the divinity’s ventriloquist act

Many people assume that the Genesis story must be the work of a misogynist because of the supposedly nasty way it presents Eve, but I suspect the hand of a woman. The original sin comes about because of a woman eating when she’s not supposed to, then she persuades her heterosexual life partner to do likewise and they and their descendants have to spend the rest of eternity exercising it off. What man would have that much of a dietary hang-up? I also don’t understand how any modern day evangelists can read that and conclude that work and labor are as sacred as God’s own pet iguana. Isn’t the whole point that work and labor themselves are the punishment and payback for unredeemed miscreants? Yet they go about praising work like S&M enthusiasts contemplating being whipped and flayed in hell. If the Bible were really written in that spirit God would have been bragging about achieving full global employment after exiling Adam and Eve and having rid the Garden of welfare queens and social parasites.

Whatever, this is far from the only economic concept on which the usual social views are completely contradictory. The media, in particular, love to write stories about how peoples’ lack of confidence in the market and pessimism about the future will cause the collapse of the economy. And they seem incapable of looking both directions on anything. If inflation has stopped, we are in dire danger of deflation. If they were reporting on crossing a street, no one would ever make it to the other side. If no cars were coming from the left, they would announce that all the cars on the street must therefore be coming from the right, casting grave doubts on the possibility of ever making it past the lane divider. My theory, on the other hand, is that anyone will do any job with the right manipulation. For instance, scientists have been trying to cultivate special prokaryotes that can clean up oil spills and radioactive material by ingesting them. Whereas I’m pretty sure if you just added enough sugar and caffeine and carbonated the whole mess teenagers from near and far would come to lap it up.

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