How Theists know about their gods.

Oholah and Oholibah: A Biblical tale with donkey-cocks

The story of Oholah and Oholibah is a genuine honest-to-goodness Bible story, Old Testament wrath of God type stuff. Sure, there are plenty of those, but this one has the added distinction of being one of very few Bible tales to describe swarthy turbaned men with donkey-cocks and horselike semen output splattering a pair of whore-sisters with the stuff. And these are Biblical whore sisters, who not only enjoy a ridiculous quantity of fucking, but who do it not simply for the money, but, as well, out of lust for the cuneiform visages of men from distant tribes whom they had never even seen in person prior to their arrival for the fucking.

Sadly, the sisters come to an end typical of Biblical morality plays -- BibleGod eventually caused them to be cut to pieces, and caused a like fate to befall their little children ('cause there's nothing BibleGod gets a bigger boner over than the killing of the littl'uns). But don't take my word for it -- without further delay, here is the story of that Biblical cum-guzzling siren duo, Oholah and Oholibah (as told by that crazy fucker, Ezekial):

The word of the LORD came to me:

"Son of man," the LORD began, "there were these two women, daughters of the same mother. They became prostitutes in Egypt, engaging in prostitution from their youth. In that land their breasts were fondled and their virgin bosums caressed. The older was named Oholah, and her sister was Oholibah. They were mine and gave birth to sons and daughters. Oholah is Samaria, and Oholibah is Jerusalem."

"Oholah engaged in prostitution while she was still mine; and she lusted after her lovers, the Assyrians—warriors clothed in blue, governors and commanders, all of them handsome young men, and mounted horsemen. She gave herself as a prostitute to all the elite of the Assyrians and defiled herself with all the idols of everyone she lusted after. She did not give up the prostitution she began in Egypt, when during her youth men slept with her, caressed her virgin bosom and poured out their lust on her."

"Therefore I delivered her into the hands of her lovers, the Assyrians, for whom she lusted. They stripped her naked, took away her sons and daughters and killed her with the sword. She became a byword among women, and punishment was inflicted on her."

"Her sister Oholibah saw this, yet in her lust and prostitution she was more depraved than her sister. She too lusted after the Assyrians—governors and commanders, warriors in full dress, mounted horsemen, all handsome young men. I saw that she too defiled herself; both of them went the same way."

"But she carried her prostitution still further. She saw men portrayed on a wall, figures of Chaldeans portrayed in red, with belts around their waists and flowing turbans on their heads; all of them looked like Babylonian chariot officers, natives of Chaldea. As soon as she saw them, she lusted after them and her pussy got totally moist and she sent messengers to them in Chaldea. Then the Babylonians came to her, to the bed of love, and in their lust they defiled her. After she had been defiled by them, she turned away from them in disgust. When she carried on her prostitution openly and exposed her naked body, I turned away from her in disgust, just as I had turned away from her sister. Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt.

There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses."

(which means about a cup, for those keeping track, which is more than sixteen times as much a strapping healthy man can usually put out at a time; but then again, they did have donkey-cocks....)

"So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled and your nipples were suckled upon and your loins were stroked and your honeypot was stirred and your hindquarters were entered into from the backside."

(at this point in the telling of the story, the LORD jizzed in his robe and was really redfaced and had to take a few minutes to compose himself before getting to the fire-and-brimstone part)

"Therefore, Oholibah, this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I will stir up your lovers against you, those you turned away from in disgust, and I will bring them against you from every side— the Babylonians and all the Chaldeans, the men of Pekod and Shoa and Koa, and all the Assyrians with them, handsome young men, all of them governors and commanders, chariot officers and men of high rank, all mounted on horses. They will come against you with weapons, chariots and wagons and with a throng of people; they will take up positions against you on every side with large and small shields and with helmets. I will turn you over to them for punishment, and they will punish you according to their standards. I will direct my jealous anger against you, and they will deal with you in fury. They will cut off your noses and your ears, and those of you who are left will fall by the sword."

(at this point, the LORD jizzed in his robe again and was really embarrassed, and hemmed and harrumphed a bit while digging up a clean one, and then he got on with telling the terrible things he would do to the whores....)

"They will take away your sons and daughters, and those of you who are left will be consumed by fire. They will also strip you of your clothes and take your fine jewelry. So I will put a stop to the lewdness and prostitution you began in Egypt. You will not look on these things with longing or remember Egypt anymore."

