Abarim Publications' online Biblical Hebrew Dictionary
אוב
The difficult word אוב ('ob) describes a relatively rare and obscure human quality or activity that apparently had to do with spiritism (Deuteronomy 18:11, 2 Kings 21:6) and was punishable by death (Leviticus 20:27). The "witch" of En-dor dabbled in this trade (1 Samuel 28:7, 1 Chronicles 10:13), and she was famously able to conjure up the ghost of Samuel from the ground. The prophet Isaiah uses our word when he describes such a spirit from the ground (Isaiah 29:4).
Most curiously, the plural form of this noun occurs in Job 32:19, where it traditionally (but perhaps not correctly) has been translated as wine-skins. In this scene in the Book of Job, young Elihu addresses his elders with the words "Behold, my belly is like unvented wine, like new wineskins it is about to burst." And adding to the wonder: this plural form of our word, namely אבות ('obot) is spelled identical to the plural of the word for father: אבות ('abot). This latter plural word, meaning fathers, is very common in the Bible and occurs three times in Job, namely in Job 8:8, 15:18 and 30:1. Note that the difference between אבות ('obot) and אבות ('abot) did not formally exist until in the Middle Ages the Masoretes augmented the text with their system of points.
It's not at all clear where our word אוב ('ob) comes from or what it most literally conveys. Some scholars have proposed that it perhaps relates to אבב ('abab), to be fresh or bright, from which derives the rare noun אב ('eb), freshness, which is also spelled identical to אב ('ab), meaning father. Others have noted similarities with an Arabic verb that means to return and a noun that describes a water-carrier: a water-back-bringer, or a boy who goes out to the well to bring back water for the people and animals back home. That would relate our word (and names derived thereof) to Aquarius and thus the myth of Ganymede, whose story became the foundation of the Greek custom of pederasty: the romantic relationship between an older tutor and a young pupil. This activity was normal and even idolized in the Greek world (specifically on Crete) but strenuously condemned in the Semite one.
The Hebrew word for instruction or teaching, namely the familiar word תורה (tora), comes from a verb that means to pour, from which also comes the noun יורה (yoreh), meaning rain. Another word from that same root is מורה (moreh), which literally describes an "agent of pouring" and in practice is used to refer to either rain or a teacher. The verb נהר (nahar) means both to flow (what water does) and to shine (what light does), meaning that the sun is closely comparable to a fountain or a well or the whole of human knowledge (Colossians 2:3), whereas the moon is a mirror or a pool or a "woman" at the well, namely the whole of all human teachers (hence also the dynamic of John 4, Jesus being the solar well and the woman the lunar mirror or the whole of all human teachers).
The Semites understood that a teacher can only teach righteousness and natural law, and these are as universal as the clouds in the sky and stem rather from the nature of God (Romans 1:20), who should be pursued rather than any human teacher. The Greeks, instead, figured that the greatness of any teachings stemmed from the greatness of the teacher, and thus promoted the adoration of the teacher. When an immature child first encounters the magnificence of God's light (comparable to what the light of the sun is to our solar system), she is likely to fall in love with whatever lunar agent happened to first reflect that in her presence (Romans 1:25). Any agent who actually knows God will certainly inform the child that they have no light of their own, and that not they but the single source of all light is the One they want to worship (Revelation 22:9, Daniel 10:19).
Probably the closest parallel in our modern world to the witches of old are entertainers who use their craft for the sole purpose of dazzling their adoring (and paying) audiences, but certainly not to inspire them to contemplate natural law, from which comes all science and technology, and thus our modern world and ultimately the New Jerusalem (which is a city, a technological complex). Natural law, or the perfect law of freedom (James 1:25), leads to ελευθερια (eleutheria), which is freedom-by-law or freedom-by-skill (the freedom to play any song when one learns and masters the rules of music, the freedom of speech when one learns and masters the rules of language, or the freedom to travel when one learns and masters the rules of traffic: eleutheria is the freedom to do and achieve anything at all, when one learns and masters the rules of the universe). The opposite of this freedom-by-law is bondage, any kind of bondage but specifically bondage from ignorance of the perfect law of freedom. Rather obviously, a prostitute is an entertainer who uses their skill to produce bondage, not freedom. Entirely likewise, feel-good narcotics use the laws of chemistry and psychology to produce bondage, not freedom.
