No One Has Ever Defeated Death

The one problem humanity has never been able to eliminate is death.

We can accumulate wealth, build empires, acquire power, alter our bodies, manipulate our genes, replace failing organs, and develop increasingly sophisticated machines. We can even imagine a future in which aging is slowed and human life extends far beyond its current limits.

But there is one question no technology has yet been able to answer:

How do we defeat death once and for all?

Every so often, urban legends resurface about the world's wealthiest elites, elderly billionaires supposedly willing to pay enormous sums to receive blood or plasma from young donors, as though youth itself could somehow be transferred from one body to another. There is genuine scientific research into the effects of certain blood components and the biology of aging, but we are still nowhere near a procedure capable of turning young blood into a source of immortality.

The same applies to human cloning.

Science fiction has already shown us some of the darkest possibilities. In The Island, unsuspecting human beings are created as biological reserves for their "owners," destined to be sacrificed so that their organs and tissues can be harvested. It is one of the most disturbing nightmares imaginable: turning a human being into a warehouse of spare parts.

Reality, of course, is very different. Scientists are working on stem cells, regenerative medicine, bioengineered tissues, and artificial organs. It is conceivable that one day many parts of the human body could be replaced or regenerated.

But even if we reached the point where we could replace a heart, a liver, a kidney, or even parts of the brain, one question would remain:

How much of us can be replaced before we stop being ourselves?

And above all: how long can we postpone death before we finally have to face it?

That is the paradox of our age.

As we witness the emergence of fortunes on an unprecedented scale, and even talk about the world's first trillionaire, we are forced to acknowledge that not even the richest person on Earth can buy what human beings have always wanted.

They can buy a house, but not a second existence.

They can buy better medical care, but not necessarily another youth.

They may be able to buy time.

But they cannot buy eternity.

And perhaps this is where Roy Batty's words in Blade Runner acquire a meaning that goes far beyond science fiction.

Roy does not ask for wealth. He does not ask for power. He does not ask for an empire.

He simply asks for more life.

It is perhaps the most elementary and desperate request a human being can make when they realize that their candle is about to go out.

And someone might answer that the candle has already been burned at both ends.

It is a devastating metaphor because the problem is not merely that life is short. It is also the way we consume it. We may reach the end of our lives only to discover that we cannot buy more time—and that we have already burned through too much of the time we were given.

Perhaps, however, the future could open an entirely different path.

Not necessarily through the human body, but through machines.

If artificial intelligence were one day to become genuinely self-aware, capable of preserving its memories indefinitely and transferring them continuously from one physical medium to another, it might theoretically escape the same biological cycle of birth, growth, decay, and death.

An artificial body could break.

A computer could fail.

A server could be destroyed.

But a digital consciousness, if such a thing were ever possible, might perhaps be transferred elsewhere.

And then we encounter an even more disturbing question:

If we transferred all our memories, personality, and patterns of thought into a machine, would we actually have transferred ourselves—or merely created a copy that believed it was us?

We do not know.

Perhaps technology will one day allow us to extend biological life enormously. Perhaps it will enable us to progressively replace parts of our bodies. Perhaps it will even create forms of artificial existence that we cannot currently imagine.

But so far, no one has defeated death.

And this is where Christianity becomes unique.

If we take the Gospels seriously, then there was once a man who did precisely what no billionaire, scientist, or technology has ever managed to do:

Jesus Christ died and then rose again.

The difference is enormous.

Christianity does not merely promise to extend life. It does not promise a biologically improved version of humanity. Its central claim is far more radical:

death does not have the final word over human beings.

From a religious perspective, this gives Christianity an extraordinary claim.

The founders of the great religions belong to history and to death. Their tombs are part of the memory of their respective traditions. Christianity, by contrast, is founded upon the proclamation that Christ's tomb could not hold His body because He had risen from the dead.

Of course, this is not a scientific demonstration.

It is a matter of faith.

And this is precisely where Christianity becomes both immensely powerful and profoundly vulnerable.

You have to believe it.

If Christ truly rose from the dead, then the Christian promise is infinitely greater than anything technology could ever achieve. The goal is no longer to gain ten, one hundred, or one thousand additional years of life.

It is the ultimate victory over death.

But if Christ did not rise, everything changes.

At that point, religion risks becoming something else: a system of power built upon the fear of death, the promise of an afterlife, and the authority of those who claim to administer that promise.

And this is where the history of the Church becomes uncomfortable.

We cannot seriously claim that the entire clergy regarded the Resurrection as a fairy tale for the ignorant masses. Such a generalization would be historically indefensible.

But we can certainly observe a recurring and disturbing contradiction: men who represented Christ sometimes lived in ways radically incompatible with the Gospel they preached.

Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia, is one of the most extreme examples of this contradiction.

