Important Facts about Egypt

Posted on May 12, 2005 by Jenna

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Egypt is not the only country where gingerbread men have taken over the afterlife. In fact, swarms of gingerbread men have taken over just about every afterlife in every major religion. This makes things very different!

In Western Hell the gingerbread men put little hats on people. They also dip them in boiling brimstone. The people often escape their gingerbread masters. The people shout, “Run, run, little gingerbread clods! You can’t catch me! I’m forsaken by God!”

The gingerbread men give chase. “Your conclusion does not follow from your premises!” they shout.

This is correct.

In Chinese Hells, things are different. Chinese Hells are not about being forsaken by God. They’re about working out a burden of karma. The gingerbread men like to help people work out their karma by strapping them to white-hot iron pans. Then they stuff raisins into the victim’s eyes and cherries up the victim’s nose. This isn’t much better or worse than a typical pre-gingerbread takeover Chinese Hell.

Chinese Heavens are pretty cool. There’s the Heaven of Getting Lots of What You Want. There, people want gingerbread men! It’s not so much a consequence of the gingerbread takeover as an inevitable accompaniment—it’s part of the metaphysical structure of that Heaven that if the gingerbread men are going to take over, people are going to have to want them to!

There’s also Million Zany Prophet Heaven. Million Zany Prophet Heaven is filled with one million zany prophets who preach various futures all the time. It is a good heaven with many pleasures but more cacophanous than the Endless Perfect Sea Heaven. Now seven hundred thousand zany prophets are gingerbread men and they take turns predicting the ultimate destiny of runaway gingerbread men on Earth.

“The fox’ll get ‘im,” preaches one zany prophet.

“I think he’ll bring peace to the Middle East,” suggests another.

At this point, one of the human prophets tries to speak up. But the gingerbread men just talk right over the human prophet! That’s one of the rudest habits gingerbread people have.

Like Really Good Chocolate Heaven is like really good chocolate. Souls who come to Like Really Good Chocolate Heaven often say, “Wow, this is better than sex.” White chocolate is not really chocolate and so there is no Like Really Good White Chocolate Region in Like Really Good Chocolate Heaven. Gingerbread men cannot really improve Like Really Good Chocolate Heaven, but they also don’t hurt it much, so, like the Chinese Hells, this is pretty much a wash.

Gingerbread men cannot really take over the Dominionist Heaven because it is run by a notionally omnipotent God. However because they are in a state of entire sanctification they can do whatever they want there and no one can really protest. They often draw fake moustaches on the saints and slur the tetragrammaton to YV, which drives seraphic grammarians positively insane.

In Hades people shuffle around. Everything tastes of dust. Even for the gingerbread men it is very sad. That is why they host the gingerbread gala there every year—it’s so boring being dead! What else are they going to do?

In the Egyptian afterlife the gingerbread men weigh people’s hearts against feathers. But they’re not entirely sure where to go from there. So they stick the heart on a stick and roast it. Then they put it on a graham cracker and remove the stick. They put a Hershey’s chocolate bar on top and then another graham cracker. This makes a delicious s’more. “Mm, mm,” say the gingerbread men. “Let’s have s’more!”

They make another s’more out of the feather. They eat it. The soul watches them in a kind of dumbfounded horror. It’s entirely unsure of whether it’s passed the test.

“Well, go on,” say the gingerbread men. “Go to … an eternal reward or something. Git!”

The Egyptian gingerbread men don’t care as much about people as the gingerbread men in other afterlives because in Egypt the gingerbread men have their brains and hearts pulled out through their nose during the baking/mummification process. Also, in Egypt, cats are considered sacred!

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Categories: Legends, Hitherby, Essays, Jesus, Hopping Vampire, and the Enemies of God

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David Goldfarb on November 30, -0001 at 12:00 am said:

I don’t know — I’d say that really good chocolate is better than bad sex, but not as good as really good sex.

I am pleased to see correct attitude towards white chocolate. (When we’re in a grocery store and we come across some white chocolate, Katie will sometimes take up the white chocolate and threaten me with it because she thinks it’s funny to see me cringe.)

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Graeme on November 30, -0001 at 12:00 am said:

I must say I found this piece rather sexist. Where are the gingerbread women?

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rpuchalsky on November 30, -0001 at 12:00 am said:

I liked this one.

By the way, I highly recommend an album by The Residents, _Gingerbread Man_. It concerns nine characters, their failed lives, and a sinister gingerbread man who unifies the album, his “you can’t catch me” representing the elusiveness of human happiness.

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Ben on November 30, -0001 at 12:00 am said:

I am pleased to see correct attitude towards white chocolate. (When we’re in a grocery store and we come across some white chocolate, Katie will sometimes take up the white chocolate and threaten me with it because she thinks it’s funny to see me cringe.)

Blashpemer!

There’s no “Like Really Good White Chocolate Heaven” because that would be redundant. White chocolate IS heaven, in every delicious bite.

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Solarbird on November 30, -0001 at 12:00 am said:

Ben says:
White chocolate IS heaven, in every delicious bite.

Wow! I think I’ve just encountered the Platonic ideal of wrongness! I don’t see how this could be more wrong.

I mean, even the name is a lie! White chocolate is not chocolate in any way. Much less is it good.

