While plenty of products are foisted on us as “natural,” let’s be honest, they’re not and we know it. “Natural” means as it occurs in nature: blackberries in a meadow or fresh venison. “Natural” foods according to the USDA are foods “that are minimally processed and free of synthetic preservatives.” That is, “natural” foods are fundamentally artificial, having been processed, preserved and, in all likelihood, made with hybridized rather than natural ingredients.

Even something as natural as the water we drink has been filtered, fluorinated, chlorinated, and goodness only know what-else-erated.

Not that I think this is a bad thing. Natural water is up there in the mountains just below the snowfields at 10,000 feet filling “pristine” lakes and streams, but, even there, no one drinks it. Hikers know enough to treat the pristine water with chemicals or boiling or microfiltration to avoid ingesting nasty bugs like giardia and cryptosporidium that occur naturally.

Our food, what we drink, the heated and cooled air we breath, our transportation, clothing, environment and pretty much everything else we bump into day by day is the result of human ingenuity. This is a good thing. As ones made in the image of God, we’re co-creators in a world that is incomplete (and potentially deadly) without our cultivation and stewardship.

The difficulty comes when we begin to believe that everything is fair game for human manipulation including humans. This is precisely the majority opinion in our culture and a fundamental divide between worldviews.

“Talking Past Each Other” is the apt title for an article by Ralph Hancock, political philosopher at Brigham Young University. His subtitle is “‘Love Wins’ vs. Human Nature.”

These two conflicting ideas are more than just political/social approaches to expanding marriage to include same-sex couples. These are worldviews, which is why we’re, “talking past each other.” Hancock writes, “one side is interested in human nature and its implications, in permanent features of the human condition as taught by both reason and revelation, and the other side — well, not so much.” Actually, not at all.

One worldview acknowledges the givenness of some facts of life — gender, motherhood, fatherhood, the value of children, timeless moral truths and the validity of human reason. The other worldview believes in the artificiality of all these things. Not even human nature is natural. We may begin with the raw material of humanity, but then constructed what we want to fit some preconceived design that fulfills some desired purpose.

Thus marriage is what you make of it based on sentiment. Gender is multiple choice based on how you’re feeling. Planned Parenthood is heroic for aborting babies and selling the parts, but the death of Cecil the lion is one of the greatest crimes in history.

When those who believe in permanent things raise questions or objections, they’re met with anger that I suspect stems more from incredulity than anything else (at least initially). How is it possible that any thinking person could believe that some things are simply given and unchangeable? Claiming the authority of reason or revelation is viewed, at best, as childish and, at worst, as a naked power-grab.

This is the reason traditional/natural views of marriage and sexuality are under attack. It’s also the primary reason religious liberty is under attack. If nothing is natural, everything is artificial, and, in the final analysis, arbitrary. Doctrines, beliefs, social structures, and the meaning of words can and should be changed to satisfy the desires of the moment.

Since the mainline/oldline denominations and many liberal Catholics have already shifted their worldview and tailored the faith to fit the Zeitgeist, the question arises of what’s wrong with the rest of us Christians. Don’t we want to be part of The Church of What’s Happening Now?

Well, no. While it would certainly make life simpler (this life, not necessarily the next), there is something to that much-maligned old bumper sticker that reads: “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.”

Besides, it’s kind of bracing that, in a world of processed, canned, artificial and under nourishing ideas, those of us who still believe in human nature, natural law and what Pope St. John Paul II and his successors have called “human ecology” are now the radicals.

St. John Paul II wrote that “… man too is God’s gift to man. He must therefore respect the natural and moral structure with which he has been endowed.” And if we won’t? Ralph Hancock notes, “As C.S. Lewis saw with great clarity more than seventy years ago, man’s mastery over nature — the abolition of nature — can only end in man’s mastery over mankind, ‘the abolition of man.’”

And the results will neither be natural nor will they be pretty.