"Natural"

Natural, it means good right?  Nothing that is natural can be bad for you?  I cringe every time I hear someone say that it's good for you because it's natural, or it has no side effects because it's natural. Pagans and people who eat organic food are the biggest perpetrators of this myth, and it is a very dangerous one at that. Don't get me wrong, I prefer organic food and would rather use 'natural' remedies; I just don't automatically assume that just because something is natural means that it won't hurt me. Maybe it's the allergies, perhaps it's my chemistry knowledge, or possibly it is because I like playing with rose bushes with my bare hands.

There are two thoughts that jump immediately into my mind when I hear someone say that because it's 'natural' it's safe. Those are, arsenic is perfectly natural and will kill you, followed by belladonna is natural and, while it is used as a medicine, it will kill you. If you aren't careful, Nature will hurt you, or possibly kill you.

And the argument that being gay isn't 'natural' never seemed right to me. For one thing, there are animals who are gay. I'm thinking about the two gay penguins in the New York zoo who raised a chick. Another is that we humans do a lot of things that are 'unnatural'. What I mean there is, that it's not unnatural, but even if it were, it still wouldn't matter. We get too hung up on certain types of natural that we ignore others and at times, I think we forget that nature does not care about us the way we would like to think it does.