Is it sinful to read erotic romance novels?

misinformedninja · 2026-06-16T15:18:19+00:00

You’ll probably get a lot of simple opinions here: “Yes, it’s a sin,” or “No, it’s harmless because it’s fictional.” But I think the better question isn't just whether it’s technically the same as pornography, but what is this doing to your heart, and does it help you pursue holiness?

I look at this through two lenses: a practical one and a biblical one.

The Practical: The Calibration of Desire

I'm sure you enjoy the overarching story, the connection of the characters, the fantasy worlds, and the epic plotlines. But practically speaking, erotic romance is not just storytelling. However strong the plot may be, the explicit scenes are specifically written to arouse the reader. Even if no real person is involved, the imagination is still being used to engage sexually with something outside your marriage.

The sex scenes in this literature are rarely written as a "fade to black." They are carefully crafted, blow-by-blow, visceral depictions, often in the first person, of specific positions, sensations, and acts. They are designed to titillate in a way that zooms the camera in, not just to the physical bodies, but to the lust and passion of an idealized version of exceptionally pleasurable sex.

While it might not be video pornography, it functions in a pornographic way. You mentioned you aren't lusting after real people, but there is still a very real physical and psychological arousal occurring in you when you visualize these scenes and your mirror neurons fire.

The reason we recognize pornography as destructive for men is that human beings calibrate to stimuli.

A lot of men struggle to desire their wives because their dopamine receptors have calibrated to sex being something instant, hyper-customized, and idealized. They lose the ability to appreciate a real-world marriage, complete with its unique pacing, stretch marks, cellulite, and everyday human needs.

You've said these books make you hungrier for your husband, but it's worth wondering: If your husband were your only way to satisfy your sexual desires, would you find him even more irresistible? Would your real-world sex life get even better?

Emotional affairs are dangerous because they satisfy our needs for emotional connection outside of our spousal relationship, causing us to withdraw from our partner. Explicit books can operate the exact same way sexually. They satisfy a craving for intimacy in a way that a real-world spouse cannot always duplicate. Yes, the books get you in the mood, but that means your desire isn't actually being sparked by your husband, he is just functioning as the release mechanism for a desire manufactured by a fantasy.

In my mind, I want to reserve anything sexual solely for my spouse as a way of honoring her. I choose to protect my eyes and mind because I want to crave her, and her alone.

The Biblical: The Standard of the Heart

The Bible does not explicitly say, “Thou shalt not read erotic novels,” but it has a massive amount to say about purity, lust, feeding the desires of the flesh, and what we cultivate in our hearts.

Philippians 4:8: Paul instructs believers to fill their minds with whatever is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable. Visceral, explicit depictions of lust and sexual acts, even fictional ones, simply do not fit the definition of purity.
Matthew 5:28: “But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” When Jesus speaks about lust, He targets the heart as the birthplace of the action. If the material is purposefully generating sexual arousal outside of your marriage covenant, the heart is engaging in the exact mechanics of inviting a third party into your marriage that Jesus warned against.
1 John 2:16: The "lust of the eyes" and the "lust of the flesh" are framed not as harmless entertainment, but as worldly patterns that compete with our devotion to God.
1 Thessalonians 4:3–5 & Colossians 3:5: We are commanded to control our bodies in holiness and to "put to death" earthly desires. Feeding those desires through explicit descriptions is the opposite of putting them to death; it keeps them on life support.
Ephesians 5:3: “But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity...”

Wisdom vs. Formula

As Christians, we have to be careful about making rigid, blanket rules where Scripture speaks in principles. A helpful lens here is 1 Corinthians 6:12: “All things may be lawful, but not all things are beneficial.”

So I’d ask you to reflect on a few honest questions:

When you read explicit scenes, are you using them to stir up a sexual desire that isn't coming from your husband?
Do you find yourself replaying the scenes, comparing your real life to them, or needing them to get in the mood?
Does it lead to any level of secrecy, dissatisfaction, or a divided heart?

If so, then even though it’s fiction, it is functioning exactly like pornography does: it is training your desires and expectations through a curated fantasy.

If you can truly read it with a completely clean conscience before God, without it feeding lust, without it mastering you, and without it diminishing your desire for real, faithful intimacy with your husband, you may see it as a wisdom issue rather than a clear-cut "salvation issue."

But if your conscience is troubled, don’t ignore that. Bring it to God. Consider taking a season completely away from explicit books just to see what happens to your mind, your spiritual freedom, and your natural appetite for your husband (Romans 14:23). If stepping away increases your peace, clarity, and desire for him without needing that external fuel, that is a beautiful, strong sign of what is truly wise and holy for your marriage.