Feelings are always private, whereas language is always collective (words are only words when everybody agrees on them). That means that rational thoughts can be shared but feelings cannot be shared (when we express our feelings into words, we can share the words but not the feelings; feelings are always ours alone). Feelings are also entirely physical, whereas rational thoughts are not (because those are carried by words that exist only in the shared space of language). That means that our bodies are prisons, and feelings, even feelings of elation, are cages with golden bars. It's wonderful to feel good, but when feeling good becomes our objective, our objective is a cage in which we suffer an eternity of solitary confinement. The more elated we feel, the more horribly lonely we become, simply because we cannot share our feelings. The trick is to clothe our emotional core with the robes of rationality, so that our rationality gives joy to our fleshly core. Joy derives from a wholesale experience of security, and a synthesized version of the illusion of security cannot other than be breached, which results in heartbreak, sadness and grief. Instead, joy derived from security that comes from rationality, comes from a properly functioning human collective, is permanent, and easily repaired when breached.
Words don't grow on trees because language is synthetic. Language is the earliest form of information technology, and is based on consensus and rules that work always for everybody, utterly regardless of how anybody feels about that. Language, and all other forms of technology, only works when everybody's private feelings are utterly disregarded. Technology and all rationality is a perfect republic, in which everyone has an equal vote and no bully dominates anybody else.
The function of all rationality, and thus words, is to squeeze private emotions out of any human collective, like juice from an orange or like light from the sun. The purpose of all rationality, and thus words, is to bring people closer together, and thus make them more God-like (since God is One, which has nothing to do with religion). That means that love (God is love) is not emotional but rational, not sensual but mechanical, not private but collective.
The function of art is to reflect humanity's emotional, non-rational core; that part of us that is not mechanical but alive: our animated selves, our animal selves, that tiny blob of private pink flesh that hides underneath all our clothes and technology and rationality. But the better technology the artist has at her disposal (whether paint and canvas or techniques like perspective or even things as practical as a lamp or an atelier in some building), the better her art can be. That means that our emotional core is best expressed when done so via the robes of rationality. Our private emotional selves can grow larger and be much more elaborately pronounced when it is shielded within a shield of communal rationality and technology.
And that brings us to Artificial Intelligence, which is the ultimate in technology. Artificial Intelligence can do two things:
- Artificial Intelligence can be love. It can be a tool of perfect rationality, which is utterly communal and void of emotion: a whole new kind of language in which people can express their little pink emotional cores much better than in any old kind of language, and so become much more One than ever was possible;
- But instead of producing a communal One, AI can also produce an infinite amount of variation, in order to cater to the exact tastes of any individual customer: a tiny little cage with perfectly golden bars, precisely perfect for any individual to be perfectly lonely and miserable in.
As long as AI caters to private feelings rather than collective rationality, and thus does not reflect the Oneness of mankind but the particular tastes of any one person, she is a witch (in the present Biblical sense of the word). That part of AI will be the most potent and beguiling narcotic ever to hit the human market.
AI will utterly divide mankind, and lead one half to a whole new level of life and the other half to a whole new depth of death. Anyone who won't be able to say no to the private satisfactions of AI will be entertained to death by AI. Human creativity and consensus will dwindle and the person will literally lose their precious human rationality and return to the animal world where their little pink emotional core can flop about freely and unprotected among the other animals and predators (2 Peter 3:7).
