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Nature Vs Nurture

not my paper actually. desperate to get in. sorryTHE GREAT
NATURE-NURTURE
DEBATE
t about the age of thirteen I began to notice girls -- or should I say, it was then that I began to notice little else. Twenty-five years later the inclination is a bit more refined, a bit more controlled -- but only a bit. Wherever I am, I notice women, and I notice particular parts of women. I often entertain fleeting thoughts -- at times lingering thoughts -- of how I might enjoy having sex with women I have never met. It is, after all, only natural.
Or is it? Was I born with an inclination to have sex with several different attractive women each day, an inclination that merely remained dormant for thirteen years? Did my father, whose desires are very similar to mine, train me to think about women in a certain way? Am I the product of lifelong exposure to advertisements, films and popular music? Did the trauma of my parents' divorce when I was three, or my mother's actions during my infancy, create in me particular sexual needs and desires?
All of these questions I find genuinely interesting. They are not however, moral questions. Moral questions have to do with the rightness or wrongness of my actions, regardless of the source or strength of my desires. Whatever I may attribute to my genes, or to my parents, or to my culture, none of them can force me, at the crucial moment to turn a glance into a fantasy, or a fantasy into a flirtation, or a flirtation into a sexual act. At that moment my will is involved, and precisely such moments define my obedience and growth as a Christian. However good I may feel about my conduct or however deeply ingrained is my desire to act in a certain way, neither of those factors is the measure of obedience. In fact, more often than not they are measures of self-deception.
This of course is not a fashionable notion today. The overwhelming message of the popular culture, which a thousand films and ten thousand love songs drill into us, is that...