Choosing Against Our Natures

I consider my orientation to be a part of my makeup.  I didn't choose it.  It's part of the fabric from which I am made.  However, as a member of the church, I don't have romantic relationships with other men.  Some people may question if it is wrong to ask someone to choose against their nature?  I contend that civilization is precisely that: asking people to choose against their natures.  For example, if you are hungry, you naturally want to eat the food available.  However, if you are civilized, you wait for the proper time to eat, you share food with others, you avoid foods that break with your moral code (vegans, for example), you control your diet for health reasons, etc.

I know people who are very competitive, so much so that it becomes hard to communicate with them some of the time.  These kinds of people often make excellent athletes or businessmen.  But to be civilized, they have to learn to compete within the rules.  That takes self control -- in particular, control to reign in their own natures and comply with society's laws and norms.

Some people may be better at this than others.  But all of us defy our own natures to exist in society.  There's an excellent article about the meaning of "free agency" that examines the evolutionary advantages that free will gives people.  In particular, the author claims: 

If you think of freedom as being able to do whatever you want, with no rules, you might be surprised to hear that free will is for following rules. Doing whatever you want is fully within the capability of any animal in the forest. Free will is for a far more advanced way of acting. It’s what a creature might need in order to adjust its behavior to novel situations, to get what it wants while still following the complicated rules of the society.  People must inhibit impulses and desires and find ways of satisfying them within the rules.

What makes free will powerful is the ability to follow commandments, despite the desire to break them.  I had a teacher once point out to me that free-form poetry's lack of rules makes it all sound rather similar, despite its more liberated nature.  A poet writing sonnets, however, must follow strict rules of rhyme and meter, and being expressed within that structure, the poems are more powerful and more distinct from others.  Similarly, our lives can be more powerful when we work within the rules, follow the commandments.

It is not some foreign idea to me that I should have to make choices against my natural instincts.  It is part of what makes me civilized.  It may seem harder for a gay-oriented person like me to find happiness and satisfaction within the structure of the Church, but it's harder to express ideas within the structure of a sonnet, too.  However, the poem and my happiness become more beautiful and powerful when we work within those rules.