COLUMBIA HOUSE STARTS PORN CLUB.
It’s this kind of thing that makes me wish I had something to do with Columbia House just so I could call and cancel my account.
May still call them, though, and tell them that because of their new porn club I will never have anything to do with them in the future.
Author: Jimmy Akin
Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."
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Actually the really disgusting part is mentioned in the article:
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I firmly believe that if child pornography weren’t illegal, it would be a THRIVING business in this nation.
I’ve been thinking of joining Columbia but that is the end of that. Anybody know of a club where you can get non-classical CD’s at good prices without feeling the need for a shower afterwards?
I was thinking of joining Netflix (for their free trial offer) just so I could cancel in outrage and their pro-abortion charity donations.
I was thinking of joining Netflix (for their free trial offer) just so I could cancel in outrage and their pro-abortion charity donations.
What?!? When did Netflix start doing this?
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The Netflix news is new to me as well.
(Apologies, I’m not sure why my end tags are AWOL.)
Extremist . . . Anything in writing to prove the statement? I’m not finding anything. Thanks.
I’m a member of Columbia House’s DVD club, and I was outraged when I got the mailing announcing their new porn club. They said I would be automatically enrolled in the porn club unless I called them and told them not to enroll me. I called immediately and let them know how twisted it was that they don’t just make porn available to the pervert who desire it, but instead require those who believe in moral virtue to go out of their way to say no to corruption. Immorality is officially our cultures default position.
Any idea how we can contact Columbia House and express our disgust?
Jared,
you sure you read the offer right? The article Jimmy posted says this:
“This will be a separate subsidiary,” said Jim Litwak, senior vice president of marketing at Columbia House. “It will be completely separate from Columbia House, and will not be marketed to current members. We are not using Columbia House at all, and are not talking to existing members; this is a separate business and deal.”
Not that I am trying to defend CH.
No word back from Gleeful Extremist about Netflix. I guess he must work for Blockbuster or something.
Sorry, I didn’t check back until now. I had it from my brother-in-law. I’ll check with him for his source.
I hope it’s not true. I live in the same town as them and can get my DVDs really fast. 🙂
Oy. Turns out I was told they were donating to Planned Parenthood when in fact it was one of PP’s subsidaries, the Democratic National Party.
Sorry for the misinformation.
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Ok so what is so bad about pornography the way i see things its mostlikely keeping alot of people from peeping into window’s on people and still lets them release the tension
Is it proper for followers of Christ to support companies that directly promote the homosexual agenda? Check out Netflix’s genre’s. They have a Gay/Lesbian genre. Hey…come to faithandfamilyflix.com, where all movies are family safe. Just because we are adults doesn’t mean we should allow immorality into our hearts. Make the right choice…;-)
Blockbuster has soft-core porn, even R-rated cuts of hard-core porn films like Pirates.
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/movie/reviews/285266
(link is free of adult imagery or text, at least on my browser; I cannot speak for the text of the reviews however, as I have not read them)
And that includes some homosexual scenes (I have not seen the film myself, but I have read about it).
Netflix also has soft-core porn as do many other video rental businesses.
If one demands that a business not carry morally objectionable material where would it end? What about the artistic masterpiece The Last Temptation of Christ? What about the movie Dogma? You won’t be able to rent anything from anyone except Christian operated businesses.
What about hotels that allow customers to buy porn pay per view? Or cable or satellite services that offer porn as pay per view or as channels? Some criticized some Republican candidates for allowing porn in their hotel business, but the paramount value of a business must be the service of a customer and not the imposition of the values of the owner upon the customer. Customers intolerant of that business model even when they themselves are accomodated with blocking technology, family friendly lines that don’t show Cosmopolitan or juicy gossip in grocery stores, are being intransigent. In a pluralistic society, you must let go, live and let live. As Palin herself said in the debate today, amongst her friends are those who make choices with which she may not agree but which she fully tolerates. If Palin were working at Walmart and were a staunch Catholic opposed to contraception, I am sure she would still sell a condom to someone as that is not about compromising one’s morals; that is about courtesy … a point made btw by a Catholic bishop once, of a Catholic in a similar situation who came across someone, also a Catholic, who was purchasing a condom … the bishop suggested, contrary to the caller or however it was the question was submitted … it was years ago … that the context was not the best place and time for the Catholic to address the matter. The moral value of courtesy involves our willingness to allow and even facilitate others in what we believe to be profoundly moral mistakes. It doesn’t involve any formal cooperation, only material or the mere recognition of an act already effected.
In this situation, it is odd that Catholics would be up in arms over this but not be up in arms over companies that donate to anti-life causes … the list of anti-life companies is extremely long. And it would be difficult to lead a life in America without doing business with at least some of them.
it is odd that Catholics would be up in arms over this but not be up in arms over companies that donate to anti-life causes
Who says they’re not?
I boycot at least two businesses only moral grounds: one for its support of Planned Parenthood, another for its support of homosexuality.
I don’t go looking for companies to boycot, and in the end you can’t prevent a business from using its profits to do evil, but if I happen to find out a company is working to spread indecency and corruption, I have to seriously consider finding others places to do business.