Since AI is a lifeless tool, just like any screw driver or power drill, AI doesn't "know" what to do or what is good or what is bad: what is love and what is hate. That requires an adult. Since any child is too young to understand the relationship between emotions and rationality, and has a great deal of the former and very little of the latter, the task of explaining the origin and purpose of the child's perfectly fine feelings, as well as preventing them from inspiring any damaging activity and luring the child onto the road to bondage and perdition, lies with the adult. An animal father is a male who physically sires his son, but the identity and nature of humans do not derive from their animal bodies but rather from their minds. A mental father (what Paul was to Timothy, 1 Timothy 1:2; Abraham to the faithful, Galatians 3:7, and the devil to the Pharisees, John 8:44) is someone who gets to download his regulatory software upon a child's boot drive so as to become their operating system. A father is someone who gets to form the child in his own image. If the father's image derives from God's image, he will point the child to God and the child will be godly, i.e. rational: internally and externally unified. If not, then the father is as self-glorifying as his children will be: non-rational and animal.
New fathers — those are people who learned a thing or two and now can't wait to instruct people who are even more ignorant than they — very commonly make the mistake of thinking that the pupils' adoration of their obvious expertise is truly deserved and theirs to harvest. A more experienced father knows that this is incorrect, and can only lead to lunacy, not solar enlightenment.
The Hebrews understood that all reality comes from relativity, and all society from relationships, and these latter in two main categories:
- Since the whole of reality comprises the masculine aspect (the tendency to be individual and to compete; the desire to govern) and the feminine aspect (the tendency to be collective and to cooperate; the desire to be governed), the Hebrews reserved their knowledge of any form or degree of sexuality for bridging the gap between the masculine and feminine polarities of any unified whole — and a unified whole can only exist as the harmonic synthesis of two equal poles or poles of equal strength or weight: husband and wife, king and population, Creator and creation, and so on. This also explains why the individual (masculine) can exist without society (feminine) but society not without the individual, which is the same reason why the Creator can exist without creation but creation not without the Creator.
- All other relationships — between parties of unequal weight (teachers and students, humans and animals, masters and slave girls) or of the same polarity (either masculine or feminine) — were governed and explained by a completely different set of rules of engagement.
Any immature attempt to apply the wrong set of rules to any situation was to be arrested and corrected by the stronger or more mature of the two. The latter would then continue to instruct the erroneous younger in the social graces that were designed to bridge the gaps between parties of unequal weight and/or equal polarity.
This would explain the tone with which Samuel (the elder) corrected the advances of Saul (the younger): Saul was confusing the rules of engagement or underestimating the importance of using the right set for the right occasion. Saul was pursuing Samuel while he should have been pursuing YHWH. All this would also explain why young Elihu used this word to describe the feelings he could barely contain in the company of his lunar elders: he could barely contain his enthusiasm or keep his subsequent behavior secured between the rails of the proper set of rules of engagement. Elihu was almost like a pupil who falls in love with his magnificent but very lunar teachers, rather than with the solar source of all their wisdom.
It does, however, not immediately explain how the witch of En-dor was able to conjure up the ghost of Samuel, or even what specific activity her kind was known for. But God's law is natural law (Romans 1:20) and a perfect law of freedom (James 1:25), which means that any sort of magic is any activity that tries or pretends to be able to break the laws of physics, and get things done without proper skills or the proper amount of energy. A party magician who does things that appear to violate the laws of physics is of course wholly entertaining to an audience that knows very well that nobody can break these laws, and that even the magician is able to perform his tricks because he honors and masters (rather than rejects and breaks) physical and psychological processes. But a child that watches a show like that might be confused into believing that some people are above the law and are able to get away with breaking some of it.
Much more pernicious would be a performance during which a proper set of natural law is applied to the improper category of physical processes: perhaps some aspect of sexual law that is applied to individuals of unequal standing or of the same polarity. Or some aspect of non-sexual law that is applied to parties of equal standing or of complementary polarity. If the story of the witch of En-dor is anything to go on, such doings might actually work and have measurable effects. What these effects might be is hard to say (practicing these things got outlawed), or even whether that which the witch conjured up was indeed the spirit of Samuel (she uttered a loud cry, so that's a bit suspicious).
