Why I think nudity is healthy by Bryans

Details: Category: LDS Naturist Essentials

Building on Common Ground

There are many reasons why I feel being a naturist is healthy, but I'd like to focus on just one area: male development. Although admittedly I have no formal education in the matter and my observations are based on personal experience, I feel somewhat qualified to speak on the subject, being a male myself.

nudity is healthy I'd like to start by building on some common ground with which I feel everyone might agree, naturist or not, and it all starts with something every male knows and understands: Hormones.

Every young teenage boy must decide how he will respond to and deal with the raging river of hormones that begin to develop about age twelve or thirteen and are in full force by the time he is fifteen or sixteen.

Mormon boys are no different. I surely wasn't. Gratefully, I managed to stay a virgin until the night of my honeymoon. When I was in high school, however, there were some close calls that drove me to the Bishop's office a short time later. If I could go back I would erase those close calls from my history. They left me feeling miserable and also robbed innocence from the young females with whom they were committed. I wish they'd never happened.

From everything I hear and read, teenagers are becoming more and more promiscuous as time progresses. It's a battle we are losing, and I fear for my own children. My son is still very young, but his own days of raging hot hormones will come. It's inevitable.

I often wonder how I can best arm him with all the tools to avoid the pitfalls into which I fell. We read the scriptures, we hold regular family home evenings, we have family prayer, and we teach and testify on a regular basis. But is all this enough? To my parents' credit they did the same, and yet I still stumbled. There are hundreds and hundreds of other good LDS teens who come from solid, active homes and who have also fallen into the same sexual traps.

Sexual Education: Are We Failing Our Children?

Can Healthy Nudity be the Answer?

Here's the root of the problem, at least in my humble opinion: In our religion, we do not adequately teach our children about their own sexuality. We are excellent at teaching them about the gospel, at giving them a love for the scriptures, at instilling in them a testimony of our Heavenly Father and His son Jesus Christ, and at helping them understand the importance of modesty and the dangers of immorality.

This is all very good, to be sure. Yet at the same time, we are failing to address the fact that young teenagers, especially boys, are deeply and immensely curious about their bodies and about their sexuality. When all we do is tell them to stay morally clean, we provide them with no healthy method for this perfectly normal curiosity to be satisfied. Why is this bad? Because simply ignoring it will not make it go away – or go on hold. It will instead compel them to satisfy their cursorily behind our backs and in ways with which would not approve.

Of course, most parents are familiar with the ubiquitous "where do babies come from" conversation. This only scratches the surface, and in most cases, only causes confusion and embarrassment. Teaching our youth where babies come from does nothing to provide them with :

Tthe knowledge that they are sexual beings,
The understanding that their sexuality and their emotions, desires, and curiosity are healthy, normal, and in fact divinely inspired,
How to appropriately cope with and respond to their own sexuality, and 4) how to satisfy their curiosity in ways that are healthy, productive, and moral.

I propose that is that it is possible to allow our youth to satisfy their curiosity of the human body, including the sexual parts of the human body while remaining moral, modest, and chaste.

How Did You Learn About Your Sexuality?

Naked Curiosity

Many parents either fail to comprehend the need to instill in their children a sense of sexual security, or they recognize the need but lack the tools to do so. Too often parents fail to recognize that their adolescent is struggling sexually until it is too late and damage has been done.

Secure in their own adulthood and often content with the level of sexuality in their marriage, they have either forgotten what it is like to be young and bubbling over with curiosity or, the only model they have for teaching sexuality to their children is the model their parents provided or both. They assume their children will somehow stumble into an understanding of their own sexuality the same way they did.

In my case, that would mean playing "doctor" with siblings and other kids from around the neighborhood, talking dirty at sleepovers, sneaking porn (thank goodness the Internet didn't exist when I was young), and eventually, fooling around with girls at school and church who were willing to compromise their morals.

I didn't do any of these things because I was a little sexual pervert, as my mother told me angrily when some of it came to light. I did it because like every other kid alive, I was simply curious.

We'll get back to this normal (and even healthy) body-curiosity in just a moment, but first, I want to approach what I fear is a serious problem in the way we teach our kids about our bodies and about sex.

