Dear Youth,

Receiving Absolute Moral Guidance is the privilege of children.

"Do this." "Don't do that."

You no longer qualify for Asolute Moral Guidance.

You and your buddy are "18+/-." and that means you're not children. Don't get expect us to say "Oh no! Dirty! Bad boy! Stop that!" to you like you're still a little kid.

You are facing the existential void here: the reality that you have the power to make moral choices about your own life. Once you step off church property, you are "Free, White and 18." So long as your body holds out, you can do what you like with it, whether that is mutual masturbation, anal sex, or whatever, with guys, or faithful married life with a woman and having kids. Sure, we tell little kids all these morally charged stories, about how BAD PEOPLE have gay sex and get AIDS, and GOOD PEOPLE get married and have kids... We tell Bible Stories to give kids an idea of what God likes and doesn't like. But the most important thing God gives us is Free Will. That is a REAL THING: the choices we make are REAL CHOICES.

This is really a terrifying thing.

Youth wrote:
"So what then?
DO I embrace this?
Or toss it?"

Yes; that is exactly the question. But we can't answer it for you. I mean, we could refer you to text X or Y, but you know those texts as well as the most moralistically oriented of anybody here.


Look down at your hands.

You could hold a newborn baby boy in those hands, your son. He would be crying, and then you could pick him up, and he would stop, because he knows and trusts you, his father. Evidently God intends this pleasure for all men.

Or you could masturbate your self and your friend, and then go wash the goop off.

Fantasies become plans, plans become actions, actions become habits, habits become character, character becomes destiny, or, in the quaint old-fashioned Christian terminology, Salvation or Damnation.

As a Presbyterian (Calvinist) there is a tendency to believe that all these issues are foreordained, that "God has seen the video." Somewhere in God's library, theoretically, there is a picture of you with a wife & kids....or else a picture of you in prison for sexual offenses against children.

But I would never let that perspective, which is God's alone, interfere with the drama unfolding here & now, the drama of the choices you make every day.

---Didaskalos