Self-pleasing, Man-pleasing, God-pleasing

There are these 3 orientations of the self:

Towards itself

Towards others

Towards God

People usually have a mixture of these with one or two predominating the others.

Romans 12:1-2 reminds that pleasing God can only be possible through a living sacrifice of the body and a transformation of the mind to be able to discern God's acceptable will.

Galatians 1:10 challenges is to please God and not the world.

Jung talked of the mass man who falls prey to the images of the collective consciousness (what the world is demanding as ideal) rather than listening to the collective unconscious (analogous to the Imago dei, the designer's blueprint within us). Conforming to the world is equal to being incapable of pleasing God as well as being untrue to oneself - inauthentic existence. Transformation requires letting the Spirit work in our innerman to transform the way we are thinking so that our minds become capable of right perception unclouded by and free of  the consciousness of the masses, the world. This is important for individuation. This does not mean a denial of the outerworld but a proper and right orientation towards it that only comes by offering our body (that connects to the external world) as a living sacrifice to God who made us not merely worldly beings but spiritual beings in His own image and likeness. It is His image that we are to be transformed into. Obviously, this begins with first breaking the habit of conforming to the world image.

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Shaping a Scientific Sense of Self

SCIENCE	SELF
Causality (determinant factors)	Self-determination (freedom)
Essentiality (defining features)	Social disguise/identity (façade/front)
Objectivity (definite facts)	Subjective dispositions (feelings)

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Grammar, Culture, and Transgender

Accepting an anomaly into the grammar of social-culture might introduce meaning confusions and so humans naturally resist any disturbance of the prevailing system of meaning which is crucial for any proper communication/socialization to take place. That is an important factor why in traditional Asian societies like India, the transgender had to group away into a community of their own with their own socio-cultural grammar system that was different from the others. However, with the rise of liberalism, individualism, and postmodernism, systems of meaning are breaking down. Human consciousness identifies this as an omen of forthcoming rational catastrophe and would naturally attempt to forestall the same.

Whether homosexuality should be criminalized or whether same-sex marriages should be allowed much depends on the ideological position of a government in the spectrum of Individualists Vs Collectivists. The individualists would regard sexuality as a private matter while the collectivist would regard it as a social matter. Whether homosexuality is good or evil must be considered by looking at various moral theories, esp. the consequential and the deontological. Even from the evolutionary point of view, homosexuality has consequential disadvantage in the long-run (collectively speaking). In the short-run, it may only have some psychological benefit of "satisfaction", but "satisfaction" is not a moral criteria for value judgment..

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