Oh dear.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
How long has it been? A whole week?
That's too long. I haven't had a blog-break like that in some time.
I'm sorry. There's no justification for such negligent behaviour.
I should try and make up for it by writing something really interesting. Or really long. Or both. But I haven't got anything lurking in my head at the moment.
So I'll try for something short and boring. I'm doing pretty well so far.
The most interesting thing I've heard about recently is the Ancient Greek creation myth. It's pretty crazy stuff. I like any religion that you can imagine illustrated by Jack Kirby.
One of the cool things about the myth is the huge number of freaky characters. My favourite are the 'Hundred-Handed Ones' (the Hecatonchires). They were big tough creatures - and the children of Uranus.
They did have a hundred hands. As the name suggests.
Although it's a cool idea, I think having a hundred hands would prove cumbersome. It's good to have extra hands, but a hundred is too many. The trouble is, they had a hundred hands, but not a hundred arms. They're not the Hundred-Armed Ones (that would be stupid).
If they were the Five-Handed Ones, that might have been useful for fighting. A hundred hands is basically a big ball of fingers.
(It may seem unlikely, but I've written about this dilemma before).
Buying gloves would be a nightmare. Giving the someone the thumbs-up would be disorienting - resembling a fleshy bed of nails. Handshakes would be endless. It someone asked you to give them 5, you'd have to give them 250. You could do your own Mexican wave.
Of course, I'm assuming the hands are evenly distributed. Fifty on each wrist.
But they could be assigned at random. You might have eighty hands on one wrist and twenty on the other. The lack of symmetry would drive you crazy.
I'm happy with my number of hands.
***
For a while, it seemed like something interesting was going to come out of that. But then it just slipped through my (frankly inadequate) fingers.
Maybe ten isn't enough.
***
On reading the Wikipedia article, it seems they also had fifty heads.
This changes everything.
It's characters like these that explain today's fall in popularity of Christianity. Jesus missed a trick. Rather than purporting to be the son of God, he just needed 100 hands. He would've been terribly popular - like a poly-limbed Jade Goody. Begs the question, why didn't God design him that way?
ReplyDeleteI think that question is the biggest argument against God's omnipotence.
ReplyDeleteRead this article on Jesus's hands:
http://www.mentoring-disciples.org/Hands.html
Then read it again, adding the word 'hundred' before every instance of 'hands'. It's a much better read.
I remember that Dawkins has a similar argument - that if Jesus had been the son of God, he probably "would've had quite a few more hands, like that chap from Greek myth".
ReplyDeleteThink of the lepers he could've healed, the fish he could've caught, the extra chairs he could've mended with a few more hands. You wait till Dan Brown hears about all this. Do we have the rights to "The Hundred Hands of Jesus" I wonder?
I think we should do a Saturday morning cartoon with that title.
ReplyDeleteThe opening credits can include a scene where one of Jesus's hands taps Judas on the shoulder, and when he looks around he gets punched by another.