healthy in the Catholic sense/

[superblue]

Urges, be it sexual or not; why is it from the stand point of the Church for us as humans; when we have a natural make up or chemical imbalance or what ever that makes us, us ; to there by decide that okay, even though God made me this way, it is better and even healthier that I deny those urges.

Because then the turn around is, well we are made in the image and likeness of God, so how then can anyone rationalize away issues / urges from a sexual nature, to obesity and call that gluttony , or ssa, or what ever else someone down the line might throw out in the topic .........

 

or does it eventually boil down to that is what the Church believes and teaches and we either choose to accept it or not.

[beatitude]

Even from non-Catholic perspective, not all urges are healthy. Someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder might have an urge to wash their hands until their skin chaps and their hands bleed, someone with severe depression might have an urge to cut themselves, and so on. 'Illness' and 'health' are not two polar opposite things, they exist on a spectrum, so it is possible for otherwise healthy people to have unhealthy urges - to eat all the cream cakes in one go, for example, or to punch someone who has upset them. Just because an urge is biological doesn't mean it's what best for you. We are blessed with reason as well as pure biological urges, so we can say to ourselves, "Yup, the cream cakes are delicious and it's nice to enjoy them, but it will only mess with my pancreas and make me selfish if I eat ten of them every day without sharing, so I won't give into this impulse to scoff them all."  A healthy life is a balanced life, where we look after the needs of our body without becoming a slave to our cravings, and this means we need prayer and reason as well as biological impulses - being healthy means integrating all of these things. As human beings we sometimes struggle to do that, because we are fractured by sin, and sometimes we are troubled by urges that aren't even healthy if followed in moderation, like St Paul's thorn in the flesh (but even that had its purpose, to make him humble). Our whole life is a process of being conformed to Christ and transformed in him, so eventually we are made whole.

[Norseman82]

God gave us an "out".

It's called heterosexual marriage.

[MarysLittleFlower]

Remember those things are the effects of the fall.. not how God made us originally. We are still in His image because our nature is not destroyed. However, He didn't give us concupiscence - we got that through disobeying Him with original sin. Adam and Eve before the Fall, or Our Lady - didn't have concupiscence and their physical nature completely obeyed their soul, and their soul completely obeyed God. St Augustine talks about a dis-ordering that happened in us after the fall, where through pride the soul wants to rebel against God, and the body against the soul - so we want to do what we know we shouldn't. We are supposed to become sanctified as Christians and resist all those urges, and learn to submit our souls to God and our bodies to our souls.

God gave us an "out".

It's called heterosexual marriage.

however I don't think marriage was created as a way to deal with concupiscence originally, because Adam and Eve were at an unfallen state and marriage/family was already a plan for humanity. Also, lust within marriage is still lust and it's not ok to act on any urges in marriage just because they happen. Married people need to practice self control too and each vocation involves penance. It's an occasion to grow in sanctity, not to gratify lust, even though marriage gives a valid licit way to act upon one's sexuality without sin. If someone really can't be celibate, it could help them to marry to not sin, but they'd still have to learn restraint and not introduce lust into the marriage, which could happen.

Also we need grace to be chaste, and those who are not called to marriage aren't called there because they naturally don't struggle in this area, but because of a supernatural calling that gives them the grace to be celibate. Married people also need grace to practice chastity within marriage.