I think pedophilia is an atavism caused by the fact that just a couple of hundred years ago, people used to marry quite young (when they were literally children in our eyes) and this proclivity has not had a chance to get completely evolved out of society yet. There are different examples of these atavisms in many other people - for example, that instinctive phobia some people have of snakes or spiders undoubtedly comes from prehistoric days, when they were much larger and more dangerous.
I also agree that no want or need is abhorrent in and of itself, and that any behavior can be sublimated to a higher goal. For example, my own flaw is that I tend to be an aggressive person - I love conflict and the adrenaline thrill of brutally crushing an enemy. This may sound hard to believe, but when I was younger, I actually went to a therapist for violent tendencies. While this "fight-or-flight" mutation may have been perfectly acceptable and even a plus in medieval times, it's not very advantagous now. So my therapist taught me to sublimate those urges into similar but more useful drives, like ambition, competitiveness, etc. While I grant that it's hard to imagine a pedophile channeling their urges into an "acceptable" way (or even imagine what that might be), I feel that we should at least try, rather than just writing people off because they were born different.
I also agree that no want or need is abhorrent in and of itself, and that any behavior can be sublimated to a higher goal. For example, my own flaw is that I tend to be an aggressive person - I love conflict and the adrenaline thrill of brutally crushing an enemy. This may sound hard to believe, but when I was younger, I actually went to a therapist for violent tendencies. While this "fight-or-flight" mutation may have been perfectly acceptable and even a plus in medieval times, it's not very advantagous now. So my therapist taught me to sublimate those urges into similar but more useful drives, like ambition, competitiveness, etc. While I grant that it's hard to imagine a pedophile channeling their urges into an "acceptable" way (or even imagine what that might be), I feel that we should at least try, rather than just writing people off because they were born different.
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