Double Whammy: The Porn Industry And My Religion Both Taught Me The Same Thing - Girl's Bodies Are Naughty

The porn industry, Hollywood, the general media, and even advertising executives all use sex to sell. It's a proven formula: show a little human skin when promoting your product and customers fork over the cash. The more skin you show the more the cash flows. And if your product happens to actually be human skin, as in the case of the porn industry, you are set to rake in billions.

By only showing the human body in situations where it is always sexual, the message about the human body taught by the media is clear: It's sexy and lusty! Come And Get It!!

As I became a teenager, both my parents and my youth leaders at church ramped up the anti-lust teachings on morality and chastity. And rightfully so. Yet laced into all their teachings was this very strong message: "Do Not Look at Naked (or Almost Naked) Females. It Is a Sin." The aim of both my parents and my youth leaders was to keep me as far away from female bodies as possible. I was not to look at them unless they were fully (and modestly) clothed. I was not to think about them. I was not to touch them. I was basically to ignore them and pretend they did not exist.

By limiting my exposure to the human body (and the female body especially) to absolute zero, the message about the human body taught to me by my parents and my youth leaders was clear: It's Sexy and Lusty! Stay Away!!

Here's the catch: What was taught to me at home and at church actually confirmed what the media taught: That the human body is sexual and lusty. Their goal was noble. They wanted me to stay pure and chaste. But the method was flawed. By trying to keep as much distance between me and nakedness as possible, the law of unintended consequences came into play, and in my youthful mind, they further entrenched the idea that the human body is inherently lustful and always highly sexual.

This presents a very real and serious problem.

The Human Body is Not Pornography

Let's briefly go back to this idea of normal and healthy body-curiosity in young boys.

As a young pre-teenage boy I had a natural and normal curious about bodies, my own and those of the other gender. Yet even at the age of eight, nine or ten, I had already picked up on the very strong vibes that curiosity about the human body was something I needed to keep to myself. There was a taboo around the human body, and as a curious boy, this was confusing. As I became older and entered puberty my curiosity extended to include curiosity about sex.

By placing a taboo on this curiosity, the prevailing culture of home and religion managed to send it underground. The only way available to me to solve my intense body-curiosity was on the sly. As I mentioned before, as a young boy I played "doctor" with siblings and other kids around the neighborhood. It was always done in secret and we knew we were committing a highly punishable offense. Later I gained access to pornography via the collection of a friend's father.

Like many Christian American boys, I grew up believing that nudity and sex were inseparable. If you were naked, you were either thinking about sex, about to have sex, having sex or had just had sex. By the time I was thirteen even my own nudity was sexual. I could not get undressed in the shower or in my own bedroom without having some sexual fantasy dancing around the fringes of my imagination. Female nudity, when I came across it, was always intensely sexual.

I was a confused and miserable mess. How could anyone not be? Worst of all, I believe, is that the net combined result of all these mixed signals resulted in this one terribly false, distorted, and even perverted belief: the female body is, by definition, sexual and lustful.

Pavlov rang his bell, the dogs salivated.

What a powerful tool Satan has placed into the minds of the vast majority of our young men. See a girl, become horny. Watch TV, see girls, become horny. Look at the magazines in the check out aisle, become horny. Watch movies, become horny. Go to the beach, become horny. Go to school, become horny. Walk down the sidewalk, become horny. Those pesky girls are everywhere!

Again, I'd like to repeat this to make sure the point is clear: We have become conditioned to associate female flesh with lust. In fact, we have become so conditioned to this belief that many will vehemently disagree if the association is challenged.

By making us believe that female flesh is somehow inherently lustful, Satan has developed a powerful tool to pervert our sons and demean our daughters. Lucifer has duped us into believing that we, as men, are weak-minded and that we will yield to temptation if we see too much female flesh, no matter how it is presented. We also believe that women possess a body which is somehow inherently cloaked with shame because it causes boys and men to lust by even thinking about it, say nothing about seeing it.

Let's be clear about one thing: Females are God’s creation. Lust is Satan’s creation. There is nothing evil about the female body. Nothing evil comes from God, and God created females.

Alan Palmer, creator of the Latter-day Saint Skinny Dipper’s Connection (www.ldssdc.info) said it this way:

"Fearing our flesh is not the same as overcoming it. On the contrary - fear would allow the flesh to control us. With fear, we consider our flesh as too powerful to contain without covering it, our spirit too weak to behold the flesh of others and not sin. There is no overcoming of the flesh in running and hiding from our own skin. Overcoming the flesh is about self-mastery, among other things. If we have learned to master our desires and passions, what exactly do we fear?"

