First I will digress - this is already old on this thread, but for some reason stuck with me out of the blue. The statement that the Taliban are still doing alright in Afghanistan and are producing 80% of the world's opium is false. Afghanistan produced a great percentage of the world's opium before the Taliban came to power, and the Taliban actually put it to a rather abrupt stop. So if Afghanistan is supplying a lot of opium again, it is actually proof positive that the Taliban is a thing of the past.

I am not homosexual so I do not know if homosexuality is a choice, but I tend to think that it is not simply by trying to relate it to myself in some way. How I do that is to ask myself if I ever made a choice to be a heterosexual. Well, no I didn't. It was automatic and natural for me and there was never any question that I was interested in women and not men. I would tend to think it must be the same for homosexuals. While things seem to be changing some, it is still not easy to be a homosexual, and it seems to me that not a whole lot of people would make a decision to be homosexual and face those hardships unless it was a natural part of their being and something they had little control over. If it were a choice, it would be much easier to choose differently.

Given what I've said, I am not totally sure how to reconcile homosexuality with the religious teachings I have been getting through the course of my life. It seems to me that what I think of homosexuality is really irrelevant. I think all I really need to know is that my religion teaches compassion and forgiveness, not hate and intolerance. So regardless of my feelings toward the practice of homosexuality or whether or not my faith says it is wrong, I do know without a shadow of a doubt that at least my own religious faith still does teach that one should try to look beyond it.