Why so few homosexuals?

[wenglund]

Please, can I get a little help with this:

Here is something relevant to mull over for a bit:

In secular thought, is the notion of "survival instinct" generally accepted and believed? If so, do secularist believe that survival instincts exist in animals as well as humans? If so, does the instinct to survive extend beyond self-preservation to preservation of offspring, families, groups, and even species? And, most important, in addition to fight-flight, does survival instinct also include the inclination to reproduce? Or, is that a separate "instinct"? In other words, and at least for humans, is there an individual instinct to survive beyond death through posterity?

Thanks, -Wade Englund

[Vort]

2 hours ago, Mike said:

Because on the other side I can't think of a reason to be bothered if I learned today that my wife was sexually active before I met her. It's in the past.

Interesting. Is this also true if she happened to murder someone before you married? That, too, is in the past.

[Mike]

32 minutes ago, Vort said:

Interesting. Is this also true if she happened to murder someone before you married? That, too, is in the past.

Not sure how this is a serious question.

[Vort]

Just now, Mike said:

Not sure how this is a serious question.

But it is. Seriously. If your wife had murdered someone but it's in the past now, would that bother you?

[MrShorty]

For survival, Wikipedia claims that almost all life has some kind of self-preservation instinct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-preservation They do note that the instinct may exist, but all may not have the adaptations needed to survive. A quick internet search for "animal suicide" was interesting in that, while suicide is mostly a human thing, there may be some anecdotal evidence of animals also expressing a loss of this self-preservation instinct.

I think the reproductive instinct is also nearly universal, though it is obviously not "strong and constant" in all species. There are plenty of examples of species with a well-defined mating or rutting season, and they do not seek reproduction outside of that time frame. It would seem that there are mechanisms in many species that control this instinct, and I suspect that there are probably cases where these mechanisms fail or work incorrectly. There might also be a place to discuss asexuality as an exception to the assertion that every single individual has this instinct. Social animals might also provide interesting case studies, where there are obvious individuals who forego their own reproduction to help their family/community have better overall success (kin selection). Which could lead directly into the one argument your lesbian friend was suggesting.

[Mike]

32 minutes ago, Vort said:

But it is. Seriously. If your wife had murdered someone but it's in the past now, would that bother you?

Based upon so many of the posts I have seen you make I have a difficult time seeing you make a comparison between murder and a person being sexually active. 

I mean one thing is a capital crime. The other is not. That should be sufficient. But more than that I know that you are an active member of the church with a deep understanding of gospel doctrine particularly the doctrine of the atonement, and of repentance, and of forgiveness.

I feel comfortable saying that I am confident you yourself have been through many temple recommend interviews, and you know full well that after a person has repented, and taken care of issues through appropriate priesthood officials there is no need to ever dredge up the past again. Now, the one thing you couldn't possibly know about me and about my bride is that we were sealed in the temple.  But I suppose you could have asked rather than drawing an analogy between sexual activity and murder.  In any event, what I've told you is the basis for my comfort in saying that even if I were to learn today about something in my wife's past, or even for that matter in your past, Vort, that it would not mean much to me.

So, I hope I have not come across as condescending, or abrasive. And if what I have said sounds foolish to you on any level, then I don't know what else I can say.

 

Edited March 22, 2017 by Mike

[Guest MormonGator]

41 minutes ago, Vort said:

But it is. Seriously. If your wife had murdered someone but it's in the past now, would that bother you?

Vort, hypothetical situation: 

A woman is in Auschwitz. A guard says "If you sleep with me, I'll save ten people." She agrees to sleep with him. The ten people survive. Is she evil? 

Totally want your opinion, nothing more. 

Edited March 22, 2017 by MormonGator

[Vort]

49 minutes ago, Mike said:

Based upon so many of the posts I have seen you make I have a difficult time seeing you make a comparison between murder and a person being sexually active. 

I mean one thing is a capital crime. The other is not. That should be sufficient. But more than that I know that you are an active member of the church with a deep understanding of gospel doctrine particularly the doctrine of the atonement, and of repentance, and of forgiveness.

