No Quibbling: Risque Ads Are Sin

I have a couple of friends who regularly debate ads on the Internet. It’s not really new. On the one hand, without advertising revenue, some fairly valuable information would not be available on the Net. On the other hand, advertisers are the slimiest bunch of crooks, almost on the same level with child molesters. While advertisers save their manipulation for making money, they are altogether willing to use any dirty trick known to man to do it. That’s the part which makes them equivalent to sexual predators. I would willingly support honest advertisers, but I can’t find any. We are torn between tolerating lying scum versus having almost nothing on the Net, or so it seems.

Make up your own mind. One thing where I cannot find the possibility of compromise is when advertisers defy God’s Laws. Lying is one thing; you can find room for quibbling about whether an ad campaign is a lie. You cannot find room to quibble about obscene images. The biblical standard is clear. Showing cleavage or any portion of buttocks is too much. Now, that’s a pretty generous standard, considering I am certain the Bible requires female flesh to be covered — at a minimum — between the knees and the neck, though I consider bare arms up to the shoulders okay. I understand no one will listen to me on this, so I take the line there is utterly no justification for ads which violate the looser standard I mentioned first.

Now, I use the Opera browser for graphical surfing. It’s vastly superior to Mozilla, particularly when it comes to the amount of horsepower it takes to run. My wimpy laptop is almost unusable running Firefox on Etch. I have almost no trouble at all with Opera. It lacks a few things, but it’s the least painful. In terms some Linux old timers will recognize: All web browsers stink, but this one stinks less. One of it’s better features is the option to turn off just about everything on-the-fly — cookies, graphics and plug-ins. Even better is the built-in ability to selectively block particularly offensive sources for page media.

As you might guess, I am quick to activate this feature when any advertiser shows too much female flesh. For example, the most recent offender is Burstnet. Flabby or tight, I don’t need to see a naked fanny; a thong is not clothing by biblical standards. Yes, I am prudish, and proud of it. Watch all the porn you like, you filthy slug, but don’t put it on any page I visit. You get one mistake and your servers go on the bad list. You know better. Would you believe all the big names are now in my blocking file?

I don’t care about man’s laws, and I am all the more hostile when those laws fail the test of Noah. I am aware if more people repent and turn to God’s Laws, we might not have much Internet. I’m not sure I care. All things on this earth exist at God’s convenience. That includes you and I. As long as the Net serves a divine purpose, it will be here. Push too far, and He’ll allow it to go away. That is what’s happening with Western Civilization itself, in a broad sense. The Net is not sacred.