Souls

I was thinking about souls on my way to work the other morning. (I commute about an hour each way, so I have lots of time to think about stuff.) I know. I could be learning german or spanish I suppose, but those cds cost a lot of money, and I'm still paying off my deductible and out of pocket from my little health issue of last summer.

Not that I'm complaining! Glad to still be here. (No thanks to G.) But many thanks to the ER Doc, the helicopter pilot, the medivac EMTs, and my cardiologists, for all their training, skill, and ability!

Anyway, I've been thinking about souls, spirits, pneuma - whatever you want to call them - those immaterial and mysterious things which we are given, (at the moment of conception according to the catholic church, and at varying other points in fetal development according to other doctrines), which set us apart from the lesser animals like dogs and cats and great apes and monkeys. (Note: Monkeys have prehensile tails in the New World, and not prehensile tails in the Old World! Apes don't! Have long tails, prehensile or otherwise, that is. They might have souls, depending on whether souls and tails, or the absence thereof, are a suite of traits and always go together. If no tail is associated with no soul, then I guess we're all in deep shit. Then again, no soul means no burning in hell, (along with no rhythm), so it might all be good!)

So my first question is, how exactly does this getting a soul work? Is it like, the egg has half a soul, and the sperm has half a soul, and when the sperm penetrates the zona pellucida the two half souls combine, et voila'! instant soul? (Which begs the question of why white folk gots no rhythm. But I digress.)

Cool! Subject for another post! Anyway....

So what happens to all those little sperm half souls we men are crankin out at the rate of 120 to 500 million, (give or take a few hundred million), every 24 hours? Is that why christianity is so opposed to masturbation? Is the sound of all those little half souls screaming in the kleenex keeping G up at night? He could try ear muffs you know. Maybe a white noise generator, (to mask the little sperm screams, if that's the problem). Or G could have designed men to only produce one big sperm every twenty eight days, like he did with women and eggs. I mean, all those millions of redundant sperm, which will NEVER "get any", really seems rather wasteful to me. Though it does give Ezekiel the chance to slip a little porn into the scriptures. See Eze 23:19 - 20 "and lusted after her lovers there, whose cocks are like donkeys, and who cum like stallions."

(And how, perzakitly, did Ezekiel know the ejaculation volume of stallions? Wikipedia?)

Actually Ezekiel manages to slip quite a lot of porn into the scriptures, he goes on a length about various whores, (Oholah and Oholibah are two, and they sound like a couple of real hotties to me!), and how they loved to have egyptians, and assyrians, and I don't know who all, shoot their hot cum all over them.  But hey, he was a "man of god", and it's a "holy book", so I guess that makes it OK.

But if I had to define it -

Ezekiel = Porn

(I also think Ezekiel had deep seated feelings of... "personal inadequacy" ... shall we say? But again, that's another subject for another time.)

And don't EVEN get me started about Joshua and the canaanite genocide! (AKA biblical Snuff Porn.)

But, to be fair and balanced, the bible isn't ALL porn and genocide, after all there is...

The Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs, which =s Erotica. And pretty damn good erotica if you ask me! (How anyone could ever believe and accept the tortured spin taught in catholic theology and adopted by certain later protestant theologians, that the song is really about "the love of christ for his church", I don't know.  The Song of Songs is EROTICA! Though the psychological damage caused by the mental gymnastics required for people to actually believe that it's about "christs love for his church" would explain a LOT of otherwise inexplicable behavior!)

And, if I can trust my sources re translation, it should read, " ...his left hand were under my head, and that his right hand fondled me." Not "embraced", FONDLED! And just what, exactly, IS a "rose" of sharon? and the "lily " of the "valley"?  My NRSV says re "rose of sharon" "the meaning of the hebrew is uncertain". There is also a later reference to "my channel", again, "meaning in hebrew uncertain". Hmmmm.

Or, "Let my beloved come to his garden, and eat its choicest fruits."

And check out 7:6 - 9

Now. Back to semen. And its billions of wasted sperm.

Really. G should have foreseen this issue, (googols of half souls wasted over the course of human history), and dealt with it in the design stage. But he didn't. Again....

And if ensouling isn't the combining of two half souls to make one whole soul at the moment of conception, then does G do each soul implantation personally? Is it a "Hands On" process as it were? And if so, how then? I mean, at the very least it would require G, (or maybe certain specialized angels?), tracking the progression of every egg released by every ovary of every woman during every ovulation for the duration of every year of her fertility from the moment the first little thingie, (can't remember the name right now... oocyst? oocyte? oobie doobie? Isle of Langerhans?), ruptures, and releases the egg directly into her abdominal cavity - can you say big, huge, GIGANTIC design flaw? Can you say abdominal, or peritoneal implantation, and pregnancy? Ectopic pregnancy? Either of which, w/o surgical intervention, is invariably fatal to both mother and fetus/child/baby? This is Intelligent Design?  What say you ask any woman who suffers from endometriosis, (where cells from the endometrium have  migrated UP the fallopian tubes and implanted within the abdomen, where they then cycle and bleed and cause pain every month), what she thinks about this example of intelligent design.