I feel comfortable saying that I am confident you yourself have been through many temple recommend interviews, and you know full well that after a person has repented, and taken care of issues through appropriate priesthood officials there is no need to ever dredge up the past again. Now, the one thing you couldn't possibly know about me and about my bride is that we were sealed in the temple.  But I suppose you could have asked rather than drawing an analogy between sexual activity and murder.  In any event, what I've told you is the basis for my comfort in saying that even if I were to learn today about something in my wife's past, or even for that matter in your past, Vort, that it would not mean much to me.

So, I hope I have not come across as condescending, or abrasive. And if what I have said sounds foolish to you on any level, then I don't know what else I can say.

Doesn't sound foolish at all, nor condescending. But it does sound like you're avoiding my question. It's actually very simple; a "yes" or "no" will suffice. Would it, or would it not, bother you to find out that your wife had murdered someone in the past?

You implicitly suggested that "it's in the past" was a reason that your wife's hypothetical sin of extramarital sex would not bother you. I am trying to discover whether that same reasoning applies to murder, and if not, why not. The mere fact that one action may be criminal and the other not is certainly irrelevant, since "criminal" is defined purely by societal law. I could easily come up with a situation where the murder was not punishable by law while the unmarried sex was*. I assume this would not suddenly mean that you would be concerned about your wife's hypothetically illegal hypothetical extramarital sex, but unconcerned with the hypothetical murder she hypothetically committed. But maybe I'm wrong. That's what I'm trying to find out.

Not sure why you are so hesitant to answer. I have no hidden agenda. It's an honest question.

*Consider, for example, the case of a (hypothetical) wife being an Army officer and engaging in a brief affair, say one encounter, with a married general. This hypothetical wife also, let's say, was involved in a military engagement that involved her shooting known or suspected innocents by command of her superior officer in a situation where absolute guilt or responsibility could not be assigned to her, so that while it is true that she pulled the trigger and it is true that she had reason to believe her targets to be non-combatants, there was enough uncertainty as to her knowledge of the innocence of her targets and the relative culpability of her CO that she was exonerated from wrongdoing. In such a case, her fornication would be a criminal offense, punishable under military law, but her murder would not be.

[Vort]

1 hour ago, MormonGator said:

Vort, hypothetical situation: 

A woman is in Auschwitz. A guard says "If you sleep with me, I'll save ten people." She agrees to sleep with him. The ten people survive. Is she evil? 

Totally want your opinion, nothing more. 

I have no idea whether she is evil. Fornication does not necessarily make her evil; for example, I would not necessarily call the woman taken in adultery "evil", even though her act was certainly so. In such a case, perhaps it doesn't even make this Auschwitz prisoner sinful; it may be a true sacrifice (= "to make sacred") on her part. I do not know what God would have a woman do in such a situation, or even if there is a single correct answer to such a hypothetical.

Why do you ask, MG?

[Guest MormonGator]

2 minutes ago, Vort said:

I have no idea whether she is evil. Fornication does not necessarily make her evil; for example, I would not necessarily call the woman taken in adultery "evil", even though her act was certainly so. In such a case, perhaps it doesn't even make this Auschwitz prisoner sinful; it may be a true sacrifice (= "to make sacred") on her part. I do not know what God would have a woman do in such a situation, or even if there is a single correct answer to such a hypothetical.

Why do you ask, MG?

Strictly curious. 

[Guest]

Anyone else tired of seeing this title?

[Guest MormonGator]

3 minutes ago, Eowyn said:

Anyone else tired of seeing this title?

I'm really tired of this dude named @mirkwood. 

[Guest]

OH, you two. 

[Mike]

2 hours ago, Vort said:

 ... But it does sound like you're avoiding my question. It's actually very simple; a "yes" or "no" will suffice. Would it, or would it not, bother you to find out that your wife had murdered someone in the past?

You implicitly suggested that "it's in the past" was a reason that your wife's hypothetical sin of extramarital sex would not bother you. I am trying to discover whether that same reasoning applies to murder, and if not, why not. The mere fact that one action may be criminal and the other not is certainly irrelevant, since "criminal" is defined purely by societal law. I could easily come up with a situation where the murder was not punishable by law while the unmarried sex was*. I assume this would not suddenly mean that you would be concerned about your wife's hypothetically illegal hypothetical extramarital sex, but unconcerned with the hypothetical murder she hypothetically committed. But maybe I'm wrong. That's what I'm trying to find out.

Not sure why you are so hesitant to answer. I have no hidden agenda. It's an honest question.