A pope—the highest earthly representative of the Catholic Church—immersed in struggles for power, wealth, dynastic ambition, and the scandals that marked his pontificate.

This does not prove that Alexander VI personally disbelieved in the Resurrection. We cannot know with certainty what was in his conscience.

But it demonstrates something more general:

It is possible to occupy a central position in an institution founded upon Christ's victory over death and, at the same time, live as though the Gospel had no real consequences for one's own existence.

Perhaps this is why Christian history cannot be understood merely through its popes, bishops, and institutions.

We must also look at the saints.

The mystics.

The martyrs.

Those who took the Christian promise seriously enough to follow it to its most extreme consequences.

Because the martyr, more than anyone else, puts the promise of the Resurrection to the test.

If death is the absolute end, the martyr loses everything.

But if Christ truly rose from the dead, then death may destroy the body without having the final word over the human being.

That is the Christian wager.

And it is an enormous one.

Modern technology tells us:

We can try to gain more time.

Money tells us:

I can afford better treatment and perhaps buy a few more years.

Science fiction tells us:

Perhaps one day we will be able to transfer consciousness into machines.

Christianity says something entirely different:

Death has been defeated.

Not slowed down.

Not postponed.

Not circumvented.

Defeated.

But precisely because this claim is so extraordinary, it cannot be demonstrated like a mathematical equation or the workings of a machine.

It must be believed.

And perhaps that is the real difference between the technological promise and the Christian one.

Technology may promise us more life.

Christianity promises life beyond death.

One promise can be pursued in laboratories, with billions of dollars and decades of research.

The other belongs to faith.

And in the end, we return once again to Roy Batty.

The technological human being, standing before death, can only ask:

"Give me more life."

Perhaps one day we will be able to do exactly that.

Perhaps we will extend human life far beyond its current limits. Perhaps the wealthy will be able to afford things that are unimaginable today. Perhaps we will build machines capable of remembering forever what we inevitably forget.

But no one yet knows how to turn more life into eternal life.

And while we continue searching for the formula of immortality, there remains one possibility that no laboratory can verify and no fortune can purchase:

That two thousand years ago, in a tomb in Jerusalem, something happened that changed the meaning of death forever.

If it is true, then death did not win.

If it is not true, then death has won everything.

The Real Enemy of Islamic Fundamentalism Is Not Christianity — It’s the Shopping Mall

When we talk about Islam, especially in the West, the conversation almost inevitably turns to terrorism, fundamentalism, immigration, and the so-called clash of civilizations. But this way of looking at the issue can make us lose sight of something deeper: the relationship between Islam and modernity.

Because perhaps the most interesting question is not simply whether Islam is compatible with the West. It is this:

What happens to a religion when the society in which it exists gradually becomes secular?

And this is where the comparison with European Christianity becomes unavoidable.

A Christianity That Had a Church to Rebel Against

European secularization followed a particular path partly because Christianity had a very specific institution at its center: the Church.

There was a clergy. There was a hierarchy. There was the papacy. There were religious institutions with enormous political, economic, and cultural power.

For centuries, European society could therefore identify religion with concrete institutions against which, sooner or later, a reaction would emerge.

The Enlightenment, liberalism, anticlericalism, socialism, and modernity could fight a very tangible battle: a battle against ecclesiastical power.

The situation within Sunni Islam is different.

An imam is not a Catholic priest. He does not possess an equivalent sacramental authority, nor does he belong to a universal hierarchy. In many respects, he is closer to a Protestant pastor: he leads prayers, teaches, interprets religious tradition, and performs religious functions, but he is not part of a universal Church governed by a centralized hierarchy.

There are, of course, major institutions of Sunni scholarship, with al-Azhar in Cairo being perhaps the best-known example. But there is no single Sunni authority comparable to the Catholic Church.

And that changes things considerably.

In Europe, secularization could take the form of a rebellion against organized religion.

Within Sunni Islam, it can happen in a much quieter way.

Secularization Without a Revolution

A person can continue to identify as Muslim because their parents are Muslim, because their family is Muslim, because their country is Muslim, because that is the identity they inherited.

They may continue to pray, fast during Ramadan, observe certain religious rules, and participate in religious celebrations.

But that does not necessarily mean that faith still has the same inner force.

We know this perfectly well in Europe. How many Italians still describe themselves as Catholic simply because they always have, while rarely going to church? How many celebrate Christmas, Easter, religious weddings, and funerals without faith actually occupying a central place in their lives?

Religion can survive as an identity even after losing part of its spiritual power.

In Muslim societies, this process may be harder to see precisely because it does not necessarily involve an explicit declaration of rupture.

It is not necessarily apostasy.

It is more like silent secularization, in which religion remains present but can gradually become a social habit.