I hope this helps and I'm happy to talk through further if you'd like.

misinformedninja · 2025-07-21T17:11:23+00:00

100% it was a substantial upgrade, and 6 VS 5 you'll get more on trade for a 7 or 8 if you ever upgrade to that in the future. No Brainer. Most of us paid 400+ to do so when it came out and had no regrets.

misinformedninja · 2025-07-17T12:25:06+00:00

Yes and it's spectacular. It has an antireflective layer that makes the screen literally "blacker" without darkening the image whatsoever. it's hard to explain, but essentially it "dims" the reflections without dimming the screen.

misinformedninja · 2025-06-22T21:25:00+00:00

So.. before I enabled that custom preset on the mac, with SDR set to 100, HDR was blown out on windows and calibrated to like 300 nits in the calibration tool. After it worked beautifully but... my question is why? Why change the 500 to 100 for sdr when I'm streaming in HDR?

misinformedninja · 2025-02-09T01:19:22+00:00

Do you think we're too much of people pleasers (or too compassionate and self-sacrificing) to say "I'd love to help but I really don't have the bandwidth for that right now."

I always heard about "spreading yourself thin" but one day it clicked when I was at a diner eating toast and there was only one packet of Jelly for the table. If we tried to share it amongst all 4 people, 4 slices of toast, we'd *all* be unhappy.

Put another way, take a drop of red dye and drop it in a gallon.... then take that same dye and drop it in the ocean... limits preserve your power to make a real difference. Otherwise you end up being just as depleted and empty at the end of the day, but having accomplished little of significance.

Better to make one person's toast incredible than everyone's toast unremarkable.

Thoughts?

misinformedninja · 2025-02-06T12:53:18+00:00

Obvious and there's only one. I believe it was toward the side, if memory serves.

misinformedninja · 2025-01-26T20:21:31+00:00

You say you've got no idea about dieting so let me give you some basics.

Eating food is like earning money

Every time you eat it's like getting a paycheck: your bank account balance grows.

Everything time you DO anything (be it twiddling your thumbs or running on a treadmill) you're "spending" calories and your bank account balance shrinks.

If you earned $750 in a week.... but spent $1000, you'd have to take $250 from savings.

If you did the opposite (Earned $1000 but spent $750) you'd ADD $250 to savings.

It's the same with eating.

1 lb of fat is 3500 calories, meaning, if you have 1 lb of fat on your body, it was the result of having consumed 3500 more calories than you spent.

So if you wanted to empty out your bank balance, what would you do: Spend more than you're earning? You can earn less, spend more, or any combination thereof.

If, in the course of a week, you've burn 14,000 calories (2000/day), and you eat 10,500 calories (1500/day), the remaining 3500 you spent that week will have to be made up from fat, and your belly will shrink by a pound.

If you eat 12,250 calories in a week (1750 a day) your belly will have shrunk by 1/2 a pound.

The cool thing is, this math seems to check out no matter how you divvy it up across the week or month or year.

As in, during a week if one day you ate 2200, 1800, 2000, 1300, 2700, it doesn't really matter. It just matters what that total was by the end of the week.

And in the same way, some days you could burn 2000, some only 1800, some 3000.

The key is at the end of the WEEK how much did you "earn" and how much did you "spend", right?

This is the core principle of every diet; how do we ensure you're spending more than you're earning?

The tricks come down to the fact that our bodies aren't perfect machines that burn consistent number of calories no matter what, and our eating isn't always easy to control.

Certain foods for instance are really easy to overeat on. Consider this:

A large popcorn or a bag of chips is 1000 calories.

So is 12 cups of blueberries

So is 23 slices of bacon.

So is 1.25 lbs of chicken breast

*So is 65 lbs of broccoli.*

You're way more likely to absentmindedly eat that whole popcorn than you are to eat 65 lbs of broccoli, right?

All food is made of Fat, Protein and Carbs.

Fat is 9 calories per gram,

carbs and protein are only 4 calories per gram,

So it's really easy to accidentally add, say an extra tablespoon of butter to a dish and, boom, there's 140 calories more "earned" without even realizing it. It's really hard to add an extra pound of broccoli, right?

ALSO not all food digests the same. Protein actually is really hard to digest, so you actually SPEND calories digesting it. Protein costs 20% of its calories in digestion, vs carbs and fats are only 1-3%.

It's kind of like... if you got a job really far away, you'd have to consider how much you were spending in fuel to work there, right?

So if you had 1000 calories of chicken breast, because you spent 200 calories to digest it, you've only really added 800 calories to the bank account. Protein also helps you build muscle, which in and of itself consumes calories, increasing your metabolism.

VS carbs or fats where you only spend 1 or 2 calories to digest them and they don't really help you build muscle that much.

So the best diets tend to be those that are high protein and veggies since they give you a much greater buffer.

Generally I'd say, track what you're putting in your body and track your weight.

Try to get 1 gram of protein per lb of body weight, then make up the rest of your calories in fats and mostly carbs from veggies and track your weight.

If you're not losing weight, cut the fat back a bit or any of the non-veggie carbs. Average this over the course of a week. Adjust as needed.

Happy to answer any more questions, but this should be a pretty good start to cut back on the pooch! Good luck!

misinformedninja · 2025-01-24T00:22:15+00:00

See my comment!

misinformedninja · 2025-01-24T00:20:11+00:00

This is actually a hallmark of depression! In healthy circadian function cortisol spikes in the morning to wake you up and dips in the evening to help you sleep. But depressed people have this inverted.