*Consider, for example, the case of a (hypothetical) wife being an Army officer and engaging in a brief affair, say one encounter, with a married general. This hypothetical wife also, let's say, was involved in a military engagement that involved her shooting known or suspected innocents by command of her superior officer in a situation where absolute guilt or responsibility could not be assigned to her, so that while it is true that she pulled the trigger and it is true that she had reason to believe her targets to be non-combatants, there was enough uncertainty as to her knowledge of the innocence of her targets and the relative culpability of her CO that she was exonerated from wrongdoing. In such a case, her fornication would be a criminal offense, punishable under military law, but her murder would not be.

You've jumped to some inaccurate conclusions of which I want to disabuse you. What's at play here may be that you and I think very differently from one another in the ways we approach life. First, I am not avoiding your question. At least not intentionally. My problem was that your question felt so absurd to me that it has taken me this long to wrap my mind around it--and to decide to trust you since you tell me that you have no hidden agenda. It felt to me as if you did have an agenda, or at least that your intent was simply to embarrass me. I think the reason your question threw me for a loop is that it seemed so out of context given what Anatess and I were discussing--and, as I already mentioned, to me placing "sexually active" and murder in the same topic still feels so unacceptable. Secondly, what you identified as an implicit suggestion, [i.e. that the hypothetical sexually active behavior was "in the past"] and a reason it didn't bother me was neither a suggestion nor a reason at all. I was merely using the phrase as an expression to describe events that would have had to have happened over 40 years ago. However, if we were to pose differing hypotheticals (with differing time frames in regard to when my wife and I met; and in regard to whether the sexual activity occurred before marriage or during marriage) then I must confess that the intensity or lack of intensity of my feelings might change accordingly. And thirdly, I didn't offer the fact that one action may be criminal and the other not as a relevant factor but again simply as a reason that your question originally struck me as being so off-the-wall.

Anyway, you say a simple "yes" or "no" will suffice. Actually it won't suffice for me. I'll give you a brief answer, but at this point I've become intrigued and I'm now hoping to discuss it in more depth if you remain interested in your own question. The brief answer is this: in your hypothetical the murder would probably bother me, but the intensity of my feelings would be influenced by several additional factors. As I said, being sexually active and murdering someone are very different--to me even metaphorically light years apart. So, if you're interested in discussing this in more depth then let's go for it. 

Edited March 22, 2017 by Mike

[Vort]

45 minutes ago, Mike said:

You've jumped to some inaccurate conclusions of which I want to disabuse you. What's at play here may be that you and I think very differently from one another in the ways we approach life. First, I am not avoiding your question. At least not intentionally. My problem was that your question felt so absurd to me that it has taken me this long to wrap my mind around it--and to decide to trust you since you tell me that you have no hidden agenda. It felt to me as if you did have an agenda, or at least that your intent was simply to embarrass me. I think the reason your question threw me for a loop is that it seemed so out of context given what Anatess and I were discussing--and, as I already mentioned, to me placing "sexually active" and murder in the same topic still feels so unacceptable. Secondly, what you identified as an implicit suggestion, [i.e. that the hypothetical sexually active behavior was "in the past"] and a reason it didn't bother me was neither a suggestion nor a reason at all. I was merely using the phrase as an expression to describe events that would have had to have happened over 40 years ago. However, if we were to pose differing hypotheticals (with differing time frames in regard to when my wife and I met; and in regard to whether the sexual activity occurred before marriage or during marriage) then I must confess that the intensity or lack of intensity of my feelings might change accordingly. And thirdly, I didn't offer the fact that one action may be criminal and the other not as a relevant factor but again simply as a reason that your question originally struck me as being so off-the-wall.

Anyway, you say a simple "yes" or "no" will suffice. Actually it won't suffice for me. I'll give you a brief answer, but at this point I've become intrigued and I'm now hoping to discuss it in more depth if you remain interested in your own question. The brief answer is this: in your hypothetical the murder would probably bother me, but the intensity of my feelings would be influenced by several additional factors. As I said, being sexually active and murdering someone are very different--to me even metaphorically light years apart. So, if you're interested in discussing this in more depth then let's go for it. 