We are Drawn to the Forbidden

It is human nature to want that which we can’t have. If you point out a closet door to a child and tell him that he must not ever open it, and in fact, he must not even think about opening it, the child’s behavior is predictable. He most likely would not have given the door a first or second thought before, but now that it is off-limits, he will sneak a peak the moment he believes you are not watching.

Does this mean the child is naughty and must be punished? Of course not! It means only that he has a normal, healthy curiosity. One might even argue that the parent is more to blame than the child for failing to adequately teach the child what is behind the closet door and why it might be harmful to the child.

A few years ago an L.D.S. single man about my same age moved into our area. He has since married a fine young woman and the two have had an adorable son together. Over the few years he has lived in town, he and I have become close friends and discussed many topics in great depth. Recently I opened up to him and told him about my feelings on naturism. I did not know how he would react, nor had I had not attempted in advance to predict his reaction.

Without judging or reacting harshly he communicated that he believed I was in error. In our discussion I let him know that our two children, one son and one daughter, see my wife and I nude on a regular basis. He made the following statement (I’m quoting to the best of my memory):

“I have thought a lot about this issue, and I have decided that the best way to raise a boy and to help him avoid pornography is to never allow him to see a nude female, with the exception of a biology book diagram, until the night of his honeymoon.”

I know this man enough to know that his intentions are pure and his love for his son is deep and eternal. I also, as you can guess, fear that such a method of raising a boy will have the exact opposite effect which he intends, and could, in fact, drive him directly towards that which he so dearly wants his son to avoid.

What is it that he fears? Why is he so afraid of the nude female form that he feels he must shield his son from it all throughout his childhood and early adult years? It seems to me that my friend has fallen perfectly into Satan's trap of believing that all-female flesh is lustful. He seems to believe that the mere sight of any female body would have on his son the same effect as pornography. It would seem, from my point of view, that my friend has forgotten that God created the human body and that it is, therefore, divine, pure, and beautiful.

When the human body is presented as God would present it, as the mortal housing for our souls, and not as an object of sexual lust, which is how Satan would present it, then I believe there is absolutely nothing to fear.

However, as a society, it has become difficult if not nearly impossible for many of us to free ourselves from this terribly false idea that all human flesh is lustful, and that the sight of too much of it will cause us to lust, and that if children see too much of it before they are married, it will corrupt them. Where does this idea come from? What has caused us to fall into this overly protective and damaging mind frame?

One word: Pornography

Pornography, Not The Human Body, Is The Real Enemy

It is important to understand that the human body is, by nature, wholesome, pure, chaste, and divine. God created us in his image, and nothing that God creates is in any way naughty, embarrassing, or unclean.

But that does not stop Hollywood, music, television, and worst of all, the pornography industry from exploiting the human body in exchange for money. Since the creation of man, Satan has worked tirelessly to pollute and distort all that is good in this world. Why would he stop at our own bodies? The people who produce movies, songs, TV shows, magazines, and websites which sexualize the human body are not stupid people. They know sex sells. And the sexier they make the human body, the more it sells.

Let’s go back to the idea of a young boy who’s hormones are just beginning to awaken. With time, inborn curiosity coupled with peer pressure drives all but a very small minority to seek some method of satisfaction to the burning, unquenchable, relentless fire of sexual curiosity. What is the quickest method? What is the path of least resistance? Today, even the hardest and most soul-sucking pornography is only a few mouse clicks away.

And what does this young boy find when he arrives at these web sites? Yes, he finds images of the nude female form. But these are no ordinary images. They are presented in a way that is entirely unnatural and laced with sex. The lighting, the settings, the models, the poses, the parts of the body which are featured… everything is carefully crafted to titillate and awaken hormones. The models are selected for their bodies which have been altered through starvation and surgery to unnatural proportions, and the photographs are further airbrushed after the fact to maximize the sensation.

Temporarily, this boy’s internal fire of sexual curiosity is satisfied, and he finds fuel for his imagination and fantasies.