Congratulations! Wrongness that perfect is difficult to attain! ^_^

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philomory on November 30, -0001 at 12:00 am said:

Ben says:
White chocolate IS heaven, in every delicious bite.
Wow! I think I’ve just encountered the Platonic ideal of wrongness! I don’t see how this could be more wrong.
I mean, even the name is a lie! White chocolate is not chocolate in any way. Much less is it good.
Congratulations! Wrongness that perfect is difficult to attain! ^_^

Actually, if white chocolate cannot be good then ‘really good white chocolate’ is a logical contradiction. If that’s the case, then “Really good white chocolate is heaven” is a logical truth, tautological if you will. I can even give you the symbolic derivation! But I won’t, unless you ask me.

Of course, the statement “Really good white chocolate is hell,” or, “…is a categorical imperative” or “is Buddha”, are all also tautologically true. Contradictions beget absolutely everything being true! Hooray for logical contradictions!

In any case, that’s of only academic interest. I myself find white chocolate quite delicious! And I defy you to present a reasoned argument that my previous sentence was false. If you can, really can, go get a Ph.D. in philosophy.

If you persist in saying that anyone who says white chocolate is good is an example of Platonic Wrongness, just because you find it distasteful, why, you are simply a closed-minded bigot! Shame on you!

—

Hey kids! What logical fallacies have I engaged in? Remember, fallacies are different from fellatio!

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ADamiani on November 30, -0001 at 12:00 am said:

So you’rs argument is that a logical contradiction implies that all other statements are not only true but tautological?

This I want to see.

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As to disproving the statement “I myself find white choocolate quite delicious,” I propose that the most philosophically interesting approach would to be to argue for the nonexistance of the concept of ‘self,’ thus precluding any possibility of that self reaching any finding anything, much less a finding as preposterous the deliciousness of white chocolate.

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philomory on November 30, -0001 at 12:00 am said:

So you’rs argument is that a logical contradiction implies that all other statements are not only true but tautological?

Sorry, I miswrote concerning the word tautological there. Specifically, a contradiction does not so much imply that everything else is not only true but tautological. Instead, given any contradiction and some other statement, it is a tautology that the contradiction implies the other statement.

This I want to see.

For the record, I’m proving something slightly different than what Ben wrote. First of all for simplicity’s sake, I’m reducing “is really good” to “is good.” It’s just much easier to write it that way, since while Ben used ‘really good’, Solarbird used ‘good’. I take it as acceptable that anything that’s really good is also good.

Second of all, I’m interpreting Ben’s statement “Really good white chocolate is heaven” as saying, “1. There does exist good white chocolate,” and “2. Anything that is good white chocolate is also heaven.” I have to make some translation here; that’s the easiest one for the sake of writing this. I don’t want it to be too long.

So what I’m assuming is Solarbird’s statement that there does not exist good white chocolate, and the first half of Ben’s statement, that there *does* exist good white chocolate, and I am proving that good white chocolate is heaven.

I first began to write the proof using predicate logic, but it’s not necessary. Which is good, because predicate logic is much more time consuming.

Also, normally the negation operator is the tilde symbol (~). However, in the code segment, that symbol is unfortunately nearly impossible to distinguish from a dash. So I’ve had to replace it with the carat symbol (^). That’s very nonstandard, but there you go.

[code:1:b51ed99858”>
B: There does exists good white chocolate.
C: Good white chocolate is heaven.

1 | ^B A (Solarbird)
2 | B A (Ben)
|——–
3 | | ^C A
| |—–
4 | | B 2, R
5 | | ^B 1, R
|
6 | C 3-5, ^E

[/code:1:b51ed99858”>

Translating this back from symbolic logic into English, it says:

1) We assume that there is no such thing as good white chocolate (because Solarbird said so).
2) We assume that there is such a thing as good white chocolate (because Ben said so).
Given those two things:
…3) Assume, temporarily, that: It is not the case that good white chocolate is heaven.
…Given that:
…4) There does exist good white chocolate, by step 1, reiteration.
…5) It is not the case that there exists good white chocolate, by step 2, reiteration.
…This is a contradiction, however.
…Therefore, our assumption on line 3 must be false.
6) Good white chocolate is heaven, by steps 3 through 5, negation elimination.

This is a textbook example of negation elimination, really.

To prove anything else you like (such as that the moon reminds you of your grandmother), substitute whatever you like as the translation of ‘C’.

There are many other ways you could interpret the argument between Ben and Solarbird, which would lead to differently structured proofs and differently worded conclusions, but many of them would (or could) prove the same things. For example, here’s a summary of another way to interpret this:

Premise: There does not exist x where both x is good and x is white chocolate.
Conclusion: For all x, if x is both good and x is white chocolate, then x is also heaven.

I’m not giving the proof for that, but hopefully you can see how it might work.

Hooray for symbolic logic!

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philomory on November 30, -0001 at 12:00 am said:

As to disproving the statement “I myself find white choocolate quite delicious,” I propose that the most philosophically interesting approach would to be to argue for the nonexistance of the concept of ‘self,’ thus precluding any possibility of that self reaching any finding anything, much less a finding as preposterous the deliciousness of white chocolate.

Feel free to have at it, then. Make your argument. I dare you.

For myself, I’m going to argue that I can validly say, “Good white chocolate may not exist for you, but it does for me.” The reason I can validly say this is that such a statement is not subject to the relativist fallacy. Because the word ‘good’ is used here not to describe an ethical quality but a quality of experience (in this case, the appreciability of a flavor), it’s applicability is as a subjective matter of taste rather than an objective matter of fact. The relativist fallacy does not apply to subjective ‘facts’.

In doing this, of course, I am arguing only against Solarbird’s assertion that Ben gives an example of Platonic Wrongness. Ben’s other assertion, that really good white chocolate not only exists, but is heaven, I leave for him to deal with himself.

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