From: gjm11@cus.cam.ac.uk (G.J. McCaughan)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.christia
Subject: "It's not natural..."
Date: 23 Nov 92 21:27:57 GMT
Organization: U of Cambridge, England

The following applies particularly to the debates about homosexuality, but
I think it's of wider application than just this. It concerns a couple of
ways of arriving at moral judgements, and why I think they're bad.


Every now and then, especially in The Great Homosexuality Debate, someone
says something like "XXXXXX is unnatural and an abomination". I've never
been very convinced by this idea of "natural" things being good and "unnatural"
things being bad; I think it's dangerous.

Another related thing which comes up in a wider variety of places is the
business of things feeling right or wrong. So-and-so just feels wrong, we
may say, so we mustn't do it; or so-and-so feels so right, how can it possibly
be wrong? I think this is dangerous too.


It is not natural for me (a man) to desire sex with another man: this is true.
But it is entirely natural for me to desire sex with my fiancee, even before we
are married. It is also natural for me to desire sex with other women, perhaps
married ones. (My fiancee would be relieved to hear that I don't in fact find
this much of a problem. But that's just because I'm lucky.)
And it is not natural for anyone to remain celibate all his or her life; but
Jesus did, and Paul did, and plenty of other people do now, and are right to.
And it is not natural to refrain from revenge when someone sins against us;
but we are specifically commanded to. And it is not natural for our lives to
be prolonged by surgery or drugs; but most of us would agree it's wrong for
a doctor to withold such treatment from someone who "needs" it.
And it is not natural for us to be Christians.

As for our "feelings" on moral questions: 

I am a heterosexual. To me, something about the idea of homosexuality feels
very wrong. I also feel uneasy about the idea of being responsible for anyone's
"conversion" from one way of thinking to another; it makes me feel guilty. This
means that most evangelism feels wrong to me. I don't feel that there would be
anything wrong with my fiancee and I having sex; but I think that in fact there
would be, and I can give reasons. And so on.


In summary: it is very easy for us to feel that something is wrong because it's
unusual ("unnatural"), or because the thought of it repels us. If we follow
our feelings in either of these cases we end up with lousy results: the ethics
that result are not those of Christianity. This is because our hearts and minds
are affected by the fallenness of humanity.

We must NOT try to make our lives easier by always following our noses in matters
of ethics; it doesn't make any more sense than it would in, say, physics. The
results are just hopeless. Of course there is a place for our feelings; we're
not so flawed that all our ideas are wrong, any more than all our guesses are
wrong when we try to solve a problem of physics. But we need to check our guesses
unless we're happy to end up as badly wrong as, say, Aristotle was about falling
bodies.


So, rather than saying "So-and-so is obviously wrong", perhaps we should take
the fact that there is disagreement about so-and-so as indication that we need
to be a bit more careful. We should use our minds as well as our instincts, and
we should check all our answers against other people's considered opinions, and
against the Bible. We may end up with the same result as we started with, but
that doesn't mean we didn't need to take these precautions: if for no other
reason than that you stand a much better chance of persuading someone else if
you can give reasons for your position than if you just say "Well, it's obviously
abominable, isn't it?".

NOTE: Although much of this is directly applicable to the usual debates about
homosexuality, I am not referring exclusively to that. And please do not take
what I have said above as implying that homosexuality is an acceptable way of
life for a Christian; I'm not concerned here with that question, but with the
bad reasons sometimes given for saying it's not.

-- 
Gareth McCaughan     Dept. of Pure Mathematics & Mathematical Statistics,
gjm11@cus.cam.ac.uk  Cambridge University, England.    [Research student]
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.christia