The damage done to this young, impressionable boy goes beyond that which is done to his soul. Not only has he just taken one step closer to spiritual deftness, but his perception of all females has just been warped. Because of this experience, he now believes a little more then he did before that the female body is inherently lustful. He looks at females differently, trying to undress them in his mind. He compares all girls and women to the ones he saw in the images, accepting the bodies which measure up and rejecting the ones that don’t. Females lose their individuality and become objects of either rejection or desire.

But the injury is even more widespread. Because this young boy has just been damaged and because his perception of females has been warped, all of society is damaged and all females are degraded. Even those who do not directly participate in pornography recognize the effects it has on those who do participate.

And here is perhaps the single most damaging aspect: The human body, one of God’s most sublime and pristine creations, is degraded and dragged through the filthy waste of base, carnal, shameless, immoral exploitation. And collectively as a society, all of us fall deeper into the trap of believing that the female body, by definition, is overtly and overpoweringly cloaked in lust, and by association, it also becomes disgraceful, degrading, and shameful. Yes, the pornography industry is blamed for the damage they cause, but they keep right on selling more and more of their smut. The rest of us, in our effort to protect our selves and our children, understandably but mistakenly associate all female bodies with the effects of pornography.

This point is so important it bears repeating: The rest of us understandably but mistakenly associate all female bodies with the effects of pornography. I need to say this one more time, because it is the crux of this entire article: The rest of us understandably but mistakenly associate all female bodies with the effects of pornography.

We assume that anytime we see a nude human body in any setting it will have the same effect on us as if we were viewing pornography. “I must not look at pornography or I will fall into temptation” is passionately translated into “I must not look at any nude female or I will fall into temptation.”

In other words, we come to believe is that the female body is, by simply existing, pornographic. The truth is, nothing could be further from the truth! Remember, God created the human body and Satan created pornography. The human body is pure, clean, undefiled, and holy. It is not pornographic.

On one side we have carnal, lust-driven, immoral images of the human body created by evil men for their own gain. On the other hand, we have the real human body, created by God, pure, clean, divine, and undefiled. Thanks to pornography, the line between the two has not just blurred, it has been destroyed altogether.

Can I Do Better Than My Parents?

Looking back now it's much easier to understand why I stumbled. Like so many other boys, I was curious. When I tried to resolve my curiosity, I was told I was dirty for even having such thoughts. I can see how my parents had the best of intentions but just didn't know how else to handle the developing sexuality of their own child. So they choose to ignore it the best they could and shut it down it when it was impossible to ignore.

It's easy for me to say "Ha! I can do better!" But can I? Can I really?

The convoluted and distorted method of personal, bodily, and sexual discovery I experienced growing up is not good enough for my little boy. I want better for him. In fact, I demand better.

I don't want him to be conditioned to become aroused every time he sees female flesh. I don't want him to be so curious about the female form that he is forced to find porn on the Internet to be satisfied. He deserves better than that. Much better.

I think you can see where this is going. I plan to take a much different approach then my parents did. Instead of making the human body forbidden, off-limits and mysterious, I plan instead to bring it out into the open. And by doing so, I hope to dust it off and to cleanse it from the cloak of shame and fear in which it has been hidden for too long.

Nudity in the Home

I once had a “Christian” woman become so angry with me when she learned that my children see my wife and I naked, she told me I ought to have my children taken away from me and placed in foster care. She was irrationally livid and refused to listen to any reasoning.

Many parents hide their bodies from their children, and if pressed, might say that do so to avoid corrupting them. Corrupting them with what? With one of God’s most beautiful creations? With our bodies which were made in his image?

I believe the root of such unfortunate thinking lies in the belief that all nudity is inherently sexual, and that if my wife and I are naked in the company of my children then we must also be involving them in sex. Nothing could be further from the truth. My wife and I keep sex perfectly private between the two of us.

Our children do see us naked on a regular basis – almost daily. Sunday mornings especially will find all of us in various stages of dress in the main bathroom, and it is not uncommon for the glass-walled shower to run continuously as we all take turns stepping in, getting clean, and stepping out, often overlapping as we do so. They think nothing of it. They have been seeing mom and dad naked since the day they were born and find it perfectly normal. In their young and innocent minds, being naked in front of mom and dad, and having mom and dad be naked in front of them, is as pure and simple as going to Church. It’s just life.

I should also add that we have had some very open and frank conversations about the human body. We have talked about why mom and dad look different that son and daughter, we have talked about how their bodies will also change someday, we have talked about bodily functions, in fact, there isn’t much about the human body we have not talked about.

