Regards,
Stephen

Tough call.

Clearly not just by saying their sin is just a lifestyle choice. Sin is sin. But at the same time, we can point to the hypocrisy of a secular world that says that sexual orientations are just different but perfectly valid… except peadophilia, where the people concerned are malevolent, disgusting people who need to be locked away.

So here is my radical thesis: I think that Christians should be willing to accept, encourage and support people who are struggling with paedophilia, in the same way they should accept, love and support people struggling with homosexuality, or just plain old lust.

Why? Because if we are open about the problem, and truly non judgemental, then we may be able to encourage such men (usually men, although apparently occasionally women) to be open and honest about their struggle. We can then strive to help them avoid stumbling. We can ensure that we don’t place them in the way of temptation, and we can pray and help with counselling.

Would this work? Probably not in every case. A peadophile must never fulfill his sexual desires as long as those desires are wrong. But I think we could make progress if we were honest that the problem exists in our churches too, and if we broke down the taboo, whilst standing firm on the moral issue.

Maybe that is too radical - too controversial. Maybe it is what Christ would call us to do. I’m not sure (and a disclaimer, I have never counselled a peadophile, so I am speaking from ignorance as to the complexities and legalities involved).

Either way, it is certainly true that many things that were once considered obscene, or at the least, something to be hypocritical about, are now being seen as increasingly normal. Perhaps God is giving people up to their debased minds, to do those things which are not fitting (Romans 1).

Pedophilia and a few other things too disgusting to mention are probably the only sexual taboos left!

Everything else is now more or less acceptable in the eyes of contemporary society.

With that perspective: How long until the remaining taboos start going mainstream too?

It’s a very slippery slope!

I have never actually seen the show and basically have cut off watching all reality programs and such.

It just goes to show you how gullible and ignorant people can be to be so candid on camera or in a chat room.

The hard part of this whole discussion rests around how person the violation, the question of whether an individual is really old enough to consent, the irreversible properties of the crime, and the mental damage that accompanies it.

I see this as a cue to the fact that we have a society that doesn’t really know what it wants to be. If it upheld a high moral standard, like a Biblical standard, and enforced it then we wouldn’t have a problem. If they loosened laws to be open, then the problem would disappear because it wouldn’t be a crime.

I think a lot of how you interpret this depends on how you see the law. Do you have a more theonomic idea of law, where many or most external things that are sins are also crimes, or do you take the approach that things can be sins, but need not be crimes? If you took the theonomic view, to be consistent you would also have to take the Biblical standard of evidence, which is two eyewitnesses, and consider whether entrapment constitutes eyewitnesses, and whether solicitation is actually a sin. It would seem that you could solicit, but not go through with the plan. In that case, Biblically, I would think the sin remained in the thought life, which is not in the realm of the earthly law.

Interesting discussion! Thanks…

1. If the 14 year old is a child, then it’s the parent’s responsibility to “police” their children’s activities. They are the ones responsible for protecting their child from predators on or off line, and they should make sure that their children are not behaving incorrectly.

2. If the 14 year old is an adult, then the laws should reflect that, and they should be responsible for what happens.

In order for this really to have teeth, though, I would think that the parents (bearing the responsibility) would also have to bear part of the punishment if their child was out doing this and it was against the law. Maybe something as simple as denying the house internet access or something.

The problem is that you really want to be more preventative than reactive in this situation because of the value that the older people know that sex has versus what the 14 year old knows.

Do I want to have a predator outside my kids school watching them hoping to take advantage of them and my only recourse is to charge them for rape and put them away after they take away my child’s innocence? What if it’s a 12 year old or younger, does that make a difference?

But then, I may be talking two different cases– one is solicitation and deception over the Internet for entrapment, the other is the predator that kidnaps. One you have much more control over than the other. But they are linked.