gay people raising children

People do choose. I choose to like females. If I wanted to I could choose to like males, but my choose not to. Everything you do in life is a choice. I choose to like blue over red. The crazy guy chooses to pull the trigger and kill somebody. The only people who dont really have a choice are childern and retards, so are you saying gay people are like retards???? Everybody has a choice. Some people just make bad ones. Within 100 years what I call normal will nolonger exist. I guess what you call normal will.........Sad.....very sad

JWBusher wrote:

Typical lame homophobic comment.

I'm guessing he learned that bit of sloganeering at a fundie church. It sounds like a Pat Robertson / James Dobson cliché.

I choose to like females. If I wanted to I could choose to like males, but my choose not to.

Oh, please. That makes no sense. You can choose to DO something but you can't choose to FEEL something. You feel the way your brain tells you to feel. Sexuality is based on personal feelings. You don't make a "choice" to like lima beans. You either like the taste or you don't. So by your theory, the correct "choice" would be to eat the lima beans anyway, because that's what everybody else does, and to not do that would be "abnormal".

Within 100 years what I call normal will nolonger exist. I guess what you call normal will.........Sad.....very sad

Hahaha. Hysterical.

Nothingman54 wrote:

People do choose. I choose to like females. If I wanted to I could choose to like males, but my choose not to. Everything you do in life is a choice. I choose to like blue over red. The crazy guy chooses to pull the trigger and kill somebody. The only people who dont really have a choice are childern and retards, so are you saying gay people are like retards???? Everybody has a choice. Some people just make bad ones. Within 100 years what I call normal will nolonger exist. I guess what you call normal will.........Sad.....very sad

And I don't care how heated this debated gets, but I'd LOVE to see less of the word 'retard' dotted about. Thanks again.

Ahnimus wrote:

We now know that thought/chemical is a two-way connection. Depression is something a person causes to themselves, so is anger and jealousy. All emotions are self-induced. You have the choice to like or dislike whatever you want, if it's taste, politics, even sexuality.

""Depression is something a person causes to themselves" You're not Tom Cruise, are you?

Ahnimus wrote:

I'm sure just about everyone at some point in their life has experienced a gay moment. I'll admit to it, I felt oddly attracted to a man once. I abolished the thought as most people would. Only recently has it become acceptable, and people put a lot more thought into those gay moments. So homosexuality has proliferated. I choose to be heterosexual, for several reasons.

So you are telling me that I was fascinated by homosexuality and that that was normal, but somehow I let it get to me too much? And that when I fell head over heels in love with my g/f, I should've thought to myself "oh, wait a minute, it's not falling in love, it's a gay moment, I should stop it NOW"? And you compare this to training yourself to eat foods you don't like or know?

So in that case, you are saying that heterosexuality is like only eating the food that a certain society has always eaten and refusing to vary the diet. You are saying that heterosexuality is also trained behaviour.

I don't agree with your theory

Riot_Rain wrote:

""Depression is something a person causes to themselves" You're not Tom Cruise, are you?



So you are telling me that I was fascinated by homosexuality and that that was normal, but somehow I let it get to me too much? And that when I fell head over heels in love with my g/f, I should've thought to myself "oh, wait a minute, it's not falling in love, it's a gay moment, I should stop it NOW"? And you compare this to training yourself to eat foods you don't like or know?

So in that case, you are saying that heterosexuality is like only eating the food that a certain society has always eaten and refusing to vary the diet. You are saying that heterosexuality is also trained behaviour.

I don't agree with your theory

It's mostly all trained behaviour. That's why society has changed so much. Why people are so much different. Sodomy has been around forever, but it's only become recently acceptable. Heterosexuality is absolutely a trained behaviour. Love is absolutely an addiction. A fascination with a person for some reason. Perhaps they are symetrically appealing to the eyes, or perhaps they have a particular quality of your mother, or a quality you share, or lack. There are many things that can cause a person to stand out, only one thing makes you fall in love, fascination, obsession. These thoughts feed neuroreceptors in the brain, and when they are fed, they multiply. The branches in the neural net strenghten their bonds with those emotions and eventually becomes part of the character. People have epiphanies and though they don't immediately change, it empowers their will to override their neural programming.

All objectivity of homosexuality is outlawed. We can not say within our social borders what really causes homosexuality. Labratory mice will become homosexual when they are over-crowded. Perhaps that is the cause. Some people said it's plastic that causes homosexuality. However, even in biblical times homosexuality was practiced. There is only one constant, the human body, the brain. We could argue that a homornal imbalance causes homosexuality, and people could seek hormone treatment, however that relies on their choice. That choice must be made before any treatment can be perscribed.