My wife recently had the sex talk with our then nine-year-old daughter, and she reported that it was the most natural conversation a mother and daughter could have hoped for. Nobody was embarrassed, and enough groundwork had been laid that the conversation was fairly short, and multiple times our daughter's response was "Oh! That makes a lot of sense!" and "Ah! Now I understand!". I'll have the same chat soon with my son, and I have high hopes that it will not be the profoundly and painfully embarrassing, awkward, and terrible moment is was for my me and my dad. Talking about human bodies will be second nature by then – this conversation will just be one more to add to the collection.

When done with modesty and purity in mind, family nudity is a natural extension of family love. It is open, it is comforting, and most importantly, it is bonding.

De-Sexing Nudity

If you are of the common and understandable mindset that social nudity must be sexual, it will be difficult and perhaps downright impossible for you to keep an open mind long enough to consider that it might not be sexual. The traditional belief that nudity and sex are the same thing is firmly entrenched in many of us, and it is difficult and painful to accept the notion that maybe, just maybe, this belief is only tradition, and not reality.

The following quote is from the April 2006 General Conference by Elder David R. Stone entitled "Zion in the Midst of Babalon".

"What an insidious thing is this culture amidst which we live. It permeates our environment, and we think we are being reasonable and logical when, all too often, we have been molded by the ethos, what the Germans call the zeitgeist or the culture of our place and time.

"Because my wife and I have had the opportunity to live in 10 different countries, we have seen the effect of the ethos on behavior. Customs which are perfectly acceptable in one culture are viewed as unacceptable in another; language which is polite in some places is viewed as abhorrent in others. People in every culture move within a cocoon of self-satisfied self-deception, fully convinced that the way they see things is the way things really are.

"Our culture tends to determine what foods we like, how we dress, what constitutes polite behavior, what sports we should follow, what our taste in music should be, the importance of education, and our attitudes toward honesty. It also influences men as to the importance of recreation or religion, influences women about the priority of career or childbearing, and has a powerful effect on how we approach procreation and moral issues. All too often, we are like puppets on a string, as our culture determines what is 'cool.'"

I speak from first-hand experience when I say that chaste, innocent, public nudity is not sexual. When the nude human form is presented in reality, and not in the sexual wrappings of the media or pornography, it becomes at once exactly what it is: natural, clean, pure, and wholesome. Witnessing the nude human form in settings that are recreational and casual is neither a turn on or a turnoff, it just simply is.

Lust is not found in the honest, beautiful, divinely created female body. Lust is found in the eye of the beholder. Hopefully, it will never take root in any of us, but if it does, we must learn to control it and eventually conquer it all together.

Many of us are familiar with this passage of scripture:

"For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father." (Mosiah 3:19).

If our minds are untainted and our hearts pure we will not fear the flesh, lust after it, or behave in such a way that will cause others to lust after our own. The true naturist has learned to put off the “natural man” and become one who has control over his emotions and desires. He reveres all flesh and respects the human body as a divine and sacred creation.

The “natural man” as Mosiah called him, has not yet learned to master his own carnal, base, and instinctual appetites and desires. He is driven by impulse, not by calm, rational, mature thoughts and decisions. He is selfish and undisciplined.

While being a naturist is natural, it is never undisciplined. It is not a carnal gorging of lust and sin. Naturist respect and accept their own bodies and the bodies of others. The true naturist is not ruled by carnal desire, he masters it. He is devoted to decency and modesty and shows both when nude.

When we have overcome the natural man, we will no longer fear nakedness and we will not fear ourselves when in its presence. All such fears will have been replaced with confidence and with an understanding that we, as God’s children, are inherently pure individuals who view the human body as being mortal containers of our souls.

When considered in this light we come to understand that naturalism is not carnal, lustful and sinful, but inherently decent, modest, and disciplined. It is not only modest, but it defines modesty. Rather than fearing the human body or cloaking it in shame and embarrassment, it raises the human body to a higher spiritual plane. And most importantly, it elevates, not debases, how we think of it.

Mainstream Christianity would have us believe that the female body is too potent to be viewed without causing sin and that men are unable to view the female form without lusting. Naturism, on the other hand, makes a bold and positive statement about the inherent purity of the human body and about the innate goodness of man. Mainstream Christianity preaches that the body is lustful and man is weak. Naturism preaches that the body is pure and divine and that man is strong.

