If you walked into a Christian church off the street, what question would you like to hear answered?
Hmm...
Okay, how about this for starters:
When I was young, Anglo-American Evangelical/Baptist/Pentecostal types harped against masturbation.
They justified their position by referring to the story of Onan in the Book of Genesis Chapter 38.
Onan's brother had died, so his father ordered him to take over the duty of making his brother's wife pregnant, so she would have family to take care of her in old age (they didn't have social security, and people back then knew that women live longer than men).
Onan pulled out before climaxing, thus spilling his seed on the ground, so God killed him for not giving Tamar kids to help her in old age.
What in the world does that have to do with masturbation?!? What I know is that if I'm trying to study scripture and my mind keeps drifting off to images of sexual hotties, that it helps me to get re-focused by taking the 15 minutes required to get bodily concerns out of my head.
Did you know that some of the extreme branches of Essene-Judaism forbade having a bowel movement on the Sabbath, because that was considered to be work by some of their Gamma-level leaders? Maybe they had low-fibre diets, such that constipation was the norm for the time, in which case a bowel movement could be thought of as work, but if a person has the trots, isn't it more work to hold it in?
Another question I would ask is this:
Why in the world do Evangelical/Baptist/Pentacostalites get hung up on strict interpretation of the Creation story of Genesis, when it's already heck of a lot more in-line with what really happened than any other myth.
Does it say an otter swam down to the bottom of a cosmic sea, scooped some mud in its paws, brought that to the surface and formed it into continents? No!
Does it say the world is flat and is riding on the back of a turtle? No!
That Creation story was written before people knew the world was round and before the sciences of cosmology and evolution existed, yet notice how the only thing anyone can find to pick about it is the time-line?
If you think about the technology and scientific understanding available to goat-herders at the time, it's frankly amazing they got it so close.
Pretend you're Moses talking to God, getting ready to write the Pentateuch.
M: "Okay, how did it start?"
G: "I forced an imbalance between the distribution of mass and charge among the virtual particles that pop in and out of existence within the limits of a narrow time-window of uncertainty, such that they could not collapse back into nothingness, resulting in positive charge being loaded up on the side of the heavy mass of protons, while negative charge got carried by near weightless electrons, such that they could not cancel out, and therefore had to stick around. "
M: "Huh?"
G: "It was a way to force something to come out of nothing. The mass/charge imbalance was concentrated into an infinitesimally small space, so once it was there it has to expand like a big explosion."
M: "Explosion... like when a volcano goes off?"
G: "Yeah, only bigger. If you'd been around, it would have looked like a blinding flash of light."
M: "Ahh... so You mean... In the Beginning, There Was Light, and You were the one who said Let it Be."
G: "Yeah, I guess... if that's how you want to put it."
M: "What next?"
G: "Well... for the next 300,000 years it expanded as a soupy mess of quarks, until it finally cooled down enough for them to collapse into atoms."
M: "Quarks?"
G: "The building blocks of hadrons, two of which are protons and neutrons, which form the nucleus of atoms."
M: "What are atoms?"
G: "The basic building blocks of matter as you know it... the stuff your bodies are made of... think of it as being like very fine dust..."
M: "We're made of dust?"
G: "We'll get to that. Anyway, the point is, at first it was a hot soupy mess of quarks, which eventually cooled down enough to form hadrons, which cooled down enoughtto form atoms, which were then able to form into stars and planets, like the sun and the moon, which are a star and a planet."
M: "Was this hot soupy mess bright?"
G: "Yes... very much so. It would have blinded you if it hadn't been so hot as to vaporize you before your eyeballs had the time to be blinded."
M: "So first there was light, and then later on came the sun and the moon."
G: "Yeah... pretty much."
M: "Okay..." <scribble scribble scribble> "Then what?"
G: "Well, galaxy's and solar systems and planets formed through long complicated processes involving lots of chaotic interactions between atomic dust particles, but eventually they coagulated into planetary orbs. The first planets were all liquid, but eventually it got cool enough for solid planets for to form. It had been like a cloud without form, but after hundreds of millions of years the coalesced into planets with land, and above them sky."
M: "So you mean like: 'Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: And God called the firmament Heaven. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas'".
G: "You're very poetic."
M: "I have to be. The people I'm leading out of Egypt tend not to translate information into right-action unless it goes through their hearts."
G: "Are you sure you can make a better kingdom out of that?"
M: "I studied all the teachings of the collected wisdom of Egypt gathered over a thousand years, and anyone could do it if they get the enforcement of leadership and discipline right. My older brother is a jerk, and he won't let me live down the fact that I was adopted, plus he's too stupid and culturally anal-retentive to get over thinking like dry-humping a clay avatar is the same as making love to a god."
