A born-again Christian speaking to more than 2,000 University students for the second straight night urged his audience to abstain from sex until marriage to avoid sexually transmitted diseases.

"Think with your mind and not with your pelvis," Josh McDowell cautioned students before closing his presentation with a prayer.

McDowell said he was not advocating abstinence as a method of birth control, but he said it is the best prevention for STDs.

"If you don't wait you better be willing to count the cost," McDowell said.

Using a condom will not protect against some STDs like gonorrhea, McDowell said. He said 20 STDs cannot even be prevented by condoms.

About 2.5 million teens will contract STDs this year, he said. The infection rate of college students is twice as high as the national norm, McDowell added.

He said today's teens base love and sexuality on fiction, largely provided by the entertainment media, and not from their parents.

"By the age of 21, a person will have seen nearly 92,000 acts of sex on the three major networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) . . . the entertainment media removes almost all negative consequences of uncommitted sex," he said. McDowell said television does not accurately the physical and emotional effects a person undergoes when he or she contracts an STD.

"The best thing to happen on TV would be for J.R. to get VD," he said.

With the audience in complete silence, McDowell gave several personal accounts of teens whose lives have been traumatized as a result of their sexual acts.

Teens today have the fear of never being loved and never being able to give love, McDowell said, blaming broken homes on a generation not knowing how to love and being vulnerable to the first person that says, "I love you."

"There was a lot of scary info . . . it makes you want to stop and think twice (before having sex)," said Matt Peoria (junior-geography). "I got a lot of knowledge of stuff I didn't know that was really shocking," he added.