Dirty Pictures In God's Attic
About those 72 virgins the Islamonutters supposedly get in heaven...you know how all Christians and Jews always sneer at that?
Well, how do all these Christian and Jews know the Islamonutters don't get 72 virgins? For all they know, all those terrorists are up there now, fucking like monkeys. Hmmm...or, maybe fucking monkeys. Come to think of it, they're never very species-specific about those virgins, now are they?
The point is, since nobody's ever been to heaven and brought back any candelabras or anything, and nobody has any evidence it exists -- how does anybody have any authority to say who and what is or isn't up there?
Goddammit Amy, you're wrong about the Kingdumb of Heaven! Mark Twain's "Letters From the Earth" describes exactly what it's like. Here's an excerpt from one of the 11 letters:
Now then, you have the facts. You know what the human race enjoys, and what it doesn't enjoy. It has invented a heaven, out of its own head, all by itself: guess what it is like! In fifteen hundred eternities you couldn't do it. The ablest mind known to you or me in fifty million aeons couldn't do it. Very well, I will tell you about it.
1. First of all, I recall to your attention the extraordinary fact with which I began. To wit, that the human being, like the immortals, naturally places sexual intercourse far and away above all other joys—yet he has left it out of his heaven! The very thought of it excites him; opportunity sets him wild; in this state he will risk life, reputation, everything—even his queer heaven itself—to make good that opportunity and ride it to the overwhelming climax. From youth to middle age all men and all women prize copulation above all other pleasures combined, yet it is actually as I have said: it is not in their heaven; prayer takes it place....
2. In man's heaven everybody sings! The man who did not sing on earth sings there; the man who could not sing on earth is able to do it there. This universal singing is not casual, not occasional, not relieved by intervals of quiet; it goes on, all day long, and every day, during a stretch of twelve hours. And everybody stays; whereas in the earth the place would be empty in two hours. The singing is of hymns alone. Nay, it is of one hymn alone. The words are always the same, in number they are only about a dozen, there is no rhyme, there is no poetry: "Hosannah, hosannah, hosannah, Lord God of Sabaoth, 'rah! 'rah! 'rah! siss!—boom!...a-a-ah!"
3. Meantime, every person is playing on a harp—those millions and millions!—whereas not more than twenty in the thousand of them could play an instrument in the earth, or ever wanted to.
Consider the deafening hurricane of sound—millions and millions of voices screaming at once and millions and millions of harps gritting thier teeth at the same time! I ask you: is it hideous, is it odious, is it horrible?...
All sane white people hate noise; yet they have tranquilly accepted this kind of heaven—without thinking, without reflection, without examination—and they actually want to go to it! Profoundly devout old grey-headed men put in a large part of their time dreaming of the happy day when they will lay down the cares of this life and enter into the joys of that place. Yet you can see how unreal it is to them, and how little it takes a grip upon them as being fact, for they make no practical preparation for the great change: you never see one of them with a harp, you never hear one of them sing.
Bill Henry at July 27, 2006 3:33 AM
Umm... if there were a heaven and I happened to get there, I'd be pretty bummed to end up with virgins.
Christina at July 27, 2006 2:55 PM
Of course, if they are virgins when the nutters arive and then they begin fucking like monkeys, they're not virgins any more. Not sure if heaven is meant to remain a static concept. So there's that.
But then there's the controversy over translation and pronounciation and where you place the emphasis, which means that it might just very well be raisins, not virgins at all.
Just one of many links on the dried fruit controversy:
cogenteur.blogspot.com/2002/03/regarding-virgins-or-raisins.html
And further discussion here (though nothing on the raisins issue) on the 70/72 virgins idea:
memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=ia&ID=IA7401
Kitt at July 27, 2006 4:51 PM
In my personal Heaven, all the virgins are heavily into kink.
Lena at July 27, 2006 9:59 PM
From the first of Kitt's links:
"In Paradise, a believer's penis is eternally erect."
Hmmm, brings up one of the central questions of modern philosophy: "How the hell do you pee with a hard-on?"
Stu "El Inglés" Harris at July 29, 2006 1:41 PM
Maybe they start to fuck like monkeys but they still have nothing on good old debauchery. That takes practice!
christina at July 29, 2006 4:18 PM
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