It may be a secret to your friends, family, and clergy but it is not hidden from the Lord who “probes the hearts and loins of men”.

I think you need to examine why you ‘love’ masturbation. The Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit teaches us that masturbation is a “intrinsically and disordered action” (CCC 2352).

You admitted that you sexual activity is done in secret and that no one knows. Ask yourself: “Am I living a double life?”

As Christians, we are called to live within Godly boundaries and not lead double lives. Our lives are to be molded after that of Jesus’ divine countenance.

Sexual addiction is compulsive, enslaves us, and eventually leads to a detrimental pattern in our thinking and behavior.

I would also suppose that masturbation has become essential for you and you would find it difficult to live without sexual passion. Ask yourself once more: “Is sex the most important thing in my life?” For if you have been mastered by masturbation, you have been a slave to it! (cf. II Peter 2:XIX).

Enter into prayer with God and ask the Holy Spirit to give you direction and the conviction to stop masturbating. There are greater more lasting pleasures in life. Do you want to exchange that for a mere few minutes alone under the sheets deceiving yourself by pretending to be something more than your true God-given self?

Pray about it! Help is never too far away!

P.s. CW, hope you don’t mind me using this space to write my thoughts on the matter.

Much of the reason behind this is conditioning by the media. There’s money to be made from ESC research, abortion, and IVF. Institutions and organizations with the financial backing push for conditioning of the masses through the media. Through an effective ongoing campaign, the minds of the masses are slowly but surely (over decades perhaps) shifted towards believing that life begins at birth, all for the money that can be made from this.

While it is true that the Catholic Church stands out in this regard in protecting human life, the Catholic Church must recognise that its voice is lacking in the secular media. It needs to engage the world more by learning how to use the media to voice the truth. In this regard, the Church has failed so far, but there is hope. Some parts of the Church have come to realise the power of the media and are attempting to use it to change minds as well.

It is not enough to say that as Catholics, we have the truth, because our responsibility is to share that truth with others in the world. If we do not do that, then we are effectively keeping a lighted lamp under a tub.

God bless,
Catholic Writer

That’s a good resource page. But I have a problem with the natural law theory. It says that our basic ethical intuition tells us that certain behaviours are inherently wrong because they are unnatural. For a person who has been brought up in an environment that says that homosexual behaviour is alright, they cannot appeal to their basic ethical intuition – because their intuition says that homosexual behaviour is alright. If this makes sense, then we see that heterosexual people also cannot appeal to a basic ethical intuition, because it is conditioned by our upbringing.

Also, the intuition thing presumes that someone put that intuition into us, which might be difficult for a non-believer to accept. We need to work on developing purely secular resources on homosexuality and addressing it, because clearly any links to religion will not be accepted in the secular sphere.

God bless,
Catholic Writer

That may be true, but the fundamental problem really is to first help the mother to realise that the child in her womb is a living human being. Regardless of what the mother’s mental condition will be, consider the alternative – what would be the condition of the child if it was aborted? It’d be dead. No amount of mental condition the mother could go through could compare to that – the life and death of her child.

Once the mother has recognised that the child in her womb really is a living human person, and is determined not to kill a child of hers, then she can work to find other ways of addressing her problems, perhaps talking to a family counsellor, to family members, friends, etc. If the mother does not realise that abortion is taking away of a human life, then the option to abort will always be there, and she will not be as determined to find a solution to her problem.

God bless,
Catholic Writer

mrbiao specifically said in his post that he was giving it from “a totally non-biased point of view”, so I commented that his post is completely biased against Josie’s exco. But you’re right. I’m biased too. And I’m trying to learn not to be. I’ve learned also that unless I can point out what Josie’s exco did wrong, I too am equally unreliable to write anything about it.

Josie and her exco did not introduce Thio as the feminist mentor; she spoke up on her own. One thing for sure is that Josie and her exco did not plan a takeover as the media put it and strongly reinforced. But you’re right, and I totally agree with you, that they should not have run for election because they did not seem to want to continue what AWARE has done, but merely to make a stand against the homosexuality intonations that AWARE has been giving. Josie and her exco certainly did a number of things wrongly, which have definitely caused people to vote against them in the EOGM. What, in your opinion, did the Old Guard do wrongly?

Okay, to elaborate my point on the Old Guard letting gay activists use AWARE as a front. Looking at the CSE instructor’s manual, it is clear that part of their intention is to normalise anal sex among school children, to create a culture of acceptance for homosexual acts, and eventually, the homosexual lifestyle. This has been recognised by MOE after 7,000 people signed a petition that had been going around, asking MOE to relook at the CSE, which has resulted in AWARE’s CSE being suspended.

Right from the start, I had already said that the entire AWARE fiasco has to do with the pro-gay vs anti-gay issue. Though a number of people had voted out Josie’s exco because of other reasons in the end, that has all been part of the pro-gay agenda.

This so-called takeover of AWARE’s leadership is really an internal matter that should not have drawn so much attention in the media. But it did. If you remember the early media reports, the first thing that people found wrong with Josie’s exco – and which later drew so much attention – was that they came from the same church that was intolerant of homosexual behaviour. Why do you think this issue was brought up so early? Because the people who did the reporting already knew it – they were informed of it by supporters of the Old Guard. This has been what the matter is all about. Pro-gay members of AWARE, having seen that so many members of the new exco were against homosexuality, needed to do something about it – so they ousted the new exco through a coordinated and planned media assault on them.

Another important thing to realise is that a significant number of people working in the media are members of AWARE, and probably supporters of the Old Guard, which is why we saw such a media bias against Josie’s exco. It’s not that Josie and her exco didn’t speak to the media; the media didn’t want to report what they said. That, unfortunately, has been a case of abuse of the power of the media, and MICA has spoken to the editors about it.

You’re right that I didn’t go for the EGM, but I have spoken to people who attended it from start to finish – people who voted for and against the Old Guard. One thing that I have to say about all this is that the pro-gay camp really knows how to use the media, and if the anti-gay camp wants to stand a fighting chance, it too has to learn how to use the media to draw support – something which I think is sorely lacking here in Singapore.

As for the final statement on “homosexuality is neutral”, I think it’s best to illustrate this point by asking you to imagine if your child comes up to you and says, “Dad (or Mum), I’m gay.” What is your immediate reaction? If you were a normal parent, your first reaction is anger, then denial. You’d be trying to find reasons why your child only thinks he (or she) is gay, and try to find ways to ‘cure’ him of it. Why? Not because you are against homosexuality, but because you love your child and you know what being gay means for him. No one wants to be gay if he can help it, because gay people face rejection all the time. They face persecution from others who don’t understand him. You will feel sad for your child because of this burden he has to bear by being gay.

Homosexuality is not neutral; it’s negative. It’s not something a person wants to be if he can help it. To say it is neutral will lead children who are not gay, but going through a teenage phase, to think that he could be gay and that it is okay to be gay. It’s not – not because of what the bible or what the church says, but because it’s not a good thing to be gay in this society or this world. It’s going to put unnecessary difficulties on a child’s development and growth, particularly if he’s not really gay but just momentarily finds himself attracted to an older man.

God bless,
Catholic Writer