Doesn't this only serve to undermine your whole argument?
How so?
The basic gist of my argument here is that things work the way they do for a reason. That reason simply happens to be the fact that they result in certain beneficial outcomes under natural circumstances (in this case, the continuation and survival of the species) which helped our ancestors to gain an edge over their competition.
If there is, in fact, a God, would it not have been he who was ultimately responsible for setting things in this order in the first place?
You've never made the conscious choice to NOT have sex and then acted on that?
Sure. I've made the conscious choice not to eat, drink, sleep, or void my bowels - even when I've really wanted to - as well.
However, that doesn't change the reason why the instinctual compulsion to do all of these things exists in the first place.
It is not "objectively observable". You're discussing motivation and intent how is that objectively observable? It would be objectively observable it you punched someone in the nose or crashed your car but why you did either of those is not objectively observable.
Just about every higher organism on this planet has sex. A great many do so purely for procreation. Only a few have pleasure tacked onto the side as an extra incentive.
Hell! A few even have pain. Have you ever seen cats go at it, for example?
The feline penis is covered in sharp barbs and spikes. Females only barely tolerate the process out of instinct and hormonal drive alone.
Ducks, for their own immensely disturbing part, reproduce almost exclusively through violent rape.
At the end of the day, it really doesn't make any difference in the grand scheme of things what superficial factors might be at play. The undeniable reality of the situation is that the common element which runs through
all sexual behavior, for
all species, is reproduction.
Pleasure, pain, power, social bonds, and every other extraneous feature of sexual behavior which has been brought up in this thread are ultimately only secondary adaptations, which were added on to that process at some later point in evolutionary development.
Without the reproductive element, sex simply wouldn't exist. That's really all there is to it.
This is one of the top ten most ridiculous things you've ever said. Lot's of things human beings do exist without a higher purpose. I thought of about 20 sarcastic things I could say in response to the "waste of time...." thing but let's just say we disagree and the majority of the population would disagree also.
No one said that nature's mechanisms could not sometimes be confused, or perverted against their normal purpose.
Our bodies chemically "reward" us for taking certain actions which are beneficial to our survival and the survival of the species as a whole. That much is undeniable. Unfortunately, however, it simply happens to be the case that sometimes even beneficial actions can lend themselves to over-indulgence (one must remember that the world in which our instincts evolved tended to have far more scarce resources than are available today, after all), or that the "chemical reward" in question can be attained by other, unnatural, means.
This is how we wind up with problems like sex addiction, obesity, alcoholism, and other forms of substance abuse. People either gorge themselves on something their body desires to the point where it actually becomes a liability, or they find a means to trick their body into thinking it has been "satisfied" in some fashion using artificial means, when it really has not, and become hooked on that instead.
As I said to Chromium earlier, this state of affairs is honestly neither here nor there as far as what we are discussing is concerned. It is simply one of the many downfalls of our imperfect biological nature.
Just because we can do something that is effectively pointless, doesn't mean that we
should.
Yes, I do. If you choose when you do and when you don't you are controlling the impulse.
it's a simple issue of self control which,as I recall, you advocate on a regular basis
What you're arguing for here really isn't "self-control," however. You're basically arguing for exactly what I described above.
Divorced from its natural purpose, sex is really little more than another drug like any other.
That is pretty much
exactly how the social Left wants to treat it.