Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Stick to the plan - 2

Certain ways of doing things have a natural logic. Doing them differently can be at least pointless, or even damaging. For a simple example: human beings are designed to walk on two legs, not four limbs or on their arms. To do so, unless you have a disability and can't use your legs, is pointless for a start and can be damaging to the body because the load-bearing is on limbs not intended for it.
This applies also to sexuality. There is a natural and right way for it to happen, and variations on it may not just be individual preferences. They defy natural logic or law.
Sexual relations have two intended purposes if approached in the right way: the affectionate bonding of the two participants and the conception of children. Even if someone is not convinced by Christian teaching, or Jewish, or any other, pure logic shows this: the only kind of sexual relations that meet these two purposes is, consenting sex between adults of opposite genders. Any other form fails to meet one or both of those criteria.
Sex between two people of the same gender cannot produce children. It is naturally illogical.
Sex between a human and an animal cannot produce children. Apart from the disgust it may cause, it is naturally illogical.
Sex between an adult and a child can be traumatic or injurious to the child. It does not cause affectionate and safe bonding between the people involved, so it does not serve both the two purposes intended.
Forced sex, or rape, is traumatic to the unwilling partner, and denies to notion of affectionate bonding. For that reason, as well as denying the victim's rights, it is a bad idea. It can hurt someone, so it should not happen.
Sex involving multiple partners can cause uncertainty about who the father of a given child is. It also denies the bond between two individuals, dissipating it among a group.
Sex among strangers, with no real connection, denies the idea of bonding between the people involved. It is physical intimacy without emotional intimacy, thus a clash with the ideal of affectionate bonding.
God made things a certain way. Trying to vary it leads to dysfuntion and adverse side effects. God makes rules for our sake, not to be a spoiler.
Stick to the plan.

Friday, August 7, 2009

Stick to the Plan - 1

The saying goes, why reinvent the wheel? It makes sense, but that doesn't stop people trying to do things their own way - and messing up badly sometimes.
This is all pretty direct, but then life's like that. Things need to be said.
Back in the 1960s something happened which they call the 'sexual revolution'.
It was meant to bring in an era of universal love and peace, with everyone loving everyone else and no fighting, no being possessive and controlling, and so on.
It failed. In short, it failed because it tried to do things differently from how the Maker of all things meant them to operate. More specifically, it failed because what it expected to happen was simply impossible. Human nature did not allow it.
For the idea of 'universal love' to work, everyone would have to feel included. Everyone would have to feel that they got their share of the love. Nobody should be left out, and feel rejected and unwanted. As soon as someone was, then the 'revolution' was not doing what it claimed. It was not freeing everyone and making them all feel loved and happy. What happened in the 60s was, it simply degenerated into a lot of casual sex, and a lot of emptiness and resentment.
This is the trouble with casual or promiscuous sex, sometimes called 'free love.'
Some people attract far more partners than others, and have a queue waiting to get near them. Others are always waiting in a queue. And this draws attention to the fact that, in human terms we're not all equally advantaged in the way we're born. We're all equally human, and all equally valued by God, but we are not equally valued by each other. Some people are much more admired and respected simply because of the way they look or the talents they are born with. And they have suitors by the hundred. Others just don't turn heads everywhere they go. They only look good to those who know them and see the worth of them as people. And the 'sexual revolution' drew cruel attention to the fact! Instead of making us all free and fulfilled it made the problem worse. Some people had a wild time until it all turned sour because of the shallowness of it, others were constantly reminded that they did not attract others.
Add to that, the fact that casual sex was about using someone for one thing only, and not really connecting with them as anything more than a physical body. How ironic that the 'free love' advocates talked about reaching out to others, when in fact they were making human relationships incredibly shallow.
The race started out with a man and a woman. It was not a man and several women, or a woman and several men. It was one to one. And that was the template, the Divine Plan. People who thought they knew better had slogans like 'smash monogamy', and 'share the love'; and what they got was widespread divorce, anger, estrangement, lonliness, rejection - and an epidemic of STDs. So where did they go wrong to start with? They thought they could trash the way God set things out. What was also forgotten was that sexual relations sometimes have this side effect called conception- it leads to the birth or children. Yes, that comment is ironic. But people act as if intercourse was just like having a dance, or something, with no lasting consequence at all. Another thing they forgot was that it can be immportant to know who is father to a child, which might not be known if there has been too much 'freedom' in partnering. It has happened that people who do not know, accidentally form relationships with their own siblings.
God knew what He was doing. Who were these people who reckoned they knew better?
Stick to the plan.