"For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I am about to deliver you into the hands of those you hate, to those you turned away from in disgust. They will deal with you in hatred and take away everything you have worked for. They will leave you stark naked, and the shame of your prostitution will be exposed. Your lewdness and promiscuity have brought this on you, because you lusted after the nations and defiled yourself with their idols. You have gone the way of your sister; so I will put her cup into your hand."

This is what the Sovereign LORD says:

"You will drink your sister's cup,
a cup large and deep;
it will bring scorn and derision,
for it holds so much.
You will be filled with drunkenness and sorrow,
the cup of ruin and desolation,
the cup of your sister Samaria.
You will drink it and drain it dry
and chew on its pieces—
and you will tear your breasts."

And, after a suitably dramatic pause, "I have spoken," declares the Sovereign LORD. (and why is BibleGod always doing that, speaking and then when he has finished speaking declaring that he has spoken, like people wouldn't realise that speaking was going on.... that wouldn't make sense unless BibleGod really just didn't even exist at all and -- hey, wait a minute!!)

The upside of this tale is that it provides a very easy way to determine the veracity of the Bible, using nothing more than some measuring cups, some Egyptians, and some horse and donkey cocks. Simply use these items to answer the question: do the Egyptians, as the Bible claims, have donkey-cocks and horse-sized ejaculations? Easy enough to find out, just get some Egyptians and put them next to the donkeys and measure their respective cocks. If the Egyptian cocks are the same size as the donkey cocks, the Bible may be true. And, again, with the horse semen. Get the Egyptians to produce some sperm, and get the horses to do the same. If the amount is the same, then the Bible may be true. Now I admit, the latter task may be a hard one to, ahem, pull off. After all, the typical horse ejaculation is about sixteen times as much as the typical human output. But, who knows, maybe the Bible is true and the Egyptians can routinely achieve such a feat.

Masturpraytion

It's the hot new trend that's rocking the nation -- it's masturpraytion!! Straightforwardly enough, masturpraytion is the combining of two of the most profound human activities -- that is, of masturbation with prayer.

Now there are different ways these things can conceptually be unified, and probably most commonly what would arise in the mind would be praying you don't get caught whacking off in a compromising position. As in "doing some serious masturpraytion over cousin Sophie's bikini photos on Facebook, cause God help me if I get caught whacking off to that."

But masturpraytion can be something far more serious and meaningful than that: the paying of an humble homage to our Creator by joyously making use of the self-pleasuring capacity (and equipment) with which thou hast been blessed!! How strange a thing it is that some imagine in the same (non-pleasuring) stroke that there exists a Creator of our Universe which is at the same time omniscient, and yet is especially condemnatory as to the reproductive organ manipulation action of some of the hairless bipeds occupying the surface of a dustspeck planet circling one amongst hundreds of billions of average stars in an average galaxy, in an average galactic cluster, in what for all we know may well be an average Universe. This is not to suppose that such a Creator takes no notice of humankind and other potential beings of comparable (and indeed superior) self-awareness, for that surely makes us interesting to partake of....

But consider again, the very nature of omniscience; for an omniscient being would (as was abundantly mathematically proved by Duke University physicist Robert G. Brown with his Pandeist Theorem) effectively be a one-to-one information map of our entire Universe, and so, would have to actually be (or more aptly contain our Universe); and so would have the full experience of our every moment of pleasure and pain, and indeed our perspective of those every moments. And so, it would be correct to conclude that in every instance of self-gratification, thou art sharing in the exactitudes of that experience with any omniscient Creator which might exist, and it is as such that our masturbation equals giving a handjob to God!!*

And so, what better way could there be to venerate the awesomeness of the entity than to share with it the moments of pleasure which we may most intimately experience for ourselves? Well, except, naturally, by doubling that pleasure in the sharing of those sensations with a partner, for it is also proclaimed that those who "pray" together "stay" together.


----


* ^{(Well naturally a masturbating girl would not be giving a "handjob" unless you use the term broadly to address doing any such job by hand. But the effect is the same.)}

Let us yaw toward a fruitful discussion, for I fell we must reach much the same ground, if only by different paths....

So that we are clear on the fundament of what we are discussing, I will outline the pandeistic theorem from first principles -- we may agree, naturally, that we are thinking, and so thought is going on and the framework for thought must exist, and must have an origin.... having no more probable option than our physical Universe existing as it presents itself to us, we ought to proceed as though either what appears to exist, exists, or there is some reason for it appearing to us to exist, and so ought we to try to figure out why things appear as they do....

