Saturday, July 27, 2019

Holy Crap

My friend David sent me a link to a poop article. This happens. It's like how people know where to dump off their unwanted kittens so they'll be taken care of. Poop articles come here to feel less lonely.

But until David sent me this one, I had no idea anyone ever thought about whether or not Jesus pooped. It never occurred to me he didn't. All men do, even John Wayne, who was discovered to be packing forty pounds of impacted fecal matter at his autopsy, which might have accounted for his gait.

That, of course, is patently ridiculous. Forty pounds of poop! John Wayne did not even have an autopsy. People are mixing him up with Elvis Presley, who did have an autopsy, at which he was reported to be harboring an even more stupendous quantity of stale caca, but the quality of the autopsy is suspect, inasmuch as he hasn't even stayed reliably dead.

Which, I guess, brings us back to Jesus.

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The problem, for many Christians throughout the millennia, is that Jesus is thought to be both human and God, and for some reason people don't like to think about God taking a dump, even though he has a throne. I'm not sure why something as natural and, frankly, satisfying as a bowel movement has gotten such a bad rap that we would deny the pleasure to the gods.

Probably this indicates my own privilege. The whole routine has always been a snap for me, and the first couple years my poop was someone else's problem. But when I once asked my parents what they thought was the greatest innovation in their lives--I was thinking about airplanes, and automatic washers, and rocket ships, and such--they both said, fervently and in unison, indoor plumbing. So. This business of making poop disappear with several gallons of perfectly good drinking water is kind of new, humanity-wise.

Anyway, some of your earlier Christians thought Jesus only appeared to have a human body but was really a god, through and through, running a sort of parlor trick, if you will. And these Christians thought Jesus never actually dropped a load. This position is known as "Docetism," from the Greek word dokein ("dookie"). No wonder the Trinity is so hard to comprehend. We can't even get past number two.

All of this kind of makes me feel sorry for Jesus, and not just for that part toward the end. Surely a man of his talents could turn shit into sugarplums if that's what a sensitive populace demanded. He did amazing things with a single loaf of bread and a dead fish, as you'll recall. And if he didn't poop, he'd have to keep a tight rein on that sort of behavior or he'd be one tunafish sandwich away from a serious personal backup.

There has to be some sort of mechanism for this celebrated self-control, or lo, it will be with him alway, even unto the end of the world. The explanations given are less than satisfying from a scientific standpoint. For instance, according to a second-century teacher named Valentinus, "Jesus digested divinity: he ate and drank in a special way without excreting his solids. He had such a great capacity for continence that the nourishment within him was not corrupted, for he did not experience corruption." That's religion for you--you're just supposed to accept that.

But it only raises more questions. For instance, did people in the second century, when they hit their fingers with a hammer, yell Oh, Experience Corruption?

At any rate, the digestive method described by Mr. Valentinus must be something like sublimation, the process by which a solid (in this case feces) makes a transition directly to a gas. Big deal. I do that all day long.

33 comments:

  1. I think he just had a thing about pooping in public, and waited until he was completely alone before he did it. The 40 Days in the Desert? Diarrhea. The Garden of Olives (Olive Garden?), when he asked his disciples to wait for him? Well, they just had a big Passover meal, so you do the math. Meditating, my ass. Totally a euphemism for pooping.

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    1. The Olive Garden will do that to you. I'm with you, sis.

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  2. the process by which a solid (in this case feces) makes a transition directly to a gas

    Doing that with all the feces normally generated by a human body would produce a huge amount of gas. Jesus would have been blasting them out hard all the time. One doesn't normally imagine the Sermon on the Mount being interrupted by a rasping, machine-gun-like fart every few seconds. He wouldn't have needed a whip to clear the money-changers (and everyone else) out of the temple. Hell, given the ubiquitous use of candles and oil lamps in those days, the man would have been an explosion hazard whenever he stayed indoors more than a few minutes.

    Mind you, even today North Korean propaganda claims that Kim Jong Un never takes a dump. But in his case I can believe he's simply full of shit.

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    1. Oh Inf, you and I are definitely going to hell. And...REALLY? They claim that about Kim Jong Un?? How things have changed since the French king took a morning dump attended by his honored guests.

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    2. Oh Inf, you and I are definitely going to hell

      In my case, I think that's been a foregone conclusion for quite a while.

      Of course, I'm not religious. I believe in the big bang theory.