I am happy to discuss this topic further, if you like. These days, I beg off of promising much, because my schedule tends to be both unpredictable and busy. But I'll try to kind of outline where my thoughts are going on this topic, flesh out my reasoning and maybe talk a little about the consequences I perceive. This will go well past what we have discussed, so don't read the following as if it's directly responding to you. It's more a meditation of what I think we're talking about.

My point was not to embarrass you, nor to find a "gotcha" to pin on you. I understood (perhaps misunderstood) you to be saying that, because any possible sexual indiscretion from a spouse was all safely in the distant past, finding out about it now would be no big deal. I have heard this from many others, not just you, and frankly I do not understand its philosophical underpinnings. Or to be more pointed, I disagree with what I believe to be those underpinnings.

Such actions are a reflection of who a person is -- or was. In this respect, sexual indiscretion is no different from murder, except in the enormity of the act. And since murder can also be repented of, even that difference disappears.

Many view a murderer as permanently stained, a person so unbelievably morally deficient that s/he would actually wrongly take the life of another human being, fallen into a spiritual pit from which there is no return. In fact, many take this very view of women who have elective abortions and those men who support or encourage them to commit such heinous acts. Yet such sins are indeed forgivable, based on true repentance. If one would so easily forgive one's spouse for sexual licentiousness forty years ago, it stands to reason that one would also forgive her for murder done that long ago.

Clearly, the passage of time per se is not the issue, at all, to any degree. Rather, the salient point is whether the spouse has repented -- or more precisely, whether the other spouse believes that she has repented. Your claim about the example of fornication suggested to me that you would pretty much assume that your wife had repented of the hypothetical, long-ago fornication, without even requiring any further evidence. Maybe this is because you feel that you know your wife so well that you can affirm her assumed repentance based on how you know her to be. But then, if that were the case, would you not make the same assumption with regard to her decades-old murder? Clearly not; as you (very honestly and introspectively) admit, the issue of murder would bother you a lot more -- perhaps to the point that you would find it hard, or even impossible, to forgive such an action, even if forty years old. (I don't mean to say that you stated that last part; that is my own supposition.)

In this case, then the issue takes on another character altogether. (And I want to remove you, Mike, as the object of the discussion, because I'm talking about the idea, not about you or your good wife.) Why would a person so quickly and willingly forgive a spouse of the transgression of sexual sin from decades past, but not as quickly and willingly forgive the spouse of the transgression of murder from decades past? While the two sins may not be exactly comparable in magnitude, both are grave sins that cause massive spiritual damage to the sinner.

Based on my own experiences and observations, it is my current opinion -- and this may or may not apply to you, Mike, so I'm not claiming that it does -- that the reason so many profess willingness to quickly and easily forgive sexual transgression more than a transgression of murder is because, fundamentally, they honestly just do not believe that sexual sin is that big of a deal. They do understand the gravity of murder, so they assign great moral weight to such a transgression. But somehow, despite the open and consistent teachings of the Church and the prophets for nearly two centuries, and Biblical teachings for centuries and even millennia before that, they simply don't believe on a deep-seated, heartfelt level that fornication is really all that abhorrent to the Spirit of God.

In rereading this, I can see that some people will infer that I'm saying that you shouldn't forgive your wife for some decades-old fornication. That's not what I'm trying to say at all. Rather, I'm saying that we should understand full well the gravity of such things, and if we forgive (as we are commanded to do), we should -- indeed we must -- forgive the actual sin, in all its horrific gravity, and not some lightweight counterfeit of the sin that we have dreamed up and decided is the real thing. We cannot forgive a sin that we fail (or refuse) to recognize for what it is, any more than we can repent of a sin without recognizing it for what it is. Fornication is a very* big deal, and we do not do ourselves or our loved ones any favors when we fail or refuse to recognize this important fact.

*Samuel Clemens' advice about replacing "very" with "damn" would work well here, though if the editors censored it out, it would lose its impact.

[Fether]

@Mike @Vort

Paul murdered a lot of people. Would you marry someone with similar spiritual attributes as he did post repentance?  I would!

Trust plays a roll too. You must forgive, but for safety reasons, you do not need to trust them again. this is why hypothetical scenarios are so difficult. The action isn't so much the issue, but the character.

