unnatural .nom "certainly nothing is unnatural that is not physically impossible." - richard brinsley sheridan 050129 ... nomme) sunnatural 050619 ... birdmad i agree. any act of any creature conceived in nature cannot be unnatural quoth Love and Rockets: "You cannot go against nature, because when you do go against nature it's part of nature too" i'm more inclined to allow for the notion of the supernatural than i am for that of the allegedly unnatural 060609 ... flux in the words of vantala, "you cannot harm the universe". 060610 ... flux the word "unnatural" seems to reflect the idea that there's an objective moral order to the universe. if you don't accept that, the word's damn meaningless. 140809 ... flowerock unnatural... not made by nature... made by some individual component of nature? it had to be created, begin as a thought. 140809 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Yeah, one of the things about this word is that it suggests a value judgment. And sometimes this judgment has a place: food that's overly processed, for instance, is "unnatural" in that it's further from its original state - of course people have canned and cured and dried and preserved food for years - I'm thinking rather of atrocities like Kraft Singles and marshmallows (which used to be flavoured with real plants, marsh mallows, by the way). Though I guess organic cane sugar and mass-produced refined sugar will both eat away at your teeth (as your teeth eat away at them. Hey, at least it's reciprocal.) But I get mad at some of the things people will call unnatural, especially if there's a rational explanation: why has even science, up until quite recently, regarded gay relationships as weird, something cultural and not biological? And by "science" I'm mainly thinking of my brother's anthropology textbook, but yes, it's something that can be explained biologically as a natural population check (you can't have everybody having babies, especially since people are fertile for so long, relatively speaking) as well as a common variation on the sexual/relational theme. (zeke here's cautioned against thinking that evolution has "goals" - relational me keeps wondering if his background is science or liberal arts or something completely different - though I'm not sure how that would challenge and/or back up my thoughts here. Hmm... take me off blather for a few days and I start wondering what X blatherskite would say to Y idea. I started off at blather spewing ideas and silly jokes; who would've thought the social aspect would be the one that drew me back? Is that natural? Is it sugary? Is it natural sugar? 140814 what's it to you? who go blather from