Sensible Scientific Reason
For Sneeze Invocation
Dr JohnPaul Slater
From: "JohnPaul Slater"
To: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
Subject: Positive_Atheism_Letters_Section
Date: Saturday, June 16, 2001 12:25 AM
Cliff,
There is a perfectly sensible scientific reason that you have to say "God bless you" when somebody sneezes.
Sixth century CE science, that is.
First you have to remember that the sky is made out of crystal and is less than three miles from the ground. The reason that it is blue is that it is covered with water (that's where most of Noah's flood came from.) God divided the waters and these are those he put above. Just this side of all that liquid is a substance called Ether, which the anæsthetic was named after. In this region live small devils. During the War in Heaven these guys had been cherubs.
Holy Spirit force (later replaced by gravity) causes everything to reach its natural level. Real Devils go to Hell. Humans to ground level. And these little Imps float around in the Ether.
Now at this time your soul and your breath were the same thing. The soul didn't take on its separateness until the sixteenth century when we found out what a respiratory system was. In those days it closely resembled what the Chinese call the Chi and the Hawaiians call the Ha (as in HAwaii or AloHA)
Depending upon your translation of Genesis it will either say God's breath was upon the waters (cooling off the primordial soup?) or his spirit was upon the waters. Both translations are correct. Breath and Spirit are (or rather were) the same thing.
So when you sneeze your breath/soul gets shot out of your body. Until you can suck it back in it is in danger from the Imps that inhabit the Ether. Dante had a thing or two to say about these nasty guys in his Purgatory section of the Divine Comedy. The only thing to do stop these Imps from attaching themselves and being taken into your friend's body is to invoke God's blessings while their soul is still separated. If you don't do that, or you are too slow, your friend will become ill, maybe even die.
I often wonder why "Creation Science" exponents spend so much time attacking Darwin and ignore this bit of Biblical science. Shouldn't Duane Gish be showing us how pollen and mold spores are actually the tiny minions of Satan?
Dr JohnPaul Slater
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