 

[Mike]

7 hours ago, Vort said:

I am happy to discuss this topic further, if you like. These days, I beg off of promising much, because my schedule tends to be both unpredictable and busy. But I'll try to kind of outline where my thoughts are going on this topic, flesh out my reasoning and maybe talk a little about the consequences I perceive. This will go well past what we have discussed, so don't read the following as if it's directly responding to you. It's more a meditation of what I think we're talking about.

Likewise. And I've done a 180 in my appreciation of the value of your original question. I'm happy to allow a discussion to take as long as it may, and at whatever points in time we can both give it the attention it deserves. Thank you for this, and for your high calibre thinking. I fear that I may struggle to avoid becoming lost in the words, and I may therefore need to "eat this elephant" a bite at a time.

[Mike]

11 hours ago, Vort said:

... Why would a person so quickly and willingly forgive a spouse of the transgression of sexual sin from decades past, but not as quickly and willingly forgive the spouse of the transgression of murder from decades past? While the two sins may not be exactly comparable in magnitude, both are grave sins that cause massive spiritual damage to the sinner. ...

I agree that in terms of true repentance with all that it entails (i.e. real change) what a person *was* no longer *is*. I agree this also applies to the case of murder as you explained. Moreover, I agree with you in terms of forgiveness--how the Lord feels about it anyway. Everyone ought to forgive as the Lord does, but since we are talking about weak mortals we must acknowledge the reality of the limitations (one-by-one) to overcome in order to forgive and forget. I submit the first factor affecting our limitations is that the difference in magnitude makes all the difference in the world, and I don't agree that the two sins are even close to being comparable in magnitude. The results of sexual bad judgement you mentioned (as in the hypothetical pre-marital experimentations) don't typically last--as a matter of fact for the majority of humans on the planet they may even be looked back upon as pleasant memories and lessons learned.* The exceptions are just that, exceptions--if every sexual indiscretion resulted in a venereal disease or every boy with a magazine went blind, then people would stop, no questions asked. But every murder always lasts a lifetime, and of the two participants in each murder one of them never said, "yeah, let's do it," and never got a second chance. I doubt the other ever entertained a memory that some good came from the experience. This huge difference in magnitude weighs heavily, and is culturally embedded in the minds of people the world over.

* For some reason I was just now humming to myself and thinking of Joni Mitchell's lyrics to Woodstock - " ...life is for learning" 

 

[yjacket]

13 hours ago, Vort said:

Based on my own experiences and observations, it is my current opinion -- and this may or may not apply to you, Mike, so I'm not claiming that it does -- that the reason so many profess willingness to quickly and easily forgive sexual transgression more than a transgression of murder is because, fundamentally, they honestly just do not believe that sexual sin is that big of a deal. They do understand the gravity of murder, so they assign great moral weight to such a transgression. But somehow, despite the open and consistent teachings of the Church and the prophets for nearly two centuries, and Biblical teachings for centuries and even millennia before that, they simply don't believe on a deep-seated, heartfelt level that fornication is really all that abhorrent to the Spirit of God.

This is exactly what has happened culturally.  Culturally we have become numb to the gravity and seriousness of sexual sin. That numbness is portrayed in movies, art, literature, words and is absolutely relevant to why homosexuality is no big deal anymore-as a society we are as it were "past feeling" on this issue.

Let us not forget that at one time adultery was punishable by death and while sins punishable by death were more common-their still were not too many sins that required it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_capital_crimes_in_the_Torah 

I'm glad we don't have capital punishment for sexual sins today . . .but it should be a very important lesson for us that if at one time God through His Prophets commanded that those who were guilty of sexual sins were punishable by death-then yes sexual sins are a very big deal.

Edited March 22, 2017 by yjacket

[yjacket]

9 minutes ago, Mike said:

The results of sexual bad judgement you mentioned (as in the hypothetical pre-marital experimentations) don't typically last--as a matter of fact for the majority of humans on the planet they may even be looked back upon as pleasant memories and lessons learned.* 

 

This is only a modern day occurrence and only in modern western societies that have made sex cheap through birth control.  Go to non-western/modern societies and you'll find a very different story.  B/c you know, that is how babies are made and I guarantee you, the above does not hold water at all. In fact, that was one of the primary lessons I learned on my mission.  There is no faster way to destroy a society and it's stability than to have sex out of wedlock. I saw the ill-effects of it several times a week-it happened to members who were baptized, those who weren't, etc.  It destroys a society.

