love for your spouse rather than beautiful naked women or stunning male supermodels on a computer or television screen.  So, in order to protect us from this enslavement and confusion, God lovingly gives us restraints.  Sex should be saved for marriage, so a person can form no other associations with it besides love for their husband or wife.

                  So, there is a balance between listening to overly didactic teachings about purity, which basically condemn a woman for even looking at a man, and living a free-spirit life where every urge and desire is met, regardless of how evil or dangerous it is.  Both are prisons. 

Freedom comes from following our God-given guidelines about how to live a pure life.

-Authored by Dale Suslick and VP of Writing Style Team Member Kristin Wallace