http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NluGSYegZ68

The big lies doing the rounds — about 9/11 being a government conspiracy, the Da Vinci Code, Neil Armstrong and the bouncing in the studio can all be attibuted to people’s refusal to seek the truth. The flesh is the master in such cases.

I would venture to say that for the typical person, the answers would be –
Are having these thoughts sinful? yes and no
Is it just my flesh lashing out? yes and no
I am not responsible? yes and no

There are a lot of factors at play here, one of which being that we live in the world, a world which seems to be increasingly hedonistic, but if you go and read St. Augustine’s Confessions, for example, you see that he struggled with the exact same problems.

One thing to remember is that the object of the thought itself might not be a sin in itself, but instead a good that has been distorted and corrupted. For example, sexual desire. Being created by God, sexual desire in itself is necessarily a good, but it is a good only insofar as it is ordered toward and consistent with the truth for which God intended it, i.e. as an occasion of love within marriage. To be sure, God purposely put a strong sexual desire in us precisely to drive us toward marriage, and so that we might “be fruitful and multiply.” It is when such desire is contrary to, or a privation of, that good and truth that it becomes an evil. The body itself (male and female), being created by God, is necessarily a good, to be sure, it is “very good.” It is when one allows the goodness of the body to be degraded to the level of worldly “flesh,” seeking inordinate worldly pleasure, being a distortion, perversion, and privation of the good that is the body, that it is an evil.

To the extent that inordinate worldly desires, such as lust, or other wrongful thoughts originate entirely with you, they are sinful thoughts for which you are responsible. And to the extent that they do not originate with you, but you willingly dwell on them and entertain them, the more sinful they become.

However, many times such thoughts do not originate entirely with us — we have been infected, our good body has become mere “flesh” by being infected with worldly hedonism and utilitarianism, and it is the world and this diseased flesh that whispers such thoughts and temptations into our ears as if they were demons. Then, of course, we cannot discount the possibility of real demonic forces putting thoughts into our head.

What to do then? Sometimes we are successful in immediately putting such thoughts out of our heads. Of course, it helps to avoid “occasions of sin,” for example, if we don’t want to think about sex every five minutes, it helps not to be looking at Internet porn every day. However, even if we do that, still we are living in a sex-saturated and pleasure-oriented society where we are constantly bombarded with messages directed toward this appetite or that one, from sex to food to booze and beyond, so something more is needed.

It also helps to seek God’s grace, including the graces received in Confession, because with such grace, you can find that such thoughts do not pop into your head against your will as often. With grace, you can control your passions rather than your passions controlling you. And you find that, even if you cannot put them entirely out of your head, you can pay no attention to them or otherwise defeat them. It is interesting that Jesus did not simply make Satan vanish when tempted out in the desert. Rather, Satan repeatedly spoke to Him — put thoughts in His head — but Jesus remained in control, He controlled the temptations, rather than the temptations controlling Him.

With grace, the vice of lustful thoughts really can become the virtue of chastity. Bad habits can be converted to good habits. But it is important to remember that we are on a journey, we are still sojourning in this land. Although we are not of this world, we are still in the world, and it often seeks to intrude upon us and keep us from our destination. Thus our will to fully accept grace is sometimes imperfect. So the conversion from lust to chastity might be a gradual one. Or, it could be something you struggle with month after month without much headway and then, one day you allow that grace, which had previously been bouncing off of you, to actually sink in and, in an instant, the struggle is over, the demon is defeated.

Yes, such grace does truly exist. I know it to be true because it happened to me. That doesn’t mean that girls in low-cut tops will no longer walk by me — they do — but it is a lot easier now to pay no attention to them.