A HALLETT Cove man has failed to convince a judge he was merely "praying" for the young victims depicted in child pornography he downloaded.

District Court judge Gordon Barrett rejected Andrew Liddington Shore's claims that he had a defence against downloading 2000 images and 39 videos of underage girls because his motive was religious.

Shore, 74, refused to answer the judge when asked whether he had derived sexual pleasure from the pornography he had collected over "a couple of years".

"That belongs in the sanctity of the privacy of my home, it's a matter between myself and God," Shore said.

Shore earlier this year pleaded guilty to one aggravated count of accessing child pornography and four aggravated counts of possessing child pornography but sought to change his pleas, which he said were made under duress.

Representing himself after sacking his lawyer, Shore said he had a defence to the charges - namely that he did not have the "requisite criminal intent in accessing and possessing the pornography.

He told the court his principal purpose was to heal the children depicted by praying for them.

"My motive was not prurient but it was at assisting the children involved," he said.

Judge Barrett then put to Shore that he had conceded there was a sexual ingredient in his watching of the images.

"The whole of life is sexual your Honour, even flowers, they have reproductive organs," Shore said.

"One can't shutter one's self off from reality. One just does one's best to alleviate suffering wherever one sees it."

Shore also claimed he was worn down by the proceedings to the point of exhaustion when he entered the guilty pleas.

In one set of instructions to his then lawyer, Blair Tremaine, Shore claimed he wanted to mount a defence against the allegations on several bases.

One of the bases was that "he had saved the images of young naked girls if they looked happy but deleted the images if they looked unhappy", Judge Barrett said.

"It was my intention to go through the child pornography and delete what I termed 'nasty (or explicit) images' and keep innocuous images for use as a focus for prayer for those children (and adults also)" Shore instructed the lawyer.

Judge Barrett found that Shore "felt, in a delusional way, that he was saving the girls" but dismissed the application to set aside the guilty pleas.

Shore will return to court for sentencing submissions later this month.