On the one hand you say that nature hasn’t any purpose and on the other you say homosexuality is not what we are designed for. Make up your mind. And what is a mental aberration? Is mind separate from nature. If nature is what it is and mind is part of all that then how can there be an aberration? It just is what it is. Aberration is a value judgement imposed on nature.
Steve
Nice try, SteveK. When I say Nature has no purpose, I mean that it has no intention or will; no conscious thought or plan. It simply has its own nature. An aberration would be something that does not follow the nature of Nature. It is a huge fantasy (read ego-trip) to assign any more value of sexual drive in humans than there is in any other life-form, whether it be plant or animal (Tyler’s hairy palms notwithstanding 
).
djm
http://www.studio2f.com/misc/2005/05/27hairy_palms_too.php
The only cure for “not getting any!”
http://www.nothingtodo.co.uk/view.php?id=824
If you accept a naturalistic and evolutionary point of view, surely we are not designed at all and not designed to be heterosexual or homosexual. Whatever is just is and is the outcome of natural processes. Everything follows the nature of Nature including man-made carcinogens and transfat. The only aberrations are statistical and aberration is not a particularly good word to apply to them. Whether learned or genetically based, homosexuality is the outcome of natural processes. I don’t quite understand your last sentence. Did you mean “assign more value to sexual drive in humans?”
Steve
You are committing what is technically known as the Naturalist Fallacy. No sweat, you’re in good company: Aristotle and lots of others. The problem is that in order to distinguish “nature” from “aberration” you have to already impute to nature your judgements of right and wrong. Sexuality is a good example: you can observe that heterosexual intercourse produces offspring. So you say: The purpose of intercourse is procreation; non-procreative intercourse is an aberration. But you can also observe that people are having a lot of fun rolling in the hay and that this applies to both heterosexual and homosexual intercourse (depeding on preference). So you can say: Another purpose of intercouse is pleasure; because if it were not, Nature wouldn’t have made sex pleasurable and wouldn’t made humans be in heat year-round. Therefore any sort of sex is natural (including homosexual intercouse), except when it affords no pleasure to the participants.
The point is: For anything people are capable of doing, you can argue that if Nature had not intended people to do it, it would have made us incapable of doing it (like breathing underwater). You make a choice (or value-judgment, if you will) to consider as “natural” one of two things that people are capable of doing (homosexual and heterosexual intercourse) and because of that choice you are imputing to nature what you think should be “natural” and excluding what you consider an “aberration.” It’s a vicious circle, and not a valid argument.
Mind you, you may still be right in some moral sense (I’ll leave everyone to decide for themselves), but it does mean that you can’t prove homosexuality wrong by citing “Nature.”
My dad was left handed.
The nuns of his school made him right the right way.
Is there a gene for being left handed? Or is it a life style choice.
The bible refers to the sinister people a lot more than gays.
Stupid arguments? Yep. Feel free to debat them.
(Sorry it is Friday and I am feeling goofy)
Perhaps I am not using the correct wording, then. I am capable of mass destruction, but choose not to. Does that mean that, by Bloomfield’s definition, deliberate acts of mass destruction are part of Nature? I think not. Nature is not merely what we are capable of, but we how we tend to behave, and the vast majority of us tend to behave in a heterosexual manner. It is our Nature. Beyond procreation, there is no plan for sex drive. Nature could care less what we do with our sex drive. If we continue to procreate, life continues. If we do not, life does not (by “we” I mean anything that procreates). Assigning more meaning to sex drive than that is pure fantasy.
djm
I dunno, bro… I sure like having sex, and not because I want another kid…she’s already a handful
Naturally :pant: :pant:
Perhaps that is your Nature (?) 
Perhaps that is her Nature (?).
djm
Oh, pooh!
It doesn’t imply anything of the sort. Nature has more mechanisms than one in her arsenal.
However, to indulge your pop-darwin rather than the other poster’s pop-mysticism, if there’s no homo gene then there’s no hetero gene, and all of sexuality is equally unnatural.
However, it is clear that the normal human population produces a small number–between 1 and 10 percent–of gay individuals with every generation. As evolution operates upon species rather than individuals, we can infer that homosexuality confers some survival benefit upon the species as a whole.
Your argument–that nature only produces homosexuals to kill off the trait–would require evidence that homosexuality is a trait that has dimished over time. However, there’s no evidence in support of that, at all. I’m sure most social conservatives would believe the opposite–that homosexuality has never been more prevallent in society.