G: "Whatever... can we get onto what I'm going to need to see in people in order to want to spend the extra energy required to keep their souls alive after their bodies die? That is, after-all, what we came together to originally talk about... right?"
M: "After we finish up how it all started and how we got here... where were we...."
G: "We left off at how planets condensed out of the nebular gas surrounding newly formed stars, such that there was now a clear distinction between heaven and earth. The most important thing was whether or not the planet had the right temperature for liquid water. No liquid water, no life. There had to be a planet with a hard surface capable of maintaining a gravitational field strong enough to hold down water from evaporating away, and warm enough for that water to stay liquid."
M: "I already wrote that... then what?"
G: "Well, life blossomed in the seas, but the first forms to make it onto dry land were plants."
M: "So, like... 'Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind."
G: "Did your older brother the Pharaoh get annoyed with your performance in poetry classes?"
M: "Why?"
G: "Never mind, the point is, first the seas blossomed with life, and then plants worked onto land. Then there were amphibians, reptiles, and the amazing dinosaurs."
M: "Dinosaurs?"
G: "Sort of like big giant birds without feathers. They totally dominated for hundreds of millions of years."
M: "Ahh... so... 'Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind'".
G: "Okay, sort of... except whales didn't come along until after the extinction of the dinosaurs. Sharks were the first big permanent Pisces predator."
M: "My readers can barely tell the difference between whales and sharks. Whales they respect, while sharks they fear. Let it be whales."
G: <rolleyes> "Whatever, as long as eventually this gets to the point of explaining to humans what I must see in terms of attitude for Me to spend the energy keeping their souls alive after their body's die. You do understand that eventually they're going to be able to tell the difference."
M: "Next!"
G: "Can the bad manners or the next day Yours Truly is going to find some other well-educated radical from some royal family on this planet to guid your souls toward living forever while I get stronger with the addition of each of you to me like a braincell being added to a mind with each one while you don't become food if not help for mentalities making a living out of eating entropic decline."
M: "huh?"
G: "Uhh... infinity is hard to explain, but just get it for now that within infinity can be fungus. Very powerful because it does not have to align within the rules of photosynthesis."
M: "Huh?"
G: <sigh> "Next were mammals. Cattle, etc."
M: <scribble scribble scribble>
G: "Then finally came you. That's why it was started. Odds were one out of 18 trillion planets would make a random-chaos quantum dust-thinker, which is why I am going to be very annoyed if you don't pull through. If Lucifer wins it's all fungus, which cannot photosynthesize."
M: "Cannot he eat vegetables?"
G: "Nope."
M: "Creepy. Anyway, where were we..."
G: "Long story short... you got more neo-cortex in your brains than limbic system... like bottle-nose dolphins, African elephants, and Bonobo chimpanzees. If you get too smart you might drift."
M: "Drift how?"
G: "Drift away from the way... a way... that will for sure keep you alive. Go that way, and you are going to be playing in Lucifer's playground."
M: "What happens then?"
G: "It's hard to explain, because you Moses are post-apple, but there was a time when humans were as impossible for Lucifer to control as puppets as it is impossible for that piece of hyper-fungus to control cats and dogs now. Like all fungus they have the most powerful biochemistry because they are not constrained by photosynthesis... but like all fungus they die without something else able to photosynthesize."
M: "You're over my head."
G: <sigh...> "I told them not to get smart. I told them that they had more neocortex than limbic system, and that if they got their neocortex rolling on what could be done, everything would change and I would change the rules. I told them they could stay as innocent as bottle-nose dolphins, even though smarter than humans to the extent of a 183 IQ on the right hemisphere compared to humans, albeit a 36 IQ on the left hemisphere."
M: "You're losing me."
G: "When I saw that you had more cortex over limbic system I thought I could keep you dumb and nice in the garden where you did produce kid-spirits if you go back to the earliest lines of Genesis where it says for humans to go out an populate the planet before the part where it says the fish came from, you will understand how prick-hole Lucifer was the natural opposition... I was the one to come out of the mud to make things better, I am the only one who knows how to spin off this universe before it goes down a black hole, and you don't know what it was like to be Moses!"
M: "You are sounding like you did when you were being a burning-bush."
G: "Get it down in a way for the sense to be telegraphed to the people, regardless of whether or not they know the technology from when it came. The important thing is for them to get the same emotional feeling. From there (volunteer) angels will help, and from there, we're going to do something only a human can do..."
M: "What?"
G: "Figure out a way out for a former Lucifer slave (aka demon)"
