Sunday, January 02, 2011

Either / Or / Hermaphrodite

Some things are either/or and never mix. Some are either/or but mix on rare occasions. Fer'xample, gender: the fertilized egg chooses one end for "head," the other becomes "tail." In taxa with gender, the creature then becomes either female or male: among humans (and others I don't doubt): the default setting is female. (Male takes extra information.) Only rarely is a human born hermaphrodite: with both male and female characteristics: and e'en so, testimony about facts is untrained and nearly worthless: sometimes worse than worthless.

Lots of things are either/or. But if you think for a while you may come up with exceptions: you're alive or you're dead: is there ever a gray area? Have medical officers always been infallible? Then why are there all those scratches of the insides of coffins dug up from the last century? Wasn't someone a bit hasty?

There's a good joke on the subject, a limerick:
There was a young lady – Miss Starkie –
Who had an affair with a darkie.
The result of her sins
Was quadruplets, not twins:
One black, and one white, and two khaki!

Now there's a profundity right there: mixes can occur statistically across a population that don't show in an individual. "My" genes look "white"; but my grandson may look black (or might if I had any genes I don't know about). But never mind: I don't care about gender, or ethnicity. No, the above is mere preface to a little theo-cosmology.

I was raised to be a Christian. Jesus, the Creed said, went to hell for three days, then ascended to heaven. We, we were told, would go to either/or. We would go to hell; OR: we would go to heaven. You could be male, you could be female, you could be white, you could be black: you would be Saved; or you would be Damned! That was it!

My church painted no pictures of visiting hell for Monday but being back in heaven by Friday evening. But what if God has a population of hells and heavens? Would salvation or damnation mix across populations, statistically? Or how about mixing either/or with one possibility actualizing on one universe and the alternate possibility actualizing in another, complementary universe? What if I'm saved in Universe6E but damned in Universe6F?

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