I've been thinking about this article overnight because I wanted to reply. The problem is that I dont know where to start because, although I sort of agree with the reason why he wrote this article I agree with nothing else. But then I rather feel the same way about your response as well. To me, the whole thing (problem and responses) seem incredibly archaic. Victorian indeed. The 'fundamentalists' seem prudish and petty - taking the very jewish moralistic tendencies of Paul and stretching them to their absolute limits. In my view missing the point entirely: confusing morality with goodness to the point where the focussing upon the one actually obscures the other. Phariseeism. But then the article equally misses the point because it doesnt take into account that the desire for purity is not something imposed by religious fanatics but by an innate human need which I am surely not alone in needing to respond to. We all of us as boys would have been horrified if our mothers had caught us in the act whether Christian or not. There is something much more fundamental about the 'shame' of sex generally and the 'shame' of masturbation particularly and it is something schoolboys giggle about and worry about incessantly. It has nothing to do with Christian thinking and perhaps more to do with the fundamental difference of being a child to being an adult (the loss of innocence?). [I'm sure that Druid and pagan boys would have felt the same way].
In fact I would see it the other way round. The innate religious nature of the human and the innate need for 'redemption' is not initiated by Christian thought: it's there anyway. The fundamental difference in the way we feel after masturbating over a picture on the internet as opposed to the way we feel after an evening spent in the company of someone we love is not something inculcated in us by a power hungry priesthood: it is there from the start in the human psyche. [I know that I am not the only person who as realised to his astonishment that when I have fallen madly in love I cannot bear to masturbate.] It is the making sense of that difference which is at the source of religious feeling and our own fundamental yearning for redemption and 'cleansing'. The modern humanist has conveniently forgotten that the whole premise of the Christian way is not to impose the problem of religion but to solve it: not to enslave but to free. But then we Christians can easily lose sight of this as well.
It is the Christian way which reassures us that, despite the fact that there is this innate contradiction between our desire for 'purity' and our equally innate need to masturbate which is either to be stifled by dangerous repression or to be made unnecessary by intimate relationship, we are not to allow this 'animal' nature to impede our progress towards God. It is the fatal irony of the fundamentalist moralistic approach to this issue which actually traps the person in the very place that God would lead us out of. I would go so far as to say that 'Egypt' is the place of Religion and the Promised Land is a place where, as Bonheuffer might say, we are finally set free from the very bonds of Religion.
As Christians, we do not come to God needing to purify ourselves after sex like the Levites with their obsessive washing, we come to God through the purity of Christ which is something utterly different.
Masturbation is surely the 'raw material' out of which loving relationships are formed. I am all too aware in my own life that it can also be a barrier to forming loving relationships if there is a personality 'problem' of any sort. 'It is not good for man to be alone.' Not because God doesnt like us masturbating but because He calls us to live with others, forming loving relationships and finding our own happiness in the happiness of others. It is no accident either that the more isolated we are as individuals the more often we need to masturbate. It's not the masturbating which is wrong, it is the seperation of man from man and from man with woman. This is what God is calling us to: connection. It then stops becoming a personal problem and becomes a social one. If we prefer to stay at home and masturbate over pictures on the computer rather than head out and relate to others then we have a problem. The problem is not the masturbating it is the feeling that we have nothing to offer others. It is the feeling of exclusion and unworthiness.
Wow this has got very long.
My final point was that your own response strikes me as something that Lord Shaftesbury might have written in the 19th century: a sort of well-meant elitism which misses the point that we are all in this together. We are all of us then your 'working poor'. The problem for each of us does not go away so easily. Except of course that it is not the stumbling block at all but in the strangest kind of a way, part of the cornerstone.
ng