Shame and guilt are useful feelings to have, but only when you have done something worthy of them. Masturbation is not something to be ashamed or feel guilty about.
Yes it is. For one, OP says he’s addicted to it. Even if you didn’t care about Catholic teaching, you’d at least see that OP is harming himself through this vice.
From a secular/legal viewpoint, there is nothing wrong with masturbation. It can be part of a healthy lifestyle and, like I’ve mentioned previously, has benefits to sexual and mental health.
From a secular/legal viewpoint, there is nothing wrong with adultery or murdering an defenseless, innocent unborn baby.
You’ve asserted that masturbation has mental or sexual benefits, however I doubt you could provide any more evidence that some psychiatrists personal opinion on the matter.
I imagine you’ll just ignore OP’s anguish over this vice he’s trapped in, but then again materialist atheists are very quick to ignore experiences that don’t fit into their materialist world view, which is why often they will ignore morality, rational inference or consciousness.
From the bible, there is nothing that explicitly says masturbation is a sin. While I believe this is a church teaching [that masturbation is a sin], this has simply been ‘decided’ in the past by authority figures in the church. To add to this, there are catholic theologians who are supportive of masturbation.
Yes the Bible condemns masturbation. Genesis 38 and the story of Onan. See also Ephesians 5:3.
But maybe tell us where in the Bible it says that all what we’re supposed to believe and practice as Christians is to be found in the Bible.
To say that the condemnation of masturbation has been “decided by authority” figures is nothing but a straw man of how the Catholic faith operates. It is in fact these supposedly catholic theologians who are these said authority figures deciding things by fiat unguided by the magisterium of the Catholic church. This is why, like Sr. Margaret Farley, they hopefully have been condemned by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, so the faithful can stay away from these wolves in sheep’s clothing (this was after 6 whole years of trying to work with Sr. Farley to correct the errors in her book, btw.)
Look OP, just in case your reading this troll here, this is the Catholic answer from the Catechism concerning masturbation:
"2352 By masturbation is to be understood the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure. "Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action."138 “The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose.” For here sexual pleasure is sought outside of "the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved."139
To form an equitable judgment about the subjects’ moral responsibility and to guide pastoral action, one must take into account the affective immaturity, force of acquired habit, conditions of anxiety or other psychological or social factors that lessen, if not even reduce to a minimum, moral culpability. "