Our Universe exhibits order, and not just any sort of order, but order of the type which generates complexity, ie life, and not just complex life, but self accelerating complex life, ie evolving life forms (as Dr. Theobold has just this summer so aptly proved) which inevitably eventually develop the intelligence and use such intelligence to discern the governing dynamics of our Universe and use such knowledge to consciously self-advance-- we, humans, are near that stage, have not reached it yet, and are presently but an absurd fraction of what we might become-- will become if we survive long enough to do so.... and what we stand to evolve into in perhaps a thousand years is something of actual elucidatory use to the Creator of our Universe....

Now, consider, as Scott Adams did, if our Universe demonstrates order of a magnitude which suggests the hand of a Creator in its establishment (and does it not?) then what purpose is served by this Creation? What need on the part of the Creator is fulfilled by the exertion of setting forth what by chance has become us? (though it could have as readily yielded a different reality with different self-advancing intelligent life unrecognisable to our eyes, and perhaps it has done so in other galaxies, and elsewhere in our own).... well it is natural to observe that an entity, alone in its existence, and having such power as is necessary to set forth a Universe such as our own would be lacking in the knowledge of interaction, of facing and possibly overcoming obstacles, or dealing with the failure to overcome them.... it could not know such things as hope or triumph, fear or courage, grief, contentment, and love -- and so it would have to actually become a physical Universe (or as Einstein described it, a very persistent illusion of one) to obtain any of these experiences (that is, for the time that it exists, for ultimately all will fall into black holes, and then the evaporation of Hawking radiation approaching than the rate of c presages a universal perpetual information loss corresponding to the shrinkage of phase space volume, wherein trajectories converge towards singularities, counter-balanced only by the degree to which quantum information is regained, ameliorating root phase space volume; at which point the original Creator-entity would be restored from its experience of existing as our Universe....)

Anyway, the point there is that, yes, every rock and stream and ray of light and burst of radiation in deepest space is an aspect of our Creator, but while those aspects are attuned to existence as a physical energy, Man is on one level of which we are consciously unaware attuned to existence as exactly that, but on another level attuned to our conscious experience of the world, our troubles and toils and foibles.... this alone does not make us 'better' than anything else, but it does make us 'different' from all things which do not experience this and this difference brings a useful diversity to the experience of our Universe.... and though we are far from the 'pinnacle' of Creation, we are on the path for our future transhuman generations to achieve the capacity to set ourselves upon that pinnacle, IFF we may reconnect our conscious contemplation to our connectedness with all that exists beyond our crabbed claim of reality!!

The Astronomers--an inspiration to Pandeism

Astronomy has always had a role to play in theological discourse. From the time of the earliest records of the ancients, it was supposed that the lights in the night sky represented mystical forces. And, once it was understood that there were distinct forms of objects beyond our horizon, elaborate systems were imagined to explain their significance, and their supposed influence on human affairs.

Ptolemy of Alexandria devised a model of the sun and planets which placed the Earth at the center of our Universe, orbited by the Moon, then Mercury and Venus, then the sun and the rest of the known planets: Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. All of this, in the Ptolomeic model, was surrounded by a moving sphere of fixed stars. We now know that Ptolomy's model was wrong, but not for any lack of intellect on Ptolomy's part. Instead, it was a well-thought out model that largely accounted for what could be observed in that age, and with the prevailing theological supposition, of our Earth sitting at the center of our Universe.

Nicolaus Copernicus pioneered the next great leap in astronomical knowledge. Copernicus published his heliocentric theory, placing the Sun at the center of our Universe, shortly before his death. This was necessary due to the prevailing religious sentiments of the time. Although we now know the heliocentric model to be true, the monolithic Christianity of the era required the Earth to be at the center of the Universe, and so, truth was suppressed in the name of religion.

Following the work of Copernicus, Galileo Galilei determined, as well, that the Sun, and not the Earth, was the central point for the planets. His work was based on the most practical level of research, improving the design of telescopes and then observing the sun, moon, and planets through them, and reporting his observations. For his discoveries, he was condemned by the Church, which famously declared the theory that the Earth orbits the sun to be "false and contrary to Scripture." But, it is not so widely remembered that he was equally condemned for discovering spots on the sun, craters on the moon, other moons circling other planets, and that the planets themselves were not perfect orbs, as the church required. Under threat of of torture by religious officials, Galileo recanted -- but, naturally, recanting what is a true has never worked to make it untrue.