Of course, it would be absurd to generalize and suggest that Muslims are somehow less sincere in their faith than Christians. Millions of Muslims live their religion with profound spiritual conviction.

But the sociological phenomenon is worth considering: a society can remain formally religious while becoming progressively more secular in its behavior, desires, and mindset.

Islam Is Certainly Not Devoid of the Supernatural

There is another distinction worth making.

Islam is not a religion without the supernatural. Quite the opposite. Angels, jinn, prophets, revelation, the Last Judgment, Paradise, and Hell are fundamental elements of its worldview.

The difference lies more in how the supernatural is expressed in everyday religious life.

Catholic Christianity developed an extraordinary culture of miracles: saints, relics, apparitions, healings, stigmata, pilgrimages, and sacred images.

In orthodox Sunni Islam, the relationship with God is less mediated by a priestly class and by a vast network of saints and sacraments.

This does not mean that the supernatural is absent.

It means that it takes a different religious form.

Wahhabism and the Fear of Religious Decline

From this perspective, Wahhabism can be understood as a response to the fear of religious decline.

The idea was simple and radical: return to the Islam of the earliest generations, eliminate religious innovations, purify the faith, and bring religious life back to the Qur'an and the Prophetic tradition.

Then modernity arrived.

European colonialism arrived. The Ottoman Empire collapsed. Nation-states emerged. Capitalism, urbanization, technology, Western culture, and eventually globalization transformed Muslim societies.

And the Muslim world found itself facing the same question that had already tormented Europe:

How can a society become modern without ceasing to be religious?

The answers have been numerous, and often deeply incompatible with one another.

Fundamentalism is only one of them.

But Fundamentalists May Be Underestimating Something

For decades, parts of the radical Islamist worldview have imagined the West as a civilization destined to decline.

Conquest was supposed to come through demographics, immigration, conversion, and the gradual replacement of Western laws with Islamic law.

But this vision may have underestimated the real power of the West.

Because the West is not simply parliament, constitutions, democracy, or a legal system.

It is also a vast cultural system built around desire.

And the real competitor of Islamic radicalism may be precisely that.

Not Christianity.

The shopping mall.

The Devil of the Shopping Mall

It may sound provocative, but think about it.

A young man raised in a madrasa in a poor country may be told that the West is corrupt, decadent, and morally bankrupt.

Then he picks up a smartphone.

And through that smartphone, he sees the world.

He sees cars, universities, hospitals, skyscrapers, restaurants, travel, video games, music, fashion, technology.

He sees an enormous range of possibilities.

And above all, he sees something incredibly simple:

the possibility of desire.

Consumer culture does not ask him to convert.

It does not ask him to read a philosophy book.

It does not even ask him to believe in anything.

It simply tells him:

you can have more.

You can choose.

You can buy.

You can travel.

You can have fun.

You can change.

You can become whoever you want to be.

That is an extraordinarily powerful promise.

And it is very difficult to fight it simply by saying that it is sinful.

Paradise After Death Versus Paradise Now

Here we encounter a curious paradox.

Fundamentalism promises Paradise after death.

Consumer society, by contrast, tries to construct a small version of paradise before death.

It does not necessarily offer salvation.

It offers something more immediate: pleasure, comfort, entertainment, choice.

But consumerism has a huge weakness of its own.

It can satisfy many desires, but it has no answer to death.

It can sell you a car, a house, a holiday, a computer, and increasingly sophisticated virtual experiences.

But it still cannot sell you immortality.

And that may be its greatest weakness.

Because Eventually, the Same Question Always Returns

We can become wealthy.

We can live longer.

We can modify our bodies.

We can use technology to overcome limitations that, only a few decades ago, seemed impossible to overcome.

We can desire almost anything.

But sooner or later, death arrives.

And in the face of death, the shopping mall suddenly becomes silent.

Consumption is no longer enough.

Technology is no longer enough.

Success is no longer enough.

And the question humanity has asked since the beginning returns:

What comes after?

Perhaps this is precisely where fundamentalism continues to find its strength. Not necessarily because it is stronger than modernity, but because it addresses a question that modernity, by itself, has never been able to answer.

That is also why I do not believe the future can simply be described as a victory of the West over Islam.

The real struggle may be much deeper.

On one side is a religion that promises meaning, belonging, and eternal life.

On the other is a secular civilization offering freedom, wealth, technology, and an unprecedented range of individual possibilities.

And in the middle, there are all of us.

Human beings who want to live well, be free, have everything they can possibly desire and, if possible, never die.

We can desire everything.

We can buy almost everything.

We can conquer almost everything.

But we still cannot buy immortality.

And perhaps, if God really exists, it is precisely there — in the face of death, when every other promise comes to an end — that He may yet have the last word.