~
An earlier poster posited that nature “intended” a particular form of sexuality. In logic, this is pathetic fallacy; the attribution of human characteristics to natural events. The assumptions behind this conclusion also include the fallacy of composition, which is the conclusion that the qualities of some members of a group must be the quaities of the whole. Most people are straight. That is a fact; nowever, the poster attempted to then argue that because most members are straight and therefore all members should be straight. That’s a false conclusion. Most humans, after all, have brown eyes. Should we conclude that all blue-eyed folks like me are “unnatural”?
Yep…
In Bonobo monkeys, the sex act is also a very important part of their social structure, above and beyond procreation
http://www.primates.com/bonobos/bonobosexsoc.html
And if we’re going to discuss what’s natural and what’s not, isn’t it about time someone brought up seeming homosexual behavior in animals?
http://www.bidstrup.com/sodomy.htm
(apologies in advance if the URL titles scare folks off…they’re actually quite informative and scholarly articles)
In humans, you’re right. In fruit flies, on the other hand, there’s fairly strong evidence according to this study published recently.
http://www.cell.com/content/article/fulltext?uid=PIIS0092867405004071&highlight=fruit%20flies
Summary:
All animals exhibit innate behaviors that are specified during their development. Drosophila melanogaster males (but not females) perform an elaborate and innate courtship ritual directed toward females (but not males). Male courtship requires products of the fruitless (fru) gene, which is spliced differently in males and females. We have generated alleles of fru that are constitutively spliced in either the male or the female mode. We show that male splicing is essential for male courtship behavior and sexual orientation. More importantly, male splicing is also sufficient to generate male behavior in otherwise normal females. These females direct their courtship toward other females (or males engineered to produce female pheromones). The splicing of a single neuronal gene thus specifies essentially all aspects of a complex innate behavior.
No. You see, in humans, all genes are heterosexual. You can’t have genes without sexual reproduction, and for that you need heterosexuals. And homosexuals don’t reproduce. It’s like, a fundamental given of genetics.
What concerns me most about ‘legalising’ homosexual marriage isn’t the marriage itself What two people do together in the privacy of their own homes and lives is up to them. What makes me ‘unhappy’ about such legislation is the associated ‘rights’ that go with it. ‘Conflict of interest’ makes me squirm where the right to adopt children is concerned. Two lawfully wedded men will, I assume, have the associated right to adopt little boys, and two lawfully wedded women will have the right to adopt little girls (in spite of the fact that they may be fully equipped with functional means of producing their own etc etc). Whether or not the adoption is all above board, a ‘conflict of interest’ only has to be apparent, not proven, for feelings of unease to arise. I wonder what the Pope will have to say about that?
Following that, the argument will inevitably be made that if two men can legally adopt a child, why not one man? And if two women can do so, why not one woman?
Then there’s the whole question, more on topic-ish, about whether some countries or States will lawfully permit wedded-homosexual adoptions, and will there accordingly be mass migrations to those countries and States etc etc.
A can of worms, methinks, which opens many questions.
[quote="GaryKellyWhat concerns me most about ‘legalising’ homosexual marriage isn’t the marriage itself What two people do together in the privacy of their own homes and lives is up to them. What makes me ‘unhappy’ about such legislation is the associated ‘rights’ that go with it. ‘Conflict of interest’ makes me squirm where the right to adopt children is concerned. Two lawfully wedded men will, I assume, have the associated right to adopt little boys, and two lawfully wedded women will have the right to adopt little girls (in spite of the fact that they may be fully equipped with functional means of producing their own etc etc). Whether or not the adoption is all above board, a ‘conflict of interest’ only has to be apparent, not proven, for feelings of unease to arise. I wonder what the Pope will have to say about that?
[/quote]
Gary: What conflict? We talking gays/lesbians here, not pedophiles.
Also, what if my wife and I wanted to adopt a child. We, as a couple, are also “fully equipped with the functional means of produciing our own” but suppose we choose to adopt instead, for any number of reasons? Is our adoption also suspect?
Tom
And kittens would sleep peacefully.
Gary: What conflict? We talking gays/lesbians here, not pedophiles.
Also, what if my wife and I wanted to adopt a child. We, as a couple, are also “fully equipped with the functional means of produciing our own” but suppose we choose to adopt instead, for any number of reasons? Is our adoption also suspect?
Tom[/quote]
Where’s Cranberry when he’s needed.
It’s my understanding that pedophiles are generally men who self-identify as heterosexual. I’m a bit loathe to do that bit of reasearch at work, however
But presumably the same number of ugly-ass human babies