Johannes Kepler, lived in the same era as Galileo, but in a place less dominated by religious oppression. Working in the observatory of another great astronomer, Tycho Brahe, Kepler sought to solve the riddle of the apparent retrograde motion of Mars -- that is, the tendency of Mars to sometimes appear to move backwards in its orbit. In doing so, Kepler hit upon another great discovery, that the planets did not orbit the Sun at a uniform speed, or in perfect circles, or with the Sun at the exact center, as the religious leaders required. The planets instead orbited in a-centric ellipses, with orbital speed changing in conjunction with the distance from the Sun, which was simply a focal point, and not at the exact center of their orbit.

Sir Isaac Newton's theory of gravity was initially set forth in great measure to explain the means by which bodies in orbit were maintained in that way. It paved the way for the theological theory of deism by demonstrating that the constant hand of the Creator was not at all needed to explain the motions of the planets, but that celestial bodies could instead be maintained in their angular momentum entirely by the clockwork operation of celestial mechanics.

It was astronomers who, centuries later, insured the upending of Newtonian physics when they confirmed Einstein's theory of relativity by observing the predicted gravitational lensing of light passing distant stars. It was astronomers who gave us the key to the age of our Universe. Edwin Hubble discovered that ours was not the only galaxy, and by examining the redshift of other galaxies moving in relation to our own, that the Universe was expanding. It is somewhat remarkable in itself that up until 1925, it was not known that a single other galaxy existed, and after that date, that countless numbers of them did.

Hubble's discovery of universal expansion was disturbing to those who, for both scientific and theological reasons, believed the Universe to have existed forever, in much the same state. Astronomer Fred Hoyle was among those who developed the steady state theory, which proposed that the expansion of our Universe was fueled by a constant infusion of new material from some central point, so that it had always appeared, and would always appear, much as it does today. But this theory was disproved with the discovery of very old quasars and similar very old and very distant structures, which are not found in the neighborhood of younger galaxies which are farther along from the point of the initial expansion. It is somewhat ironic today that the Big Bang proponents were largely religious, championing the theory in part for its assignment of a point of origin to the Universe which accorded with Creation mythology, while the steady state proponents tended to be atheistic.

Once the Big Bang theory was confirmed, this knowledge, refined over time, allowed man to at last pinpoint the age of our Universe to approximately thirteen billion seven hundred and thirty million years. Later astronomers like Carl Sagan, Paul Davies, and Timothy Ferris would continue to do more and more to not only advance our understanding of our Universe, and the continuum of physics governing objects within it, but to profoundly effect the validity of theological models as well, making it impossible to rationally believe in a Creator for whom human beings were at the center of our Universe.

As astronomical discoveries have taken us farther and farther away from our initial imagined posture in the center of our Universe, theological systems have reacted in different ways. Some have simply shifted the vanity and self-centeredness that led us to believe ourselves to be the center of a perfectly ordered Universe away from the astronomical realm, insisting that even as we are seen to occupy an insignificant position in space, we remain the object of adoration for the Creator of that vast space, so richly occupied in places beyond our very imagination. Other theological models have strengthened in their grasp of a theology in line with astronomical reality. Pandeism is one such theory, demanding that any theological explanation must accord with the nature of our observed Universe. And so, the astronomers, in their generations of work advancing our understanding of our place within our Universe, have provided an inspiration to pandeism, and to all theological theories recognizing the grandness of a Universe in which we are so privileged to play even the most minute role.

Inspirations to Pandeism I

Pandeism Fish

So what, exactly, is a Pandeism Fish? I've received that question a fair share of times, one for which I surely ought to answer. And so here, by way of a roundabout essay is the explanation behind the Pandeism Fish....

Symbology:

Symbology is important to any school of thought as it provides an abbreviated way to convey affiliation, as well as in some instances to communicate a shorthand glimpse of the doctrine itself.

One such symbol is the fish. Now this might bring to mind a particular belief system in these particular times, but in fact the use of a sparse, fish-reminiscent pair of curved lines, just touching at one end and surpassing an intersection at the other, dates back over three-thousand years, pre-originating even the assignment of Pisces to the Zodiac.

The Christian adoption of the fish-as-symbol, the icthys, may raise an eyebrow. There was already, after all, the cross. And, though miracles or parables involving fish come as readily in the Bible as in the formative texts of, for example, Buddhism or Hinduism, the fish is not shown in any of these traditions to be a particularly venerated class of creature. And yet.... well, there is something about that shape which makes it especially appropriate as a symbol for Pandeism -- and if the pandeistic model is true, this would even go so far as to explain why members of theistic faiths (including, yes, Christianity) have subconsciously gravitated to a symbol greatly explicatory of Pandeism!!

