By reason or by instinct?

Wrote this back in first year college. 🙂

“Do you know the difference between a human act and an act of man?”

The question got my attention which led me to put down the novel that I was reading during our Religion Class.

Rationality. A human act is dependent on a man’s will and intellect. A human act should thus have a definite reason. It has to have three elements: the act itself, the purpose, and the circumstances. The person who does the act should know the act, should be willing to do it, and should be aware of the consequences thereafter. On the other hand, the acts of man just arise from instincts. For instance, breathing. It is an instinctive act. It does not require thinking, it is done involuntarily.

I raised my hand. “The more we think about something, the more we try not to think about it,” I said. We tend to be so rational that we do things irrationally and consciously which only means that in everything that we do, whether irrational or not, we still have the privilege to act on our own will.

And so after our teacher explained further about the human act and the act of man, another question was raised by Clark.

“In the context of marriage, is sex done by reason or by instinct?”

I raised my hand.

“I believe it is an interplay of both reason and instinct. The purpose of having sex is to procreate and that will be our reason for doing it. But if we do not have the desire or instinct of doing it, how would we be able to push through with our purpose?”

Hmmm.. what do you think? Hihihi.