You Are Beautiful As You Are
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| courtesy: dreamstime.com |
Beauty is a word that comes and goes. It is a word coined from the nerves to describe the consonance of a quality first to nature and then individual perception: abstract or concrete, physical or metaphysical. Although it's been contentiously defined from many angles by different scholars however, one thing remains unchanged in all and that is acceptability---the willingness of a person to accept what is and isn't. Hume 1757 says 'Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity where another is sensible of beauty...' (pg136). So, if beauty is a psychological belief or what the mind perceives and accepts as truth, then there is every tendency that the mind could choose to perceive the most abominable thing as right. You feel me?
Sometime ago, I stumbled on a story as told by Nicole Gilley, a guest writer at Huffpost. A story that seemed more like a transformation than the 'true discovery' of one's sexual identity. In her account, she said she never wanted to be gay since she was raised by a religious single mother who taught her homosexuality was the one abomination God could never overlook. So, for the first three decades of her life, she did everything she could to make her gay go away. Every other night, she would get on her knees, crying and begging God to take it from her and the nights she didn't pray, she spent them underneath countless men whose names she didn't know just to jump-start her heterosexuality. Then one day, she gave up and decided to be a gay. However, she didn’t have the nerves to be until she went to a therapist who taught her how to say the words 'I am a lesbian' reassuringly for about five months. Phew!!!
Another is Ned's story as told by Dr Pepper Schwartz, a sex psychologist. He said Ned had been gay his entire adult life. Though he had a few sexual relationships with women in high school, he never thought of himself as heterosexual or even bisexual: Ned liked women but he loved men. At 29, he fell in love with another gay man who was 10 years older. After about 23 years of being together with his graduate gay lover, he enrolled in a school where he started spending a lot of time with fellow students. Before long, he fell in love with one of the girls and it resulted in the break up of his gay union and an end to his gay life.
At creation, the Bible records that God created all living creatures in two different sexes: male and female (Gen 2:5) and God saw that everything He had made was not just good but very good (Gen 1:31). Everything was beautiful and perfect. No one body conjoined with another neither did any have both sex organs like the shemales we have around today (no thanks to biological hazards orchestrated by man at foetal formation though). As time crawled by, the Bible says that man became corrupt and the wickedness was so great that every imagination of his heart was continually evil (Gen 6:5). Now, wickedness can be described as a mental disregard for what is right, just, true, honorary or virtuous; it is evil in thought and life (Bible Study Tools). To demystify this theory from a religious angle, Immanuel Kant, a philosopher, in his "Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone", postulates that human beings are by nature radically free and are continually inclined towards goodness and evil. Expressing this further, he says we have a morally good will only if we choose to perform morally right actions because they are morally right which invariably means anyone who does not have a morally good will has an evil will. He divides this stage of corruption (evil will) into three: frailty, impurity and perversity or wickedness. He posits that someone with a perverse will inverts the proper order of incentives. Instead of prioritizing the moral law over all other incentives, they prioritize self- love over the moral law. Thus, their actions conform to the moral law only if they are in their self-interest. Then I wonder: is it this natural radical freedom that makes a set of people believe there is beauty in the opposite of nature's gender assignment at birth? Or what really?
From a standpoint, imitation which is the copying of another person’s behaviour consciously or unconsciously (and sometimes, without any logical attachment) forms the basis of what every individual knows and does today. This kind of social learning is what builds the customs and traditions that have formed a part of our existence and are passed down from generation to generation. We can’t track the history of homosexuality to a particular time in the past but we can put our critical mind to work and deduce that it originated from an evil mind before it formed a habit then a tradition and then passed down from person to person. For instance, the pervasive sexual preference of an adult can influence the sexual orientation of a growing child who is just forming habits and spends a lot of time with them. So, if Aunty K, a woman with two beautifully pointed breasts and a killer backside to match does stuff with only girls, there is a 90 % probability that the child that spends a lot of time with her will pick up that habit.
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| courtesy: wallpaper. com |
From another standpoint, the ‘born gay’ syndrome takes a larger chunk. I have often heard people say they don’t know why they just get attracted to people of same sex. Some even believe certain kids express pure homosexual tendencies before they are old enough to know what sex is all about. Hmm… too much for the justification of the ‘born gay’ syndrome you would say. First of all, we need to understand that the mind is the kitchen where ideas are prepared and served. It is also that part of our being that creates the unconsciousness and consciousness in our thinking, feeling and intentionality toward our environment, to perceive and even respond to stimuli (Wikipedia). It is a very powerful tool. It’s with the mind one believes what isn’t as if it is. Once a thought has formed, a man literally becomes the complete sum through his actions. The frequented exhibition of these actions is what leads to addiction. The devil knows this that’s why he targets the mind--the control room and injects pervasive thoughts that await growth. If, for instance, he injects the idea of being a flirt into Jalong and he is careless enough to let it stay, he begins to think about what it feels like to be one, why he needs to be one and other reasons to be one. He thinks of how to start, with whom to start and the emotional reward. Henceforth, everything he does consciously or unconsciously from his words to his actions will be geared towards achieving that. In the same vein, when the natural order of people’s sexuality become perverted by the injection of this ‘born gay’ idea, they begin to align their sexual preferences consciously or otherwise in that direction and even act on them.
For the record, it is not a crime to admire people of one’s sex neither is it a crime to love them dearly like Jonathan loved David but when the admiration or love tilts in the direction of homosexuality, it becomes really dangerous. Funnily enough, to really validate this ‘born gay’ thing, a lot of scientists have saddled themselves with the responsibility of proving that homosexuality is genetic. Although the results of these researches are still inconclusive, I’m very sure, even decades from now, that it can never be proven except there are manipulations.
James Allen in his book, "As a Man Thinketh", says ‘Man is a growth by law, and not a creation by artifice, and cause and effect are as absolute and undeviating in the hidden realm of thought as in the world of visible and material things. A noble and God-like character is not a thing of favour or chance, but is the natural result of continued effort in right thinking, the effect of long-cherished association with God- like thoughts. An ignoble and bestial character, by the same process, is the result of the continued harbouring of groveling thoughts’. Now, what is beauty to you: is it that which is true, j u s t , h o n e s t , p u r e , l o v e l y, praiseworthy and of good report or the imitative lifestyle birthed by the derailed mind(s) of a person or people? Or the sweet, twisted lies you've chosen to believe as truth? Sophia Loren's saying in my version goes nothing makes a person more beautiful than the belief that they really are beautiful. It's all in the mind!
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