Helping My Son Avoid Sexual Pitfalls.

Again, let’s return to our example of a young developing boy. Like so many boys, when he approaches a certain age, he begins to be curious about the human body. At first he may have difficulty even understanding his own curiosity, as it is all so new, raw, and deeply emotional. If he is like the vast majority of boys raised in western Christian homes, he will have little to no method of satisfying his curiosity. In fact, as he listens to lessons at church on modesty and morality, his questions and confusions will only deepen, and even turn to frustration. Such lessons do nothing to curve this growing and intense desire to learn and satisfy, and instead make him feel guilty for even wondering about bodies and sex and for feeling such emotions.

At home, the idea of asking mom and dad about these new emotions and questions is embarrassing, bizarre, and far too out of the ordinary. From the time he was a tiny boy they made it clear that all things pertaining to “those parts” of the human body are off-limits. They were not talked about, they were never shown to other people, and their very existence was barely even acknowledged.

Enter his friends at school, Hollywood, and the Internet. They offer answers. They offer satisfaction. They offer acceptance. Our young boy will learn too late that the answers they offer are false, the satisfaction they provide is fleeting, and the acceptance is conditional upon further and further transgression.

Now, let us consider an alternative. Consider a young man who is raised in a home where nudity is not viewed as naughty, where early and innocent questions are treated with respect, not embarrassment and disdain, and where certain body parts are not ignored altogether. His home and his family are open and accepting, nobody hides behind closed doors, conversation is free and familiar, and “those” body parts are never viewed as naughty, embarrassing, or shameful. He is taught that certain body parts are sacred and holy and must be respected and honored, but they are never associated with awkwardness, indignity embarrassment and shame.

In such a home, questions are encouraged and freely answered. Curiosity over body parts is satisfied at an early age, and they are satisfied in a way that gives a proper, truthful, modest, and moral understanding.

When our young boy reaches the age of hormonal development, he already has a positive, healthy, secure understanding of his own body and the bodies of the other gender. There is no titillating “I wonder what girls look like” question lurking just under the surface. There is no desire to seek out pornography, and when he stumbles across it by accident, it will have no hold on him as he will recognize it instantly as a false representation of the human body.

Such a boy will not fall prey to Satan’s devilish tool that all-female flesh is lustful, as he will be familiar with it in ample settings where it never was lustful. Girls will not become an object of sexual desire, off-color jokes, long stares, or steamy fantasies. They will never be sex objects which are nothing more than bodies to be accepted or rejected based on size or shape.

In this boy's mind, girls will already be individuals with worth beyond their bodies. They will be accepted no matter how they look. They will be understood rather than mysterious. They will be familiar rather than forbidden. They will be honored and respected rather than degraded and dishonored.

My hope for my son is that he will someday be married in the temple and that he will hold hands across the alter never having made the same mistakes I made. In the meantime, I hope he will honor, respect, and hold in high esteem every female he meets. I hope he will serve an honorable mission and that he will grow to become a powerful warrior in his Father in Heaven’s army.

It is my desire to arm him with every possible weapon to fight against the adversary. For young boys, the most powerful tool Satan has in his arsenal is sexual transgression. It is my sincere desire that by teaching my son the truth about the human body, the whole truth, he will be better prepared for a moral, chaste, and pure life.

Modesty, morality, chastity, and purity are principles not taught by ignoring human sexuality and our sexual body parts and pretending they do not exist. They are taught by embracing the human body in all of its glory, and in teaching our children to truly understand their sexuality and to know that it is divine, glorious, and wonderful. Such an approach is, in my opinion, the best way to help our children maintain their innocents and purity and to offer it up to their spouse on the night of their honeymoon in the culminating act of marital union in a new bond that will last forever and bring to earth more of God’s children.

Thank you!

Thank you for reading this lengthy article. It is my hope that, at least, I have perhaps persuaded you that there is a valid viewpoint from this side of the question. Perhaps I have caused you to stop and think, if only for a moment, that their might be truth in this way of thinking. If so, I have accomplished my goal.

I would invite you also to read some other interesting (and much shorter) articles as well:

Thank you again. Please feel free to reply with your own thoughts. I'd love to hear them!

Bryan