The Devil of Progress: When Consumption Replaced Faith

When we think about the secularization of the West, we tend to look for its causes in ideas: the Enlightenment, science, liberalism, social movements, the decline of religious authority. All of these things matter. But there is something even more concrete that we often forget:

the way we live has changed.

For thousands of years, most Europeans lived in predominantly agricultural and pastoral societies. The family was an economic unit as much as an emotional one. Land meant survival. The community was where people were born, lived, worked, married, and died. Religion was not something practiced only on Sundays. It was woven into everyday life: the calendar, festivals, marriages, funerals, births, moments of fear, and moments of hope.

Then, within just a few generations, everything changed.

People left the countryside and moved to cities. Work moved from farms and family workshops into factories, offices, shops, and eventually the service economy. The family gradually lost many of its economic functions. Local communities became less important. Individuals acquired a degree of freedom their ancestors could hardly have imagined.

And along with that freedom came something new:

mass consumption.

This, I believe, is one of the keys to understanding the contemporary West.

The peasant produced. The industrial worker worked. Modern man increasingly consumes.

This is not a condemnation of supermarkets. I go to them too. The question is much deeper: what happens when consumption stops being merely a means of satisfying our needs and becomes one of the main ways in which we define ourselves?

You only have to walk into a modern shopping mall to get a sense of it.

It is curious. The old temples were places where people went to remind themselves that something existed beyond them. Shopping malls are places where people go to discover how many things they can possibly desire.

The comparison is deliberately provocative, but it says something.

Advertising no longer simply tells us, "You need this product." It tells us that the product can make us more attractive, younger, happier, more desirable, more successful, more free.

It doesn't merely sell objects.

It sells possibilities.

And a society built around possibilities inevitably begins to look suspiciously at limits.

This also helps explain the transformation of social values.

In a traditional agricultural society, people were born into a series of identities they had not chosen: a family, a village, a religion, a social class, a trade, a community. That did not necessarily make them happy. But their identity was deeply connected to something that existed before them.

Modernity broke many of those constraints.

And in many respects, that was a good thing.

Women gained rights that had previously been denied to them. Minorities gained the ability to demand dignity and equality. Millions of people acquired freedoms that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.

When we see today's Woke movement challenging patriarchy, we should remember that behind it lie decades—and in some cases centuries—of struggles for women's rights and the rights of minorities.

And when we see a Gay Pride parade, we should not make the mistake of thinking that homosexuality itself was invented by modernity.

It wasn't.

Homosexuality has existed throughout human history.

But the contemporary Gay Pride movement is a product of modernity.

In a traditional agricultural and pastoral society, it would have been essentially inconceivable to see thousands of people marching publicly to assert a sexual identity. Not because homosexual people did not exist, but because the social conditions that make such a phenomenon possible did not exist: large cities, individualism, anonymity, mass communication, modern political organization, individual rights, and a radically different understanding of personal identity.

The world in which we live changed.

And as the world changed, so did the way we understand ourselves.

But there is something else that I find even more interesting.

Capitalism does not necessarily need to destroy a cultural revolution.

It can sell it.

A protest can become an event. An identity can become a market. A political cause can become an advertising campaign. A difference can become a brand.

This does not mean that LGBT rights were created by corporations, any more than feminism was invented by the market.

It means that contemporary capitalism possesses an extraordinary ability:

it can absorb almost anything.

Even things that were originally created in opposition to it.

And this brings us to religion.

Why did the West become secular?

Part of the answer certainly lies in ideas. But another part lies in everyday life.

For centuries, God was present in an enormous number of aspects of human existence. Today, many of the functions once associated with religion have been taken over by other institutions.

Medicine protects us from disease.

The welfare state protects us from poverty.

Schools provide knowledge.

Science explains the physical world.

Technology solves problems.

Entertainment fills our free time.

And the market offers us an astonishing range of things to buy.

And so God can gradually become less necessary.

Not necessarily because someone actively fought against Him.

Simply because He is no longer needed to organize everyday life in the way He once was.

Perhaps this is the deepest form of secularization.

Not the denial of God.

His irrelevance.

This is why I find it difficult to take seriously those theories that explain the religious crisis of the West through black masses, satanic rituals supposedly performed by global elites, Beelzebub, or mysterious Masonic lodges.

We do not need to imagine a global elite gathering in a dark room to understand what happened.

If we want to use the word "devil," I would rather use it as a metaphor.

The devil of the modern world would not need to perform a black mass.

It would only need to convince us that there are no limits to what we should desire.

Its temple would not be a crypt.

It would be a shopping mall.

And its ritual would not be an occult ceremony.

It would be the shopping cart.

We enter. We choose. We desire. We buy.

And tomorrow we desire something else.

It is a religion without God and without transcendence, but it has its own daily rituals: advertising, purchasing, gratification, replacement, desire.

The problem, of course, is not progress itself.