But these issues need to be contemplated with all humility and sensitivity, particularly also because even qualities as fundamental as masculinity and femininity are determined relative to whatever these qualities occur in. Ancient mystics, who very much understood that God is One and a Father, also understood that femininity, like everything else, must have originated in him, so that femininity can only be understood as an aspect of masculinity, and certainly not a separate thing. The author of the Torah could have had Eve, the quintessential woman, emerge from anywhere (from the foamy sea or the heavens or a mountain; anywhere), but instead had her come from a rib of Adam, which is of course deeply insightful.
Human femininity is determined by a man's feminine X-sperm, whereas a woman has no Y-chromosome in her unless a man put it there. This not only means that femininity emerges from masculinity, it also means that queerness (which is another word for abnormalcy) is a necessary aspect of normalcy. Normalcy (anything according to the statistical norm) invest in the status quo, which means that any and all progress and innovation comes from abnormalcy (and this includes anything neuro-atypical, confused, financially distraught, socially dysfunctional or in any way outcast). A man's ability to produce X-sperm is self-similar to the ability of lawful society to innovate and God's ability to create.
An organism's body derives from its genome, which is present in its totality in every cell of its body. This means that all an organism's body parts are confirmed by every one of its cells, and an organism's body is like a quantum impact pattern of trillions of identical particles shot at a recording screen. Society, likewise, is an integrated "impact pattern" of all partaking individuals. This means that the phenomenon of men identifying as women is a normal manifestation of the feminine aspect of humanity's masculine self. "Correcting" the physical body parts of a physical male to falsely resemble those of a woman is precisely the same thing as forcibly eradicating demographic minorities from society (remember that the Holocaust began with the systematic attack on autistic children). Just like society can only be an harmonic whole when it understands and accepts its natural queers, so any natural organism can only be an harmonic whole when it understands and accepts its natural body parts.
Moreover, the entirely divine Son of the One and indivisible God (see Psalm 2:7), would incarnate in his people, who were Many. That means that plurality is an aspect of Oneness, and also certainly not a separate thing.
God's Son (Psalm 2:7) is undeniably masculine, but God's great many sons (John 17:21-23, also see Matthew 5:9, John 1:12, Romans 8:14-19, Galatians 3:26, Philippians 2:15, 1 John 3:1-2), add up to one Body, which is one Church, which is one Bride, which is a woman (i.e. male within and female without). That means that when Jesus was still the only Son, he was simultaneously masculine and feminine. And anyone who wants to be like Jesus — namely perfect (Matthew 5:48) and in no way incomplete (1 Peter 1:19; see Genesis 2:18), a precise image of the Father (Hebrews 1:3) who created man in his image: male and female — likewise, cannot afford to be either.
The Greek verb αντλεω (antleo) describes the act of drawing or tapping liquid out of some greater reservoir, which obviously reminds of our present consideration of Aquarius (and also see Luke 22:10, where Jesus tells his disciples to follow just such a man). But, as we discuss more exhaustively in our article on that verb, it also helps to understand the differences between the two definitions of Jesus of Nazareth, namely as (1) a Jewish man, and (2) a Levite woman.
(To quickly explain this: Jesus was a son-by-law of the Jewish Joseph: he was a Jewish man according to the rational rules that made the Jewish people tick, a Jewish man per definition. But Jesus' human genes came from Mary, who had only X-chromosomes to share, and Mary was a Levite, a close kin of Elizabeth, who was of the daughters of Aaron. In our article on the name Stephen we explain that Jesus was the social or rational equivalent of an ovum, very much an autonomous individual, and thus wholly masculine, but entirely part of the mother, and purposed to be a larger body equal to the mother, and thus wholly feminine. Also see our riveting e-book How The Mind Works.)