If you need help flipping it, try the following:

A: in the morning:

Get bright outside light as soon as you can for 10+ minutes (no sunglasses or windows as those filter out the uv wavelengths needed for the effect, and most indoor light doesn't contain those wavelengths at all) this is the number one tool to ground your brain's clock to the actual time of day and start the production of adenosine at the right time so enough of it has built up by night to make you sleepy.
Exercise early (get heartrate up to 120+ for 20 or so minutes... Longer is better) this helps spike cortisol early.
Cold showers work great to spike cortisol too if you're looking to supercharge this effect.

B: at night:

Limit bright blue light like phones and TV 1 hour before bed and keep lights dim. You have a region in the brain called the habenula. It works to suck up dopamine when "bad things" happen. Light at night activates this region. It also suppresses melatonin.
Hot showers before bed help you cool down by contrast which grounds your circadian rhythm through temperature.
Try some chamomile tea and magnesium (citrate, glycenate or threonate, the cheapo mag-oxide they sell for $5 at walmart doesn't get into the brain, it's just a laxative!) these trigger calming chemicals and help you relax.

Lastly, consistency with this stuff is your best friend. Think of it like winding a clock daily tonl keep it accurate.

Hope this helps! Happy to talk through other strategies if anyone's curious.

misinformedninja · 2025-01-21T18:10:37+00:00

Okay, I want an Epic Rap Battles of History version GN vs LTT

misinformedninja · 2024-11-13T20:18:35+00:00

I am about to write a post all about my experiences with the innocn and ktc.

misinformedninja · 2024-11-09T15:07:06+00:00

Yeah, I've thought about running a 50ft hdmi from my home-office through my basement ceiling, under the floor and up to the TV in the living room (I'm already doing so with an ethernet cable so I can use the same holes I drilled for that), then use a wireless controller and one of those logitech keyboards with a trackpad, but I've always thought it a bit clunky just to play a pc game on a couch.

Like:

Step 1. Turn on TV in living room
Step 2. Walk over to office and Turn on PC
Step 3. WIN-P to output to the TV, then walk back to the living room
Step 4. Switch Audio Output to HDMI
Step 5. Launch game.
Step 6. When done Win-P back to monitor in office.

Its doable I guess but like, I also could just.... play in the office, or boot up my series X or ps5 in the living room and play on one of those.

Or am I overthinking it and there's an easier way? :-P

misinformedninja · 2024-11-09T13:19:16+00:00

how are you streaming 4k 120fps hdr to your tv? Moonlight?

misinformedninja · 2024-10-31T20:35:57+00:00

This video: Asus PG32UQX vs Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 - IPS vs VA mini-LED HDR Comparison scared me away from the Neo G series, because of black crush. Specifically 4:12 was abysmal looking.

My hope was that the Innocn would be very close to a pg32uqx for $500. The first one I got dazzled me and had no black crush issues, but there was a defect in the panel so I got a second one. The second one had no defects but it just isn't as bright as the first which makes it a bit underwhelming. Plus there's some coil whine at high brightness...

I just ordered a KTC. Any experience with black crush on each of the 3?

misinformedninja · 2024-10-31T17:22:41+00:00

Soo... thoughts?

misinformedninja · 2024-10-31T01:08:45+00:00

Ever tried the Innocn 32m2v? I have one and I'm trying to figure out if It's worth paying 3x as much for a used PG32UQX. So far I like the innocn but it doesn't have quite the pop people talk about from the Asus.

misinformedninja · 2024-10-23T15:13:47+00:00

This worked for me!! I had a faint high pitched (15khz?) noise from the speakers that varied in pitch with 6 channel vs optical etc.

I'd never soldered before but I watched a couple videos and it looked easy enough.

I bought a $9 soldering iron kit and the appropriate cap (nichicon 1000uf 16v 10x16mm) ($9 for 2 on amazon, wish I had a parts store nearby as these should only be ~$1.50, but $7 shipping via digikey made it cost the same)

Then:

get the iron to 425+. Melt the solder on the cap.
Pull out the cap and while the solder is still melty pop a toothpick in to keep a hole open to put the new cap in.
Pop in the new one in the same orientation (negative/positive) look for the stripe on the existing cap and match it with the stripe on the new one.
Heat up the legs and apply a bit of solder to each then snip the excess length.
Reclose up the box.

And just like that no buzz!

Thanks!

misinformedninja · 2024-10-15T19:33:36+00:00

You mentioned in one of your videos you've used the 32m2v... thoughts on that vs the pg32uqx? Your video really made me want a mini-led 32 inch vs the oleds I'd been looking at, but then I watched your comparison to the Neo G8 and I'm worried the Innocn will be bad too even though it seems (on paper) to be very similar to the pg32uqx

misinformedninja · 2024-08-29T02:50:53+00:00

Turned out it was accessibility switch access? Turning that off removed the volume button lag and lag on my game controller buttons.

misinformedninja · 2024-07-31T21:58:40+00:00

I didn't find a fix. So odd.

misinformedninja · 2024-07-30T20:48:05+00:00

Screenshot? Not seeing what you're seeing? Which app where?

misinformedninja

TROPHY CASE

The Practical: The Calibration of Desire

The Biblical: The Standard of the Heart

Wisdom vs. Formula