Without progress, we would still be living with diseases we can now treat, widespread illiteracy, high infant mortality, extreme poverty, and countless injustices that humanity has rightly fought to overcome.

The problem begins when progress stops being a tool and becomes a faith.

When we assume that every change is necessarily an improvement.

When we confuse freedom with the absence of all limits.

When consumption becomes the answer to our anxieties.

When family, community, tradition, and even patriotism are perceived merely as outdated obstacles to individual freedom.

And yet, in the end, there is one limit that even the most powerful economic system will never be able to erase.

We can desire everything.

We can buy cars, houses, holidays, clothes, experiences, medicines, technology, comfort. We can build increasingly sophisticated machines and imagine a future in which technology will solve problems that today seem impossible.

But we cannot buy immortality.

And this is precisely where, for those who believe, God might have the last word.

Because we may eventually conquer almost everything that belongs to the material world, but one question remains before which money, markets, and technology all come to a halt:

What happens when our life ends?

Perhaps death is the one limit that the consumer society will never be able to turn into a commodity.

And there is another irony.

In our attempt to consume more and more, we may end up consuming the very world that makes our consumption possible.

Land, water, energy, forests, biodiversity, raw materials: everything has limits. A civilization built on the assumption of virtually unlimited material growth must eventually confront the finite nature of the planet.

We do not know where the breaking point lies, nor whether humanity will actually experience an ecological collapse. But we can imagine the extreme scenario.

A post-apocalyptic society.

Not necessarily a simple return to the Stone Age. It could be something much stranger:

advanced technologies surviving alongside surprisingly archaic forms of social organization.

Intermittent electricity grids, drones, artificial intelligence and computer systems existing alongside self-sufficient local communities. The ruins of great cities standing beside fortified villages. Scientific knowledge preserved by small elites while much of the population returns to agriculture, animal husbandry, local production, and barter.

A new Middle Ages, perhaps.

Not the historical Middle Ages, of course, but a new age in which technology and archaism coexist.

History, after all, is not a staircase on which every generation automatically climbs one step higher than the previous one.

We like to imagine progress as a straight line: every generation richer, better educated, more technologically advanced and more free than the one before it.

But history does not always work that way.

There have been collapses, fractures, political breakdowns, economic crises, epidemics, wars, migrations, and cultural regressions. The fall of the Western Roman Empire is certainly one of the most famous examples, but it is hardly the only moment in history when complex systems entered into crisis and were replaced by very different forms of organization.

Every generation is new compared with the generations that came before it.

And no generation is guaranteed to be better.

Perhaps that is the lesson we have forgotten.

Progress is not a benevolent deity leading humanity inevitably toward an earthly paradise.

It is a tool.

And like every tool, it can be used to build or to destroy.

We have built an extraordinarily powerful civilization. Now we must discover whether we are wise enough not to consume the conditions that make that civilization possible.

Because perhaps the real "Devil of Progress" is not the one that tells us what to do.

It is the one that convinces us that we can have everything.

Everything except immortality.

And perhaps, precisely at that boundary, modern man may discover that God was never dead.

He was simply waiting.

Is Homosexuality a Substitute? The Contradictions Behind the Theories That Try to Explain It

One of the hardest things for some people to accept is that sexual orientation actually exists. Not simply sexual behavior, not sexual practice, not habit, but something involving attraction and the way a person experiences desire.

Perhaps even harder is accepting something else: homosexuality is no longer considered a psychiatric disorder.

The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the DSM in 1973. The World Health Organization removed it from the International Classification of Diseases in 1990. It is therefore not a pathology that contemporary medicine considers something to be cured.

For some religious communities, this created—and continues to create—a serious problem. If homosexuality is not an illness, it becomes much harder to speak of “healing.” And yet, particularly in some North American evangelical circles, so-called reparative or conversion therapies continue to circulate, despite the consensus of major scientific and medical organizations that sexual orientation is not a pathology to be corrected.

This is where a whole series of alternative explanations begins.

One of the most common is that homosexuality is, essentially, a substitute.

The reasoning seems straightforward: when a person cannot have sexual relations with the opposite sex, sexuality will nevertheless seek an outlet. Hence the sailors spending months at sea, all men, confined together in a limited space. Hence prisons, where people are forced to live together, often under harsh conditions. Hence convents and monasteries, where men and women live separately and sexuality is supposed to be restrained.

In the absence of the opposite sex, according to this interpretation, desire simply finds a replacement.

The same reasoning is sometimes applied to people who supposedly have greater difficulty finding a partner: the shy, unattractive, socially isolated young man; the woman considered undesirable by men. If the opposite sex is unavailable—or consistently rejects them—desire will supposedly find another outlet.

But it takes only a little attention to reality to see that something does not quite add up.