Oh for Gs sake, spare me!

So, anyway, is G watching from the moment each egg is released until the moment it exits her body on its way to the landfill or the sewage treatment plant? And is G also tracking every sperm cell from moment of meiosis to its miserable end, again the sewage treatment plant or the landfill?

That would, of course,  require that G be present during every episode of coitus, voluntary or involuntary, everywhere on the planet, throughout the entirety of human history. (That would seem to indicate to me that G has a thing for live sex shows. But I could be wrong.)

But if G really is omniscient, I suppose he could have set everything up at the start, and be taking a nap right now. But that raises all these free will issues. Sigh...

If it isn't one thing, it's another.

And what about involuntary coitus? (More commonly known as rape.) Every instance of which an omniscient G has known (knew?) about since the beginning of time? Not to mention Gs serial commands to Moses and Joshua, that Israel engage in the kidnap and rape of young virgins.  (After the G commanded destruction of their various and sundry towns, and brutal murder of all said virgins parents, siblings, relatives, etc etc, most likely before those virgins very eyes? (Must be Gs version of foreplay, I guess. ) See: bible: pentateuch: opened pretty much at random. This, I believe, at the very least, constitutes instigation of and aiding and abetting in genocide, rape, involuntary servitude, human trafficking, conspiracy to commit gross crimes against humanity, etc etc.  

What say we bring G up on charges?

You'd think that a loving god would take better care of his daughters.

Oh wait, that's right. All women who are raped were "asking for it", and, since Eve ate that damn apple in direct disobedience of a divine command, well, obviously it's all HER fault! (This line of thought seems to have been taken to its logical conclusion in islam.)

But even so, would it be too much to ask that G intervene and prevent a woman who's been raped from conceiving? (Sadly there are idiots who actually DO believe this.) Couldn't all rapist sperm be lacking their half of the soul?  Since rapists seem to lack souls of their own. Or is G right there with a soul, waiting? Does G, for some reason, have no choice in the matter.

If so, there goes omnipotence.

Or does G make bets with Satan about which sperm gets to win the race, the competition, the lottery? (See: The Book of Job.) Does G choose which little swimmer gets the gold? Maybe G and Satan arm wrestle?

And you'd think, if G takes that much interest, that he would make sure that every little sperm (either guy or girl), and every little girl egg, (all eggs are female), was carrying his or her full complement of fully functional and correct genes. I mean what kind of god lets his childrens children die of tay sachs, or cystic fibrosis, or hemophilia, or any of the many other varied, unpleasant, painful, and ultimately lethal genetic defects.

What did those babies ever do to G?

G certainly could do that,
if he wanted to.

And if it isn't combining half souls to make whole souls at conception, but every soul is a "new" one, made special for the occasion, where do all these new souls come from?

I presume G made them. (At least that's what I gather from reading paul, in fact, paul seems to be implying that not only did G do that, but he also determined, prior to his act of creation, who would be saved and who wouldn't, thus allowing calvinism to later rear its ugly head.)  So then the question is, did he crank out every single soul necessary for his plan, (G is reputed to have a plan, for life, the universe, and everything), once and for all, at the very beginning, and are they now all in some kind of holding tank, or what?

If G's omniscient, one would think so, as that would have been the plan from the very start. (G's often said to be Omniscient by people in the know, you know!)

Except that I think the original plan was that there was only going to be Adam, so there would have been need for only one soul. But then G (and the mysterious "others") changed his (their?) mind and created Eve, so there's two, and then there's the entire apple episode, and there's no indication in genesis, (at least as I read it), that G originally planned for A and E to have sex and make babies. So when A and E eat the apple, and discover sex, and get kicked out of the garden, and start making babies, well, now we have another fine kettle of fish entirely! Humans being humans, we've been fucking our brains out, and making babies at an outrageous rate, ever since.

So then, does that mean G is like a Queen Bee or Termite Queen? Busy in the heavenly hive cranking out souls just as fast as he can? Is that why G can't seem to answer prayers, or get his message straight? I mean the witness of the holy spirit is all over the place when it comes to "testifying" what it is that G really wants. So maybe he's just too busy cranking out souls to keep track, and if humans would just stop fucking, G could get back into the business of running the universe in a sensible manner.

So, Witness of the Holy Spirit, please answer!
The Hive Mind wants to know.