You can do whatever you want. I'm just saying, emotion is a decision. It's a choice people make, regardless of the stimuli. I choose to smoke, even though it has me in a mental death grip, I choose to change, and it can be done. I chose to start smoking, and I have to choose to quit. I chose to fall in love with my girlfriend, and I chose to quit. If you can say that homosexuality isn't a choice, then you must say that crime isn't a choice, and bigotry isn't a choice, perhaps we don't make any decisions, our brains do all the choosing. I agree with that too, we must feed our brains information to allow it to make the right choices, for our health, safety and well-being.

Collin wrote:

You don't choose to be fascinated or obsessed.

Which thoughts would that be exactly?

Are you saying you have control over that? Teach me how, cause I don't, I can only ignore feelings, deny them etc. I don't control them.

These are all actions not feelings.

You make a choice wether to act on your feelings or not. I'm saying you don't make the choice to feel those things.

I make the choice. You have to first realize that emotion is a choice. If you think of it as a controlling factor then you cannot overpower it.

For example, I do not love my ex-girlfriend, but from time to time I think about her and even dream about her. I go through a withdrawl stage once every month or so. Well, I haven't for a while now, I think I finally kicked the habit. The point is, I loved her, I could have kicked and screamed and tried to chase her down. But once I realized the level of control I have over what I find emotional, I haven't cared to be with anyone since. When I find someone that is truely special to me, I will allow emotions to develope, to be loyal to that woman. But until then, I'm just hurting myself by getting involved. There may be some genetics involved as their is in most thought, however, the controlling factor is choice.

Choice is a much broader topic than the fact that we have it in everything we do. We have it and we don't have it. We only have choice when we see reason to use it. Too much information on one perspective, essentially makes us "choose" that perspective, although it's not necissarily a "choice" if we don't know any different. I won't go any further into that though.

Collin wrote:

I completely disagree.

Great example, let me get this straight, you chose to break up with your girlfriend, yet you also chose to think about her, to go through withdrawl? It would be much more logic if you broke up with her and chose not to think that way or go through withdrawl. I think you've just gone through what they call mourning.

How can you be hurt when you choose your own feelings?

It's not an imediate process, as I said it's a two-way street. To a certain degree, the chemicals control withdrawl and desire, the thoughts control the chemicals.

Ahnimus wrote:

http://www.sensualism.com/love/addiction.html
http://psych.athabascau.ca/html/aupr/social.shtml#Family%20and%20Romantic%20Relationships
http://people.howstuffworks.com/love.htm

I haven't read the first two (will do that when I have a little more time), I've skimmed through the last one... and don't know why you posted it.

What Makes us Fall in Love?
We all have a template for the ideal partner buried somewhere in our subconscious. It is this love map that decides which person in that crowded room catches our eye.

That would mean you don't chose for it, at least not consciously, but that would be an oxymoron.

Yikes.

I'm going to be very clear here: Emotion is not a choice. Emotion is the one direct form of response we have to our environment. Emotion provides us direct feedback informing us how we are being affected by our surroundings and those within it. If we ignore this aspect of ourselves, we are ignoring our own selves.

We do have a choice on what we do with our emotional feedback.

For example, some people advocate repressing their emotion. In essence this is denying what they feel. This works for some people on the surface--many as a matter of fact. However there is a cost for doing so. If we tune out our direct feedback as to how our environment affects us, we are tuning out our emotional intelligence--a form of intelligence that humans evolved for distinct reasons. The level of emotional intelligence is a factor in how satisfied and content or successful one is in their life. I'm not sure about anyone else, but to tune out this intelligence would be a cost that is wayyyyyy too high for me, personally.

Other costs for denying emotion are rampant around us in western society--afterall, we're big on tuning out emotion and exalting logic. The costs include addictions, emotional disorders, and dysfunctions of all kinds. As a matter of fact, this is precisely why 95% of society is considered dysfunctional. We've been taught to devalue our own emotional intelligence.

When we are emotionally intelligent, we feel our emotions, use the information they provide us and move on. The emotion then clears out as it's been acknowledged. When people deny their emotions, they go under the surface where they cloud our reasoning, our judgment and they fragment our thinking with blockage. They reside in our unconscious where they wreak havoc in our unconscious and our bodies. All because we did not have the skill in coping with them.

Ahnimus makes a good point, that we can use logic to overrule our emotions. This is of great evolutionary benefit. We can and should objectively think about our emotions and come to better ways to serve ourselves in our own lives. We use this feedback to find problems in our lives and to further problem solve. Sometimes this includes altering our distorted thinking, which helps us become more emotionally intelligent. At the same time, this wonderful interactive system between reason and emotion was not designed so that we may deny aspects of who we are--like our feedback system of emotion. We may postpone feeling strong emotion during a meeting with our boss, so that we may reflect on our responses when we are alone so as to come to the more balanced solution to take back to the situation--one that serves us rather than undermines us. When we ACCEPT who we are and our thoughts and feelings, it is then that we are empowered to make changes that are in OUR best interests rather than to make others more comfortable. In the end, the discomfort of others in dealing with our choices is about them, and not our responsibility.