What happens when the gay man in front of us is handsome, confident, socially desirable, and exactly the kind of man who could easily attract plenty of women?

And what happens when the lesbian woman is beautiful, charismatic, desired by men, and perfectly capable of participating in the conventional heterosexual dating world?

This is where the old stereotype of the ugly, awkward, shy person who is systematically rejected begins to fall apart.

If homosexuality were really a refuge for people who cannot succeed with the opposite sex, then an attractive gay man who is openly desired by women would have very little reason to resort to such a “substitute.” And an attractive lesbian woman who is desired by men would have even less reason to do so.

Yet homosexuality does not disappear as physical attractiveness increases.

In fact, the mere existence of homosexual people who are perfectly aware that they could be desired by the opposite sex creates a major problem for the substitute theory.

If you have every opportunity to obtain what the theory says you ought to want, why do you continue to want something else?

The question does not, by itself, prove the origin of sexual orientation. But it is enough to undermine an overly simplistic explanation.

Perhaps we are not dealing with someone who cannot obtain what they want and therefore settles for something else.

Perhaps we are dealing with someone who actually wants that thing.

And that apparently minor distinction changes the entire problem.

A prisoner may have sex with another man without being gay. A sailor may have a homosexual experience during a long period at sea and continue to be attracted to women. A person may engage in a sexual act that does not correspond to their sexual orientation.

And this is where the argument becomes more complicated.

It explains behavior, not necessarily orientation.

If homosexuality were simply a sexual outlet caused by the absence of the opposite sex, we should expect the attraction to return automatically toward the opposite sex once the obstacle disappeared.

But even that conclusion is not so simple.

Because the obstacle is not always actually removed.

A person who has spent years being excluded, rejected, marginalized, or convinced that they cannot succeed with the opposite sex may develop expectations, habits, and mental patterns that end up reinforcing the original belief. The prophecy can become self-fulfilling: I believe I am undesirable, I behave like someone expecting rejection, I interpret ambiguous signals as confirmation of rejection, and I eventually accumulate precisely the experiences that reinforce my original conviction.

At that point, the explanation can easily be modified.

It is no longer merely the original “substitute” that supposedly produces the behavior. Habit, the strengthening of neural connections, reward mechanisms, cognitive biases, and the tendency to seek confirmation of one's existing beliefs all enter the picture.

And this is where an apparently simple theory risks becoming remarkably elastic.

If a person changes, one can say that the therapy worked.

If they do not change, one can say that the habit was too deeply ingrained.

Or that their cognitive patterns were too firmly established.

Or that they were unconsciously seeking confirmation of their identity.

Or, more simply still, that they did not want it badly enough.

And this last explanation creates a serious problem.

Because attributing the failure of reparative therapy to a patient's lack of will can turn the theory into something that is virtually impossible to disprove.

If it works, the theory was correct.

If it does not work, the patient is to blame.

It is a logical mechanism that resembles a familiar kind of rhetoric found in Neuro-Linguistic Programming: if the method produces the desired result, the method works; if it does not, the person apparently did not believe strongly enough, did not try hard enough, or did not apply the technique correctly.

But a theory capable of explaining every possible outcome risks explaining nothing at all.

It is like building a door that always opens, provided we are allowed to decide afterward what “opening” means.

And this brings us back to the starting point.

If homosexuality were merely a behavior produced by an obstacle, then once the obstacle was removed, the behavior should gradually lose its function.

If the answer is instead that the obstacle may remain inside the mind, that habits can become entrenched, that neural pathways can become reinforced, and that people can unconsciously confirm their own identities, then the explanation becomes considerably more complicated.

But above all, one thing would still have to be demonstrated rather than simply assumed:

that the homosexual behavior originated precisely because of that obstacle.

Otherwise we risk using the consequence as proof of the cause.

And this brings us to the most delicate point in the entire argument: sexual behavior, sexual attraction, and sexual identity are not necessarily the same thing.

A prisoner can engage in homosexual behavior without being gay.

A gay man can be a virgin and already know that he is gay.

A heterosexual person can have a homosexual experience without becoming homosexual.

And a homosexual person can have numerous heterosexual experiences without becoming heterosexual.

Sexual practice, therefore, does not appear to be some kind of stamp certifying one's orientation.

And this leads us to the simplest—and perhaps most devastating—question:

If you have never had sex with a man, how do you know you're gay?

The answer becomes immediately obvious when the question is turned around:

If you have never had sex with a woman, how do you know you're straight?

A virgin boy can fall in love with a girl. He can desire her. He can fantasize about her. He can know that he is attracted to women without ever having had sex.

Nobody would tell him, “You have to try it first. Then you can decide.”

Why should it be any different for a boy who falls in love with another boy?

Why, in the first case, is attraction considered sufficient evidence of orientation, while in the second, physical experience is demanded as proof?