The reason why murder and sex out of wedlock are comparable is that they both deal with the power of life-one that creates life and one that destroys life.  Sex has been cheapened in modern society that "it's just sex" when that is Satan's lie-it's not just sex, it is the literal power to create and those powers are reserved for those who are married.  Someone who has sex out of wedlock does not understand some of the basic concepts of life-just like someone who murders doesn't understand the basic concepts of life. I wouldn't want to marry someone who has done one or the other-b/c it demonstrates a severe lack of understand about the most important principles and concept of being here on this earth.

[Rob Osborn]

I concur with yjacket. 

4 minutes ago, yjacket said:

This is only a modern day occurrence and only in modern western societies that have made sex cheap through birth control.  Go to non-western/modern societies and you'll find a very different story.  B/c you know, that is how babies are made and I guarantee you, the above does not hold water at all. In fact, that was one of the primary lessons I learned on my mission.  There is no faster way to destroy a society and it's stability than to have sex out of wedlock. I saw the ill-effects of it several times a week-it happened to members who were baptized, those who weren't, etc.  It destroys a society.

The reason why murder and sex out of wedlock are comparable is that they both deal with the power of life-one that creates life and one that destroys life.  Sex has been cheapened in modern society that "it's just sex" when that is Satan's lie-it's not just sex, it is the literal power to create and those powers are reserved for those who are married.  Someone who has sex out of wedlock does not understand some of the basic concepts of life-just like someone who murders doesn't understand the basic concepts of life. I wouldn't want to marry someone who has done one or the other-b/c it demonstrates a severe lack of understand about the most important principles and concept of being here on this earth.

Of interest but a side note is this story. This is real scary stuff-

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2695010/Could-child-sex-robots-used-treat-paedophiles-Researchers-say-sexbots-inevitable-used-like-methadone-drug-addicts.html

 

[wenglund]

Finally,

The first argument from nature against homosexuality: survival and reproduction:

·         All creatures on earth, past and present, have a limited lifespan.  One of the laws of nature, then, is that all living things eventually die.

·         The only way for creatures to survive (individually, as a species, or otherwise) beyond their limited lifespan is to reproduce. Another law of nature, then, is reproduce or parish.

·         According to science, life on earth began hundreds of millions of years ago, and because of reproduction, life has continued through today, and will continue on into the future.

·         Everywhere one may look in nature, past or present, from the cellular level to all manner of species, reproduction is ongoing. It is pervasive. Reproduction, then, is fundamental to, and is the very order of nature.

·         Likewise, because of reproduction, a vast array of species have survived—some for millions of years, others for hundreds of millions of years. Survival of species, then, is fundamental to, and is the very order of nature.

·         In more evolved species, survival is more than just the order of things, it is also instinctual.  They have an inherent, though perhaps not conscious, will to survive. And, for some species, this instinct extends beyond self-survival to the survival of one’s offspring (such as the mother bear and her cubs), or family/group (such as hive and colony insects), In humans, this survival instinct extends even to nations and perhaps even to the species as a whole (peace movements, worldwide hunger and global warming initiatives, being cases in point).

·         While this survival instinct is most often manifest in fight-or-flight responses, there is reason to suggest that it also entails the inherent need to reproduce, and this beyond the natural biological urges to have sex. There seems to be an inherent need to, at the very least, pass along one’s genes. A need to survive beyond death through posterity. This is evident among insects and higher animal that have evolved male sexual and mating strategies bent on assuring that their sperm/genes, and not that of other males, impregnate the females. It is even more evident in humans, not just with their mating practices and morality codes, but in the notion of the “biological clock.”

·         Homosexuality is a non-reproductive lifestyle. As such, it not only violates the “reproduce or perish” law of nature, it runs contrary to the reproductive order of nature, and it contravenes the animal and human survival instinct.  Therefore, for multiple reasons, it isn’t normal, but it is abnormal. Also, for the same reasons, it is not coincidental that there are relatively few homosexuals in the human population.

Granted, the same logic applies to celibates (confirmed or by default--as with me), and to some degree it applies to people who are impotent/infertile.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

Edited March 23, 2017 by wenglund

[Mike]

4 hours ago, wenglund said:

·         The only way for creatures to survive as a species beyond their limited lifespan is to reproduce. Another law of nature, then, is reproduce or parish.

