There's nothing wrong with sexual feelings in themselves, so long as they are straightforward and not sneaking or sly. The right sort of sex stimulus is invaluable to human daily life. Without it the world grows grey.
Sex can be renounced -- but sexuality cannot. We can't avoid sexual issues by avoiding sex, or by dismissing its importance, or by showing disrespect to our own or other people's sexual feelings.
The idea that 'preaching the Gospel' has nothing to do with sex and that 'preaching about sex' has nothing to do with the Gospel betrays layers and layers of seriously misguided thinking. When we divorce God's love from sexual love, as Pope Benedict says, 'the essence of Christianity' becomes 'decisively cut off from the complex fabric of human life.'
It seems to me that the real clue to your sexual orientation lies in your romantic feelings rather than your sexual feelings. If you are really gay, you are able to fall in love with a man, not just enjoy sex with him.
A world without right or wrong was a world that did not want itself, anything other than itself, or anything not those two things, but that still wanted something. A world without right or wrong invited you over, complained about you, and gave you cookies. Don't leave, it said, and gave you a vegan cookie. It avoided eye contact, but touched your knee sometimes. It was the world without right or wrong. It didn't have any meaning. It just wanted a little meaning.
There is nothing so deluded as feelings. Christians cannot live by feelings. Let me further tell you that many feelings are the work of Satan, for they are not right feelings. What right have you to set up your feelings against the Word of Christ?
To shy away from human extremes and human sensuality makes for bone-dry fiction. A world parched of our sexual releases and our tumultuous daily emotional lives is deeply impoverished. It is not lifelike, at least life as I remember living it.
Moss grows where nothing else can grow. It grows on bricks. It grows on tree bark and roofing slate. It grows in the Arctic Circle and in the balmiest tropics; it also grows on the fur of sloths, on the backs of snails, on decaying human bones. ... It is a resurrection engine. A single clump of mosses can lie dormant and dry for forty years at a stretch, and then vault back again into life with a mere soaking of water.
That's what I mean about Catholicism - your sexual life is supposed to be dead if you're a good Catholic. That's wrong. It's human nature to be sexual, so why would God want you to deny your human nature?
The sort of formality that goes into my artwork I would not expect from everybody in the world. I'm sort of pushing that point to its limit, in my mind, but I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with using a laptop so long as we have some understanding of how it works a little bit.
The blues comes right back to a person's feelings, to his daily activities in life. But rich people don't know nothing about the blues, please believe me.
Feelings, emotions - they are neither right nor wrong. They cannot be assigned a value. Feelings *are*. By labeling a feeling wrong, you force yourself to ignore that feeling. And what you most need is to feel it, let it burn through you, then get on with life.
Each human being has his or her own sexual identity and should be able to exercise that identity without guilt as long as they do not force that sexual identity on others.
It would be lovely if it was all Right vs. Wrong, Good overcomes Evil - I think most Americans, going about their daily lives, fool themselves into thinking that that's how our little world works, but it just isn't so.
I really like the idea of being a bit unpredictable. I'm known for being a nice, easy-going person with a straightforward exterior. So I think a bit of me wants to be sort of sly and devious.
If you had a daily printout from the brain of an average twenty-four-year-old male, it would probably go like this: sex, need coffee, sex, traffic, sex, sex, what an asshole, sex, ham sandwich, sex, sex, etc
Insistence on having a sexual orientation in sex is about defending the status quo, maintaining sex differences and the sexual hierarchy; whereas resistance to sexual orientation, regimentation is more about where we need to be going.