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    3. This non-crapping must be an inherited ability, as the North Koreans claim that one reason Kim's late father, Kim Jong-Il was so “great” at every endeavour (world's best golfer for example, shooting 38 under par!) was because he didn’t have to take time out to crap, because according to the North Korean State website their beloved leader, unlike other men, did not defecate. I guess that would be a time-saver. Of course he distinguished himself from the beginning by walking from his mother's Patriotic and Revolutionary Vagina [sic] six months early and without the aid of a physician. I've not been able to sing "Oh Canada" since I read that without a twinge of unfulfilled patriotism. My kids didn't walk for a year, however I do agree the whole process was somewhat revolting. There was a lot of screaming and swearing involved, and that was just my husband. The death threats came from me.

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  3. With all the things that have been rendered into holy relicts over the years, it's amazing that none of Jesus' poop was so immortalized. There are supposed to be enough drops of Virgin's Milk to drown a person and enough Holy Prepuces to, well upholster a couch. But no Sacred Pee or Sanctified Poop that I am aware of.

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    1. Oh you know the old joke about the prepuces. You only needed enough to upholster an ottoman, but if you rub it just right, you can seat four.

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  4. One of the Apollo 11 astronauts...Buzz Aldrin, I think, said he didn’t have a bowel movement the entire mission. He held it. When they were recovered in the Pacific and brought aboard, he was suffering. But everybody just wanted to stick a mic in his face and chitchat. I don’t think I’da told that.

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    1. I'm still savoring the much-shared clip of Buzz Aldrin making faces as Trump talked.

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    2. Besides, everyone gets constipated when they travel.

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  5. My reading came to a screeching halt when I got to the 40 lbs of impaction. Snopes revealed this as false, which you verified in the next paragraph. Still, a very weird thing to be out in rumorville. Then I found this https://www.space.com/22597-space-poop-astronaut-toilet-explained.html

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    1. Oh honey, there was no need to search the internet for that, not if you have a copy of Trousering Your Weasel handy. Check it out.

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    2. It's on my list! (You forgot the early Astros needed a finger cot to actually sweep away the clinging feces into the poop bag.) For some reason - maybe because I was a good Catholic girl and such thoughts were deemed impure - I did not think of the obvious need for disposing of one's doings in space. However, as a 63-year-old "fart" I am utterly fascinated.

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  6. More interesting still! https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/04/nasa-plans-mission-to-bring-apollo-astronauts-poop-back-from-the-moon/

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    1. Gosh, I hope it's in those little green bags.

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    2. Would the poop still be on the moon? There's no gravity so surely it would floated away by now.

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    3. The moon does have gravity. It's only a sixth of ours. I'm wondering if, like dinosaur coprolites, human moon poop would be a valuable collector's item. The article gave me a moment of horror thinking that the bacteria and other what-not left behind in Astro Poop might mutate and "colon"ize the moon with some monstrosity waiting to infect the next moonwalkers and thus all humankind.

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    4. Of course it would be a collector's item! Why, I'd pay for one myself. My greatest wish is for a farting termite stuck in amber, though.

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  7. On the PBS series “Chasing the Moon” it was revealed that Frank Borman had both vomit and diarrhea that floated around in the Apollo 8 capsule. One of the astronauts on another mission did indeed refuse to poop. Thank you for this illuminating post Murr.

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    1. There's refusing to poop, and then there's normal travel constipation. You must admit he traveled.

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    2. Oh yes- and the astronauts apparently left bags and bags of poop and assorted garbage on the moon when they left---- 40 is the number I've heard. Ain't that some caca?

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    3. Oh, okay, so it's bagged. Excellent. That's what people do here too. They bag the poop, then leave it by the trail. To "pick up later." So it's happening. Awesome.

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  8. In the words of my long dead mother: "if he ate, he pooped." He probably just took a nice long walk when everyone else was asleep and came back "refreshed".

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  9. I have a crystal clear memory of the exact day my toilet training ended. I had deposited a shining turd into the john, and ran to ask (well, insist, perhaps even demand) my mother come see it. She reluctantly did as requested, with something of a long sigh, dutifully telling me, "Very nice, Susan." I could tell she wasn't really into it. Then the truth dawned on me.

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    1. Dave still does that. When it's a really good one.

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  10. Sorry I made too many typos and had to delete my post.. I have the sense that BS is the truth about religious references. Space issues may vary. Any human who fails to actually crap will at some point parish. Of course we all know that because every newborn is checked for first movement outside the womb.

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  11. Finally! A group of people who understand why my favorite exclamation is "Holy Crap!"

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