I don’t think you realize how long the list would be
http://www.stantoninus.net/listab.htm
Maybe I should follow your moral logic btw … I won’t go seeking out a deity but if I happen to find one that actually exists, I will seriously consider worshipping it. The duty to inform one’s conscience under Catholicism involves not merely informing the conscience as to moral laws but also as to relevant facts. I am not hereby making a claim as to what duty might exist under Catholicism as regards doing business with anti-life companies … I am only making that general statement.
Since you don’t actually care what the duty to inform one’s conscience under Catholicism is, one can only wonder why you dredged up this old weblog post that has been all but dormant since Jan. 2005. You seem to be doing all of this for your idle amusement, not out of a genuine intellectual motivation.
Don’t feed the troll, folks.
Ah, I now see that another commenter had dredged up another, related post from Jan. 2005, so that could be what led you to dredge up the other one. So you aren’t trolling in this case.
Which isn’t to say that you actually care what the duty to inform one’s conscience under Catholicism is, and that you don’t post so frequently here out of idle amusement. You give every indication that this is some kind of intellectual or rhetorical game to you.
Jordanes, it is interesting that you note that you were in error, but then decline to apologize for your error.
Your prejudice here is striking. You think a Catholic may have an interest in advancing his world view but neglect the possibility that an atheist may have an interest in advancing her world view. The only one here on this blog who has acknowledged that his participation was one of “just recreation” was actually a Catholic.
My view of my whole life is a call to be beautiful. This is in alignment with the traditional and historic Catholic position in philosophy that being moral is a kind of beauty of objective character just as as may surprise you in Catholic philosophy physical beauty is of objective character. I cannot convince you that that is my view of my life; I can only propose it for your consideration, which given your prejudicial tendencies demonstrated here and elsewhere, “give every indication that you are stubborn” in an act which in my view arrogates to yourself something which does not rightly belong to you.
Some Catholics may separate their life into that which has a moral dimension and that which is of no moral significance. I understand morality differently. I see it as a desire to be beautiful, a desire for the beautiful, and a desire to promote the beautiful, in and through my life. I view these desires and the fruitful expressions of the same to comprise, more or less, the essense of morality for me at this present time. So if I were playing baseball for instance, I would not view that as an activity without moral dimension. But the thrust of some Catholics is such that it is implicitly assumed or even explicitly stated that such things are neither moral nor immoral, not a question of right or wrong, not a question of morality at all. This misunderstands the nature of morality and reduces it to being a way to discern whether something is morally obligatory, permitted, or forbidden. That’s not the essence of morality. Under, what are in my opinion more credible — in this respect — formulations of theism, morality’s essence is found in God’s own interior life and that interior divine life is not a question of obligation, permission, and forbidding; it is a question of vibrant love, in which those questions may be asked in some abstracted fashion, but which those questions do not actually capture any of the ontological reality itself. I view that as true for any reality that is truly an instance of moral life. There is not one’s moral life and one’s life with no moral significance. There is just one’s life and it is his choice as to whether to form one’s life according to a desire profound within one’s heart or fleeting in one’s passion, including the passion that blinds furiously, religious passion
Oh, CT. I’m shocked, SHOCKED at the level of ignorance concerning Catholic morality in your last post, and the straw man you again labor to build that the Catholic faith is rule-bound while REAL morality is not.
You must believe, then, that there can be no objective knowledge of morality, no morality that two people must always agree on. How could there be? What you favor is moral chaos.
Inventing your own morality based on what you feel? Who’s really blinded by passion?
CT: Read Germain Grisez. Then get back to us. Thank you.
SDG, I have read him and IIRC he is critical of traditionally formulated Catholic moral theology and those favoring a conventionally formulated Catholic moral theology are critical of him and ask of him and those of his ilk in what ways his proposal for the moral theology enterprise would actually be different.
I assume that you have read the multiple volumes he has written. If so, I am a little surprised.
CT: I have an MA in religious studies. I studied Grisez’s three-volume The Way of the Lord Jesus in grad school, and have done more reading from him and about him in the intervening years. Why would you be surprised?
Your summary leaves something to be desired. It is highly misleading to say that he is critical of “traditionally formulated Catholic moral theology,” and while some traditional theologians may be critical of him, AFAIK it is usually by way of supplementing his approach rather than taking issue with the basic structure of his argument.
At any rate, Grisez offers a more than sufficient answer to some of your comments above. Your meta-concept of beauty seems to be better analyzed by Grisez as harmony and fullness of being. He certainly would not support the notion you reject of, e.g., baseball as an activity without a moral dimension.
If you question how representative Grisez is of Catholic moral theology, try part 3 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It doesn’t sound much like the strange theory you’re critiquing either.
For what it’s worth, there is an interesting on-line biography of Grisez here. It covers a bit of the evolution of his thought and particularly covers his involvement in the developments of the 1960s.
In short, Grisez seems to have been one of the few intellectuals of his day actually to defend the position of the Magisterium.