Heterosexuality.... the perfect system

    Several years ago while listening to a popular radio show called "Armstrong and Getty" the subject of homosexuality came up and one of them (I believe it was Jack) made a challenge to his listeners asking them to show why homosexuality is wrong WITHOUT using the Bible.   I never gave it much thought but it came back to my memory and I thought, "Is there a non-religious / scientific reason to not promote homosexuality?"

    I recalled a comic who once said, "Isn't the perfect mate for a man another man and the perfect mate for a woman another woman?".    He was alluding to the fact that men and women desire different things in relationships.   Men mostly want physical love and women want mostly emotional love.   I say the word "mostly" because each part does at some level crave the other part just not in the same quantity.   It may be for example that men want 80% physical and 20% emotional  and women want 80% emotional and 20% physical.   It's rarely only 100% but it is definitely skewed in a particular direction.   Given this difference, it may seem logical that men would be better off with other men and women would be better off with other women.   In each instance, the person gets what they want with much less effort on their part to obtain it.   Men could have more sex with much less talking, sharing, buying flowers etc. and women as will would have more talking and sharing without the messiness of sex.

So why are we this way?

    As an engineer, I see the reason almost immediately.   It's called a "Negative-Feedback (NF) System".  A NF-system is an ideal system because it won't self-destruct.  Unlike what most people think, Positive Feedback is BAD and Negative Feedback is GOOD in engineering.   All PF-systems eventually destroy themselves from either over-stress or overheating. A good example of this is the Tahoma Bridge collapse (See video),   The bridge was poorly designed as the shape created a "wing" that was lifted up with strong winds.  The lift of the bridge met the natural resonance of the bridge and fed back on itself making the bridge rise higher and higher until it fell apart. 

   Another example is the feedback you here at concert when a high-pitch sound begins to emanate from the speakers.   There is a feedback look between the speakers and the microphone that happens to match the sound wave period. In the past, if this was not immediately cut off it could possible cause the speakers to explode.  Today's systems have the ability to detect this problem and shut it off automatically. 

   Negative-Feedback prevents this from happening by automatically reducing the amplification factor.   For example, a negative-feedback amplifier will decrease it's amplification amount as the input increases rather than a fixed amount.  This protects it from over-amplifying the input.  We refer to it as a self-regulating system.

   In human sexuality, heterosexual relationships are Negative-Feedback-Systems.  They are by their nature self-regulating and reach a natural balance.   For example, just because a man spends more time talking and sharing feelings he is not guaranteed to receive more sex from the female because physical love is not in her wheelhouse of things she truly enjoys doing.   The same is true the other way around. Just because she may provide more opportunities for sex, he will not automatically respond with more emotional sharing and communication of feelings as these are not in his wheelhouse of things he is good at.   In actuality, for both scenarios, the other may even reduce their response to the other as they may feel they are being gamed or taken advantage of by the other.  This balance has been scientifically seen in studies that showed gay men in relationships over 2 years had sex on average of 3 times a week where as male-female couples had sex about 1 time per week and lesbian couples had sex less an 1 time a month. 

   If humans evolved to be a PF-system and to have male and females to desire the same wants and desires the human species would either over-populate from too much sex or die off from under-population from a lack of sex.  Our only danger in heterosexuality with a NF-system is the problem of a "deadlock" scenario where each side refuses to give the other what they want until the other gives them what they want.  Here the system becomes dead-locked (but often unlocks itself because of love breaking the deadlock).

So what is the danger of promoting homosexuality on society?

    The main problem is under-population.  Imagine we as a society over the next 100 or so years move to a place where homosexuality is considered equivalent to heterosexuality on every level and is no long considered "taboo".   It becomes so common place that people choose homosexuality OVER heterosexuality because you obtain what you want with the least amount of effort.  Humans being naturally lazy will naturally move towards homosexuality and away from heterosexuality.  I am not saying that 100% of society will chose this path, but enough will that it will decrease a countries reproduction rate significantly to a point where it cannot sustain itself and its replacement rate will be much less than the required 2.0.   This is the main danger that is faced.  We cannot pretend that promoting a lifestyle does not influence society to produce more of it.   If you want more organic food production you must promote it as beneficial to society.   The same goes for homosexuality.

Now a word from God.....

   I believe God has designed us to be this way.  He is the ultimate engineer and he knows how we are designed to function and he knows our propensity for laziness.  His list of "abominations" is his "WARNING!! DO NOT CONNECT IN REVERSE!!" sign for us to pay attention to.  He knows bad things await down the road if we do it our way.   I often feel that this is why God uses harsh language in the Old Testament.    The people of Moses time were not intellectually ready to hear the intellectual "reason" for staying away from homosexuality and therefore God must use his Dad-voice to get his message through even though he does have very good reasons in mind.  The problem is that we often think we , the creation, are the rational ones and God, the creator, is the irrational being.   How foolish to think an irrational being can create rational beings who know more than the one who created them.







 

Sometimes paying TOO much is the right thing to do!

    No one likes to overpay for anything.   We will return an item with light-speed if we find out another place is selling it for 10% less to save a few dollars.   We get angry when we look at a restaurant bill and see extra items on it we did not receive.   It's just how we are wired.

    Even when it comes to paying for mistakes and errors we have made we want to get off cheap.   Take for example when Intel, Google, Apple and several other companies got caught colluding to reduce demand for jobs they both rely on by making a "do-not-call-list" (or "do-not-hire-list").   This went on from 2005 to 2010 when it finally got found out.   The companies had compiled a list of some 60,000 employees who they wanted to keep at their desks and not pay more for.   I was one of those employees. A judge ordered in the settlement for the companies to pay a total of $300M to the workers (or $5000 per employee).  Many who analyzed the fine said they got off easy.

https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/15/7554397/apple-google-intel-and-adobe-poaching-settlement-415-million

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYtL_wEPj9A

(Oh and they didn't have to admit wrong-doing either)

   So even when we get caught we don't want to pay 1 cent more for our sins than we want to.

   In Exodus 22:7 which says,

“If anyone gives a neighbor silver or goods for safekeeping and they are stolen from the neighbor’s house, the thief, if caught, must pay back double.

      This was what the law required.  It was not enough to pay back only what is owed to the person who is wronged, but to pay them back "double" so that not only is the item returned but hopefully also the relationship between the offender and the offended is repaired.   All too often, in business, all that is of concern is that some form of "restitution" is paid back.   When companies like Intel and Google arbitrate for less than what is lost, they cheapen the relationship they had with the individual.  Workers feel less like family and more like indentured servants which impacts the company's bottom line in the long run.   I have had several conversations with other employees who have voiced their disappointment at what was done and how the company went about handling the error in judgment and given that I am still writing about this 5 years later shows to what depth the "knife of injustice" sliced into the company soul.

   I don't expect the Intel execs to wake up any time soon and say "Wow!  We really screwed our workers back in 2005 we need to fix that damaged relationship!"   But maybe someone out there who is starting their own company will read this and say, "I am going to care more about my employees and treat them like family than slaves and work to keep my relationship to them on good terms!"