Q. Wsup! How’ you doing?
A. I’m alive! :P You?
Q. Good, good…
So first of all, what happened to Q&A? How come you don’t send them nowadays?
A. To be honest? Disorder… Or laziness… Or both!
Q. You should resume… And that’s not a suggestion.
A. Yessur!
Q. Anyway, so I was just rereading Q&A 174-176 on homosexuality plus the most recent ones on paedophilia and I have a few questions…
A. Shoot!
Q. What’s wrong with that point of view [that nature is good and caters for us and our needs (all this through design)]? To my mind it does away with a lot of the fancy superfluous materials or layers that we don’t agree on because of culture or religion. We all do agree that man is an animal and that he propagates his species.
A. Well I’m not sure if it was conscious or not, but this stripping away of layers also stripped the layer of man's soul. This statement effectively views man as an advanced animal, a super-evolutionised monkey that operates not on choice but instinct (like other animals).
Q. And what’s wrong with that? Freedom is an illusion.
A. Fully unpackaged the statement assumes there is no such thing as freedom and thus responsibility and thus culpability. Do what you have to do because you can't override instinct. Have sex with my wife because it's your instinct, be a paedophile because it's instinct, monogamous marriage is counter-intuitive, homosexual acts are natural and instinctive, masturbation is natural, corruption is in our blood, etc.
Obviously when we push examples to this extreme the speaker (hopefully!) realises there is some inconsistency in his assumption! Why berate errant paedophile Catholic priests if they are following their "instinct"? Shouldn't they be encouraged to continue because instinct being natural cannot be overridden or suppressed? Point in fact, none other than Freud said suppressing your sex drive is unnatural and unhealthy. Why insist on one man one woman till death do them part? Why not one man to as many women he can naturally handle without suppressing his libido?
Q. In all my conversations with friends on this topic over beers, the only good objection to the “primal” view of man is that for some strange reason, it seems to be used only to justify actions and habits we consider wrong or evil. Even now all your examples were of bad things: paedophilia, adultery, homosexual acts, masturbation, corruption…
A. I actually hadn’t thought about it that way…
Q. My friend says we use it as an excuse for our lazy morals.
A. And I’d have nothing to add to that!
Indeed! Why can’t the “primal” man be a “virtuous” man even by our standards today?
Q. But back to you… You were going to say something before I chipped in…
A. Ummmm… Yes… That if "propagation of the species" is the "primal instinct" of every human, the “default ‘Windows’ setting” for every man, woman and child, then does this mean that lesbianism and gayism are unnatural and anti-natural since by definition they can't propagate?
It should also be mentioned that the "primal instinct to propagate the species" is a group instinct, not an individual instinct. Not many people realise this... But think about it... A species can continue unaffected even if a certain percentage of its population don't procreate (because of sickness, early death or failure to find a mate). From a simplistic point of view for example: the number of males and females in any population is never numerically equal. That means that some will not procreate. And that doesn't affect the survival of the species.
Whatever the case, I personally don't agree with this brute view of man. I don't think either yourself or myself are monkeys, not even advanced monkeys. There is something called a soul and we all have it. And the existence of the soul is the key to unlocking all the questions and contradictions outlined above.
To be continued…
Good night!
26thAugust 2019