It seems to me, Wade, this sentence takes you down a dead end. Creatures don't survive as a species. It isn't about individual creatures. For no other reason than emphasis let me say it this way: Nature doesn't "care" about you, nor about me, nor about Bob and Ted, nor about Alice and Carol. Nature only cares about the human species in general; and the human species is doing just fine reproducing and perpetuating the species. So Nature has nothing to worry about. 

Quote

·         Homosexuality is a non-reproductive lifestyle. As such, it not only violates the “reproduce or perish” law of nature, it runs contrary to the reproductive order of nature, and it contravenes the animal and human survival instinct.  Therefore, for multiple reasons, it isn’t normal, but it is abnormal. Also, for the same reasons, it is not coincidental that there are relatively few homosexuals in the human population.

Granted, the same logic applies to celibates (confirmed or by default--as with me), and to some degree it applies to people who are impotent/infertile. 

Again, I think you are drawing an unwarranted conclusion about a lifestyle being non-reproductive. The same could be said about urinating with an organ that is "meant" (?) for ejaculating sperm. But all Nature cares about is that the reproductive organs work well enough, and enough creatures survive to perpetuate the species. A homosexual male creature can still get horny enough to rape a female and thereby get with the "program"--Nature doesn't care. 

Edited March 23, 2017 by Mike

[Mike]

3 hours ago, yjacket said:

This is only a modern day occurrence and only in modern western societies that have made sex cheap through birth control.  Go to non-western/modern societies and you'll find a very different story.  B/c you know, that is how babies are made and I guarantee you, the above does not hold water at all. In fact, that was one of the primary lessons I learned on my mission.  There is no faster way to destroy a society and it's stability than to have sex out of wedlock. I saw the ill-effects of it several times a week-it happened to members who were baptized, those who weren't, etc.  It destroys a society.

The reason why murder and sex out of wedlock are comparable is that they both deal with the power of life-one that creates life and one that destroys life.  Sex has been cheapened in modern society that "it's just sex" when that is Satan's lie-it's not just sex, it is the literal power to create and those powers are reserved for those who are married.  Someone who has sex out of wedlock does not understand some of the basic concepts of life-just like someone who murders doesn't understand the basic concepts of life. I wouldn't want to marry someone who has done one or the other-b/c it demonstrates a severe lack of understand about the most important principles and concept of being here on this earth.

Maybe I should change the words "for the majority of humans on the planet" to something like "for many people on the planet" or even "large numbers of people in the modern western world". The point--in the context of the discussion I am having with Vort relative to perceptions about sexual activity vs. murder--is that the perception I described is only a single factor that could begin to account for why people might have an easier time not being as bothered. It wasn't meant to address your opinions in any way, if that means anything to you.   

 

 

 

[yjacket]

17 minutes ago, Mike said:

and the human species is doing just fine reproducing and perpetuating the species. So Nature has nothing to worry about. 

Negativo.  You are obviously not up to date on the latest demographic changes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate.

In order to reproduce, the fertility rate needs to be @ 2.1.  The US and most of the industrialized, modern, western world is below re-population rate.  While this won't manifest itself for a while, there is a big problem. The world's repopulation rate sits @ 2.36 and projections are within my lifetime total world re-population rate will fall below 2.1.

This is a huge problem for societies and cultures. Probably the first time in world history that humans will voluntarily ensure the next generation is smaller than the current generation. Statistics also point out that once a society falls below re-population rate, it is very hard for it to recover. This is b/c it is a very long cycle problem (i.e. about 70+ years). It takes about 40 years before a country that has lower than 2.1 rate to actually notice a population decline barring immigration. That's another 40 years that people will voluntarily have less children.  Then in order to reverse the decline, societal attitudes towards children, families, child-rearing etc. have to change.  That also takes time; so by the time those attitudes actually change and then people start actually more having babies (which again is a limited time window up until ~35 for women as pregnancies become high-risk after that age) put on another 10-15 years. So for a society to voluntarily reverse a below repopulation rate and then to subsequently see the population rise again requires probably somewhere 70-100 years. Russia dropped below re-population rate in 1966. Since then they have only bounced about it for about 2-3 years in the last 50 years. They didn't start to see their population decline until 1993-they sit at about 1.8. They have major structural demographic problems, just like the US does.  This does not bode well for the industrialized world at all.