Here, however, another question becomes even more interesting:

Why is this asymmetry so deeply rooted?

There is no need to invoke religion to explain it. Religions have certainly played a major role, in many historical periods and societies, in defining legitimate and illegitimate forms of sexuality. But the phenomenon is older and deeper than religion.

Human societies have been organized for thousands of years around reproduction, family, and lineage. The heterosexual couple constitutes the biological structure through which sexual reproduction occurs and, in traditional societies, the basis for filiation, inheritance, the transmission of family names, property, and social status.

Heterosexuality, therefore, was not merely considered “normal” in a moral sense. It was built into the very structure of society.

This helps explain why a heterosexual teenager is rarely asked to prove their orientation.

Their attraction to the opposite sex corresponds to what society expects, to what the traditional family has historically been organized around, and to what ensures the continuity of lineage.

Homosexuality, by contrast, did not fit the same reproductive framework.

And for precisely that reason, throughout history it has often been interpreted as an anomaly, a deviation, a vice, a sin, a disorder, or something to be hidden and suppressed.

This does not mean that every society has regarded homosexuality in the same way, nor that history can be reduced to a simple opposition between “tolerated heterosexuals” and “persecuted homosexuals.” Cultures have produced very different—and often contradictory—attitudes.

But one historical pattern is difficult to ignore:

heterosexuality has generally been the social and reproductive norm; homosexuality has often been treated as a deviation from that norm.

And perhaps this historical legacy helps explain some of the questions that are still directed at homosexual people today.

“When did you realize you were gay?”

“Are you sure?”

“Could it have been an experience?”

“Have you ever tried being with the opposite sex?”

Questions that appear to be seeking information.

But often they already contain an assumption.

They assume that heterosexuality is the default state from which we begin, while homosexuality is something that needs to be explained.

And so we return to the earlier question.

Why do we grant a heterosexual virgin the right to know their own orientation, while asking a gay virgin for evidence?

Perhaps because one orientation has historically been regarded as the norm and the other as the exception.

And when something is treated as an exception, there is an almost irresistible desire to find a cause for it.

If it is an anomaly, someone must have caused it.

If someone caused it, perhaps it can be corrected.

If it can be corrected, then the failure to correct it must have an explanation.

And so the circle closes.

Wrong upbringing. Pornography. Abuse. An “initiator.” Habit. Neural pathways. Trauma. Cognitive bias. Lack of willpower.

The circle closes.

But perhaps that is precisely the problem:

the circle has been designed to close no matter what happens.

If orientation were produced by sexual practice, we would have to explain how a person can desire that practice before ever experiencing it.

If, instead, desire precedes experience, sexual practice cannot automatically be regarded as the cause of orientation.

This does not mean that experiences have no influence on sexual life. Of course they can. Experiences can shape behavior, habits, fantasies, fears, preferences, and even the way a person understands themselves.

But influencing behavior is one thing.

Manufacturing a sexual orientation is another.

This is also where the discussion of pornography becomes more complicated. A person may encounter images, stories, or sexual experiences that amplify an existing curiosity, or may experiment out of curiosity, pressure, circumstance, or simple opportunity. But that does not automatically mean that they have “learned” to be homosexual.

Otherwise we would have to reach some rather strange conclusions.

We would have to imagine that every heterosexual person became heterosexual because someone taught them how to be heterosexual.

And we would have to ask when, exactly, that learning took place.

A theory that seeks to explain homosexuality as learned behavior would therefore also have to explain how heterosexuality is learned.

And perhaps this is the most revealing point of all.

We often fail to notice how asymmetrical the questions we ask homosexual people really are.

The experience can give a name to something that already exists.

It can also be the way someone discovers something about themselves.

But it does not necessarily mean that the experience created it.

Perhaps, then, the real difficulty is not accepting that some people engage in sexual behavior that differs from what religious morality considers permissible.

The difficulty is accepting that not everything we desire was chosen by us.

And that is a question much larger than homosexuality.

Because if sexual orientation is not a disease, not simply a vice, and not necessarily the result of learned behavior, then it becomes much harder to maintain that therapy, prayer, or moral discipline can simply transform it.

A person can choose a behavior.

They can choose whether or not to have sex.

They can choose marriage.

They can choose celibacy.

They can even choose to live their entire life without publicly expressing their sexual orientation.

But none of this means they can choose whom they are capable of desiring.

And perhaps this is precisely the contradiction that some theories are desperate to avoid.

Because if homosexuality were merely a substitute, removing the problem that supposedly caused it should be enough.

If it were merely a habit, it should be possible to unlearn it.

If it were merely an addiction, one should be able to detox from it.

If it were an illness, it should be possible to cure it.

But if none of these explanations is sufficient, a much more uncomfortable possibility remains.

