The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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While in a post sexual revolution western world these things are considered vanilla, the largest religious organisation of the world in its official teaching still condemns all these things (even if its members don't always adhere to those official teachings). I reckon most philosophically literate people who agree to "homosexuality is wrong because it is unnatural" also condemn contraception. I guess there are a lot of Evangelicals today who think homosexuality is sinful and have less of a problem with contraception. This is actually a relatively novel phenomenon; all Protestants rejected contraception up till ~100 years ago or something. Luther and Calvin for instance strongly condemn any form of contraception in their commentaries on Genesis 38:9-10. I suspect the Evangelicals who have a looser attitude towards contraception and such while also condemning homosexuality (implicitly) subscribe to some sort of Divine Command Theory, rather than the Aristotelian Natural Law theory that is prominent in Catholic ethical teachings, and its the latter that tends to give us language about it being "unnatural", at least in a philosophical context. So I think for most people interested in philosophy the purported contradiction really does result from equivocating different meanings of the word 'natural'.
In Judaism, generally pretty much anything goes between married man and woman. Including many types of non-procreative sex, provided it does not become a habit and replaces procreative one, and not done with explicit intent to avoid procreation at all (so condoms will be frowned upon, for example). Of course, Orthodox Judaism does not allow male-male sexual relations (it's kinda unclear on female-female ones, I don't think there's an explicit prohibition but I am not entirely sure). Judaic language of course does not use terms like "natural" - one should do what The Lord said one should do, and "natural" doesn't come into it.
Obilgatory link to the Talmudic discussion of whether it is permissible for a man to insert his own penis into his own anus
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