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Did an altar call break your porn addiction ?

For Fapstronauts who are disciples of Christ

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Did you overcome your pmo habit via altar call?

  1. Yes

    0 vote(s)
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  2. No

    100.0%
  3. Maybe

    0 vote(s)
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  4. I don’t know

    0 vote(s)
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  1. I am not against altar calls in general. It Is my experience that it does setup false expectations.

    I failed enough times trying in the “altar call” at church trying to quit pmo.

    For those initiates...it’s when the preacher asks “who wants to change their life ? Come to the front let’s give it to God.” So we walk up burdened and back to our bench or chair free and floating.

    The next day , or the same night you have the pmo battle that you KNOW you are going to fail at.

    You do fail. How do you explain the last 24hrs? You walked away going ... I’m never to fall to that habit again. Then the next week you are like... shit. Well that didn’t work. It’s not God, it’s me...I’ll try harder.

    Next week. Repeat. Altar call. You go up. Yeah. Now you pound your knee like ... now I’m gonna do it.

    Nope.

    Next week same thing. you cry and the tears tell everybody who saw you up there the past two weeks now you are serious.

    You can’t explain the failure. You are sincere. You want to change. But you aren’t getting where.

    Of course, it wasn’t Gods fault it’s HAS TO BE mine. Now you heap on the guilt. Sprinkle some self hate.

    Every sermon preached at you finds you identifying with the creep or Israelite who fucks up every time. And the cycle repeats. Self hate because you identify with the sin habit that you are trying to claw your way out of.

    Feedback from fellow religious people adds gas to the hellish fire you are afraid of already but involuntarily drifting towards.

    I don’t have any beef with religion or morality or non Christian religions.

    How reliable are altar calls in dealing with porn addictions ?
     
  2. Hros

    Hros Fapstronaut

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    Well I'm not Christian, but it sounds like that with this altar call, you reach some sort of religious "high". What we're taught in Judaism is that the soul is spiritual and the body physical - meaning, opposites. When you hear a lofty spiritual idea, your soul is greatly drawn to it and is lifted upwards. A short time later, it comes crashing down into the physical, animal-like body, and that crash causes a spiritual-down/depression effect.

    What can be done? Whenever you reach a spiritual high, you need to equally ground yourself. Immidiately ask yourself what you can take from this experience as an action? How can you transform this experience into actions? It might be just a different mindset to have in the day-to-day, and that could be enough to keep you on the straight and narrow.
     
    Mr. McMarty and need4realchg like this.
  3. brilliantidiot

    brilliantidiot Fapstronaut

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    Its not a drug.
     
  4. onceaking

    onceaking Fapstronaut

    They're completely and utterly unreliable in dealing with anything in real life. I've been up on altar calls in the past and they did nothing. There's great social pressure to go up for them and many of the church leaders who lead them are trying to manipulate those in attendance to come up.
     
  5. SuperFan

    SuperFan Fapstronaut

    This will be an imperfect analogy, but bear with me:

    Imagine you were really overweight and lived an unhealthy lifestyle. One night, you go to an altar call and pray earnestly for God to change you. The next morning, you wake up and you can't even believe your eyes--you've lost nearly 100 pounds and you look like you've been chiseled out of stone. You see muscle definition damn near everywhere. Your heart and lungs are fit as can be and you feel like you could run a marathon.

    That would be amazing, right? That would completely be a "grace of God" type of thing, a gift that you couldn't explain or deserve. But it also wouldn't teach you anything, and it would leave you totally unequipped to help others in the same struggle. You wouldn't know anything about fitness, or nutrition, or rest, or discipline ... All you'd be able to say is "well, I don't know ... I just prayed at the altar, and bam, I was changed."

    I'm a Christian. I can't tell you how many times I've prayed to be released from this addiction. I've beat my fists into the ground and prayed "God, WTF ... you are all-powerful. I hate this and I don't want it anymore. Don't you love me? Why can't you just snap your fingers and end this?"

    I'm not the type to "hear from God" very often, but this was one of the few times I did. I distinctly felt his response, and it was "I'm not going to heal you that way. That's not how I want this to work."

    I've come to learn that while there's obviously grace in instant healing, there's immense grace in being healed through process. It's a privilege and an honor to get to be a co-laborer in what God is doing in your life. You learn about yourself, your relationship with others, and your relationship with the world. And it gives you all the tools you need to help others who struggle with the same things. Now, instead of saying "well, I just prayed", you can say "I started with prayer. And then I learned how to be really honest and vulnerable with others about my addiction. And then I started putting practical things in place to help steer me in the right direction. And then I started to focus more on the things that made me feel better about myself" ... and suddenly you have a repeatable path to recovery, a path that will even help those who don't believe in God whatsoever.

    I say this for anyone who's a believer and is struggling with recovery. There's value in the struggle. "God works all things together for the good of those who love him," and that includes your struggles in recovery. Embrace them as part of the process.
     
    St3v0 and need4realchg like this.
  6. @SuperFan I agree completely with your narrative. In fact , i have likened bearing addictions before to How Peter overcame cursing. No miracles for sure. Just hard work and crying.

    The point of this is that we don’t ever HEAR that.

    What gets repeated and popularized is the hollywoodized or “good for t.v” /dramatic version of how people beat this problem in applying specific steps.

    As if recovery were as simple and instant as converting rawmen-noodles from the .30 cent package into hot soup.

    Nobody and I mean nobody in Christendom applies grace to this process systematically. Instead they apply fantasy of instant “healing.” “

    “Dump all your problems today, try to live like it’s all fixed starting tomorrow.”

    Inevitably we try that approach, have relapse after relapse and blame ourselves not our perspective. Why does no one say —- it’s not an effective strategy?

    It’s a dank contrast with the reality of a porn quitter. We like the glittering extreme before and after stories, “i was smoking Mexican crack out of the tail pipe of my car when I hit the bottom and realized i would never do this again...”

    That sounds way cooler than — “I plan to fail with in reason as I purge my imagination of this shit I downloaded for years. Gonna probably take me 4-8 months, or maybe years.... give or take. “

    I think we even see that overzealousness more in our Information Age/ Social media era.

    Think about Rachel versus Leah. We fantasize about one wife and don’t pay attention to the other. Especially post porn. One is hot stuff; the faithful one with Jacob , blessed by God; where as the other is the inconsistent, Blasé wife, carrying idols, lying, jealous and nagging.

    Leah-miss-not-hot, bore 85% of Jacobs family and outlived her cuter younger sister , and in the end of her life is buried more appropriately next to an strong tree. (I think there’s a great sermon by John MacArthur on that). Coincidence ? Nope. She was solid as an oak.

    We (those familiar with Christian pop culture and flashy gospel artists, or tele-evangelists) celebrate the 1% of victories that are cool to watch on tape and in so doing setup a whole generation with a very lazy, false hope on whether this darn addiction/porn stuff will and can EVEN go away. Disappointing children has effects that can last into adulthood. Even a lifetime.

    The guys that drop out of nofap accountability groups usually describe being disappointed at failing over and over.

    That unenviable desire to be perfect despite zero evidence that anybody actually is.... despite all the religious testimonies that it’s hard and long ... and still the culture points and focuses on the 1% of examples of radica- instant transformation.

    we need more examples like you have —just hard fucking grimy work.

    Sure God is in that too. The most dis-serviced person out of these “insta-miracle expectations” is God who blessed us with hard work in the garden of Eden himself.

    Nothing wrong with hard work. It gets the job done for sure.

    I appreciate your feedback very much.
     
    Last edited: Sep 14, 2019
    SuperFan and St3v0 like this.

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