GREENSBORO, N.C. – In an article about how Christian sexuality websites avoid sin, there’s something a lot more interesting than how to use stick figures and crash test dummies to show pious people sexual positions available to them without violating the tenets of Leviticus 18:6-23: A new and extremely expansive definition of “porn.”

“Turns out, it’s more a question of function than form,” reads a quote attributed to nobody in particular. “If it’s used for sexual arousal, it’s porn. Simple as that.”

This is undeniably outstanding news for some people, while having the potential to be a serious problem for others.

On the one hand, if you’ve only ever masturbated to the Victoria’s Secret catalog, or to pictures of fully clothed celebrities on IMDB, this means you can no longer use the explanation as a dodge when asked if you look at porn.  You looked at these things for sexual arousal, ergo they are porn, ergo you’re a filthy, porn-obsessed pervert, end of story (and, hopefully, end of ergos as well).

On the other hand, of course, is a few drops of your semen you missed when cleaning up after jacking off to a Nutrisystem ad.

The good news here, especially for the porn industry, is it’s going to be really, really hard for anybody to ban porn as it is now defined. Before the government knew it, they’d find themselves needing to ban everything from Cindy Crawford “Meaningful Beauty” informercials to the names James, Jack and Ryan.

No longer will we have to worry about relying on the vague proclamations of judges who say they know what porn is when they see it, because from now forward we will all know what porn is when we see it because it will arouse us (or arouse someone, at least) to look at it.

Plus, just think of all the new niche categories we can explore, many of them in which we needn’t even depict human beings. After all, even “the shape of a glass or a cartoon female” is enough to get some people hot, apparently. (As a bonus, I’m fairly certain you don’t have to maintain 2257 documentation pertaining to glassware, no matter how recently it was fabricated.)

Yes, it’s truly a new era in porn, an era in which anything and everything can be porn, so long as it gets the viewer hot, bothered, wet and/or hard.

You thought there was a lot of free porn on the web before? Just imagine how much there is now, especially from the vantage of guys like Philip Roth.

Guys, have you ever badly wanted to stick your dick inside an inanimate object, only to abandon the idea out of concern that someone would walk in while you were fucking the gap between two couch cushions and think there was something wrong with you? Well, no worries about such embarrassment anymore. Under the new definition of porn, you can simply explain your sofa is a self-contained, analog version of the RealTouch.

For decades, some have argued porn is in the eye of the beholder, but thanks to some unspecific Christian, we now know porn is actually to be found in the beholder’s genitals. It is important for people not to take this notion too literally, though. I’m not going to get into the details, but suffice to say stuffing thumb drives inside one’s cock quickly becomes pretty uncomfortable.

As to the question about how Christians can avoid sin when virtually everything has the potential to be porn, the answer to this is clear, as well: If God asks them to do it, discussing sex, even in fairly graphic terms, is OK.

“Ultimately, the issue of obscenity on these sites comes down to a question of faith,” according to the article. “Website creators told me they felt called by God to launch their blogs, message boards and online stores. They see their sites as ministries, helping fellow married Christians enjoy what God created for them.”

I think I’m catching on now.

God wants people to enjoy sex, but not depictions of sex, so He made depictions of everything else potentially arousing. That way, Christians could masturbate to wine glass contours without uncovering any nakedness that might belong to someone else.

Just to be totally safe, though, people probably still shouldn’t look at their own genitals while masturbating, even if they’re masturbating to the sexier parts of the Bible. To be perfectly honest, I’m not precisely sure how all this “your mother’s nakedness is your father’s nakedness” stuff works, but if Leviticus is to be believed, clearly someone else owns pretty much all of the third-party nakedness in the world. As such, I wouldn’t be too shocked to learn Warren Buffet owns the intellectual property rights to my scrotum, for example.

At any rate, all of this can be taken as gospel, in the sense that it’s clearly “good news” — unless, of course, you happen to be a particularly sexy beer stein, in which case you might one day find yourself being mentally undressed by horny evangelicals.