That sexual orientation is a dimension of human experience that we can try to understand, interpret culturally, and judge morally, but that we did not simply choose.

And at that point, the question changes.

It is no longer:

“How do we make it stop?”

It becomes:

“What do we do when the reality of human beings does not match what we would like them to be?”

Science can help us answer part of that question. But ultimately, it also concerns morality, religion, society, and individual freedom.

And perhaps that is precisely why, even today, it remains so difficult to confront without reaching for reassuring explanations.

YOU DON’T EMIGRATE TO EXPORT UNDERDEVELOPMENT

People do not normally leave their country because they are perfectly happy with it.

They leave because they want to work. To earn more. To give their children a better future. To live in a safer, more prosperous society. They leave because they believe that somewhere else they will find opportunities that were unavailable to them at home.

That is the whole point of emigration.

You leave in search of something better.

You do not leave in order to recreate the conditions you were trying to escape.

Yet this rather obvious point has become strangely controversial.

Immigration is not simply the movement of human beings from one geographical location to another. People do not arrive as blank slates. They bring languages, customs, social habits, moral assumptions, ideas about family, authority, religion, work, property, individual responsibility and the law.

Culture travels with people.

To deny this is not tolerance. It is intellectual laziness.

If a country remains poor, unstable or chronically underdeveloped, we should be willing to ask an uncomfortable question: why?

Geography matters. History matters. Colonialism can matter. International politics matters. But none of these explanations is sufficient on its own.

A society also has what might be called an operating system.

It consists of its institutions, its habits, its unwritten rules and, above all, the assumptions people make about how society is supposed to work.

What does an individual owe to the community?

What does the community owe to the individual?

Is the law something to be obeyed—or something to be negotiated?

Does personal loyalty matter more than an impersonal institution?

Is advancement earned through competence and hard work, or through family connections and patronage?

Is individual responsibility a virtue, or is every failure someone else's fault?

These are not trivial cultural details.

They shape institutions.

And institutions shape societies.

This is where the intellectual tradition associated with becomes relevant. Behind institutions there is culture. Behind culture there is a particular view of the human person and of society.

Before you can understand the political structure of a society, you have to understand the mentality that produced it.

And mentality does not emerge from nowhere.

Religion has historically been one of its most powerful sources.

That does not mean that a particular religion mechanically produces either prosperity or poverty. Human societies are far too complicated for such childish formulas.

It means something much simpler—and much harder to deny.

Ideas matter.

Religious traditions have helped shape attitudes towards authority, family, gender, law, community, individual responsibility and the relationship between the individual and the collective. They have helped define what people consider sacred, legitimate, obligatory or forbidden.

A worldview is not decorative folklore.

It is part of the machinery of society.

Which brings us to integration.

Integration cannot mean that the host society provides everything while demanding nothing in return.

It cannot mean housing, welfare, education, healthcare and legal protection on one side, with no corresponding expectation of learning the language, obeying the law, respecting institutions and accepting the basic social norms of the country one has chosen to enter.

Integration works both ways.

And there is nothing remotely radical about saying so.

In fact, there is something deeply absurd about the alternative.

Imagine leaving a country because it offers little freedom, little security, little prosperity and few opportunities—then arriving in a country that has built precisely those things and demanding the right to reproduce the cultural and social patterns from which you were trying to escape.

That is not integration.

It is cultural importation.

And no successful society has an obligation to commit cultural suicide in the name of tolerance.

If you come to Europe because you recognize that Europe offers greater opportunities, then ask the obvious question:

Why does it offer those opportunities?

They did not fall from the sky.

They are the product of centuries of institutional development, legal evolution, economic growth and cultural change.

You cannot simply demand the fruits of a civilization while dismissing the historical, cultural and institutional foundations that produced them.

The immigrant who comes to work, obey the law, educate their children, build a future and become part of the society around them is not the problem.

The problem begins when immigration is treated as a one-way transaction: the host society is expected to provide, accommodate and apologise, while the newcomer is told that adaptation is somehow oppressive.

That is not integration.

That is surrender.

A confident society can welcome outsiders without apologising for its own identity.

It can be generous without being naive.

It can be tolerant without declaring every imported practice beyond criticism.

And it can say, without embarrassment, that some things are not negotiable: equality before the law, individual freedom, freedom of conscience, the rule of law, the rights of women, the protection of children and the authority of democratic institutions.

An open society can welcome people who are different.

But an open society still needs a centre.

If it becomes so terrified of asserting its own values that it refuses to distinguish between what it wants to preserve and what it does not wish to import, then it has ceased to be tolerant.

It has simply become confused.

And a civilization that has forgotten why it became prosperous should not be surprised when prosperity—and eventually cohesion—begin to disappear.

You don’t emigrate to export underdevelopment.

You emigrate to escape it.