The Pandeistic Model:

Consider, first, the pandeistic model; the Creator becomes the Creation; in the beginning (before our physical Universe exists, there is one entity, of substantial (but abstract) intellect, and having substantial capacity to control its own unformed energy. It is not infinite, but neither is it necessarily bounded -- one might describe it as "open-ended" in its creative capacity. This entity, for purposes of acquiring certain knowledge incapable of being generated for its current form, transforms itself, compresses all that it is into a singularity and then bursts forth into a new form, an unconscious will supporting the continued existence of a physical Universe, guided by laws of physics set forth in that very moment of Creation, with a grand unknown outcome but with governing dynamics designed to bring about complexity, culminating in the products of self-accelerating intelligent life (which, in turn, is capable of discovering those governing dynamics, those laws of physics and mathematics, and using them to build mightily upon the capacities delivered to it by nature)....

Anyone who has seen the map of the cosmic background radiation will note the rather oval shape assigned to it by the instruments reading it (though this oval is the product of an illusion, the true shape of the Universe likely being more spherical). Another sort of "oval" can be generated by envisioning our Universe is bursting forth from a singularity, and then experiencing a long period of expansion (perhaps hundreds of billions of years), reaching an apogee of sorts, a point of maximum expansion, from which it draws back in much the same way, returning to a point of singularity. Such expansion and contraction need not even occur in the three physical dimensions common to our observation, but may occur at higher dimensions, possessed of a curvature which exceeds our present observational capacity.

The Pandeism Fish:

And so, if we combine these ideas -- the pre-Universe Creator condensing and collapsing itself into a singularity, envisioned as an open-ended triangle pointing towards the moment of Creation; leading into the oval of our Universe as it is, or as it presents itself to us physically, and as it may operate on a larger cosmological sense, we find ourselves presented with a not unfamiliar shape:

______________________________________________________________
|MMMMMMMMWMMMWMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM|
|MMMMMMMMMWMMWMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM|
|MMMMMMMMMMWMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMW*****^O""'`o^****MMMMMMMMMMMMMM|
 ..MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMX*** ** *0* * ** * **_****XMMMMMMMMM|
 `..MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMZ* **~**o** ** *`*_**~*** ****~***MMMMM|
` .. @MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMX** **--*-* **** - -* **.... ` ` * **~*MM|
 )@ ~@ .w@MMMMMMP*****o* ** ** ** ** * *** * * * * ** ** ***MM|
 `~@ @ ..@`..@%F#.r{}*** *** *~**. .-. .* *** *// *** * ***..#)
` ) ` ) ` ) }+{ ` ` ` ` *` ` ` ` * ` ` ` ` ` ` * *` ` ` * `  }+ ???
 ,@ /@./-@/@#H%..**o-*** * *~*** *.. .. ....** **** *~** * */#)
 / ,? @ @MMMMMMMb** * *O* * * * o**~* *'** *** ** *O* ** * **M|
 @ ~,/@MMMMMMMMMMMM* * ** ** ** ** *o** _** *** ** * * ***MMMM|
, /MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM*o***~// * * * *o * * ** ** * *XMMMMMM|
 /MMMMMMMMWMMMWMMMMMMMMMMX** ** * * * ** * *0 * * *ZMMMMMMMMMM|
|MMMMMWMMMMMMMWMMMMMWMMMMMMMMX* *** * * **// * *MMMMMMMMMMMMMM|
|MMMMMMMMMMMWWWWMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMX&-x_,-/-XMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM|
|MMMMMMWWWWWWWWWWWWMMMMWWMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM|
|WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW|

Now here's where things get really interesting, conceptually. Recall that pandeism accounts for all theistic phenomena -- from all faiths -- as encounters between the limited human mind and the unconscious experience of our Creator underlying the continued sustenance of our Universe. All revelations received and miracles observed can be so explained, without resort to incongruent beliefs in things such as "evil spirits" being permitted to provide "false" revelations to some, while others are permitted to receive "true" revelations. And this accounts, as well, for the human predilection to grasp blindly towards the underlying metaphysical explanation, dressed up though it may become by human biases, fears and aspirations.

Synthesis:

Consider, again, that this fish-shaped device symbolises no petty miracle or mediocre allegory, but instead models an explanation for all observed reality, an explanation which, should the pandeistic model be true, would resonate in the unconscious mind underlying our continued existence, and through that channel into the subconscious mind of humanity. And so it could be said that the adoption by many faiths of the vague outline of a fish -- of the pandeism fish -- indicates this true underlying nature of our Universe, one which accounts for all the graspings of those very faiths!!