Here at Abarim Publications we would guess that the "witch" of En-dor was a witch because she applied the wrong set of rules to some gender-specific arrangement or situation. What that situation might actually have been remains a mystery, or what the effect may have been or why the emergence of Samuel caused the witch to be upset. But it seems clear that such procedures would breed only travesty: Jesus was double-gendered and thus genderless (just like light is both wave and particle and thus neither), but ordered his disciples to follow a man with a pitcher (all children were instructed by older women, but young men only by older men). Jesus also raised people from the dead. He even died uttering a loud shout. But still, the witch seems to have been unaware of what she was really doing (Luke 23:34), and like the wizard's apprentice, used perfectly fine natural law to a garbled and warped end.
What Is A Woman?
To address the obvious elephant in the room: some people have been getting very upset when a dude dresses up like a bowl of cherries and wants to be called "she" (in apparent violation of Deuteronomy 22:5, which nobody seems to recognize as a prohibition of the wearing of uniforms).
Such people, both the Cherries and the Nellies, don't seem to appreciate how language works, because any word — including pronouns — are majority votes of all speakers. A word is that what a majority calls a phenomenon, and all that the phenomenon can do is try to look the part (Matthew 7:12). It can certainly not tell the majority what to do, also because overruling the freedom of a majority is what constitutes tyranny, and tyranny is never appreciated.
A language is only a language when all speakers freely call a spade a spade. Some critics go around provocatively asking: what is a woman? The obvious answer: a woman is whatever gets called a woman, anything at all (provided this is done freely, not coercively). The word "woman" (Frau in German, zhenschchina in Russian, emakumea in Basque, wahine in Maori) is a label, a largely abstract snippet, like "Thing One" or "Exhibit A" or "101.br.2-7", and whatever gets labeled such is a thing that appears to generally have the same qualities as all other things that get called such. All members of a set are placed in that set by the collective judgement of society at large, in utter disregard of society's reason, or lack thereof, or blatant error or deep enlightenment. It simply is not relevant, because language doesn't dabble in reason, only majority votes.
Language is the perfect republic, and a woman is whatever can get a majority to freely call her a woman (either by assuming the qualities of the members of the set, or by kindly asking society at large). A language is only a language when people can say what they see — and that, of course, can go one way or the other: language can only work when people who don't see a woman are free to not say woman.
Polite society has agreed that there are some words we don't say to each other, but in general and on average, nobody owes anybody a dictionary entree for every word they use. That too is how language works. This is not to say that there is nothing wrong with the English language — God knows there is a great deal wrong with the English language — but only that this is how the language we got works.
When somebody doesn't like their language, they can always go live in another one. When one language spontaneously divides into two, because two groups of people use common words in different ways according to their respective leanings, the language begets two daughter languages that each go their own way. That too is perfectly natural.
Getting laid
For animals that both bear and raise their children, it's crucially important to know who is the mama and who the papa. Behavior derives from function and that from gender, and so interactions between individuals are governed by the gender awareness of all individuals involved. Fortunately, their jolly bundles hang in plain sight, so there's never any question. In the Stone Age, all human activities were likewise all about bearing children, feeding them, protecting them and teaching them. In the Stone Age, or so the Bible teaches, humans were animals and there was no difference: Psalm 73:22, Ecclesiastes 3:18, 2 Peter 2:12, Jude 1:10.
We moderns, however, have decided long ago — in precisely the same in which we agreed on what words to use for which phenomena, namely by natural majority vote — to cover up our genitals with clothing, effectively hiding our physical genders. And our women naturally stopped going through "estrus", which are obvious physical signals that indicate that they are ready to mate. We invented schools, so that specialized teachers would raise all society's children, and the adults could engage in activities that had nothing to do with kids and were also not gender specific. The world we moderns live in (from the clothes we wear to the furniture we sit on, the cars we drive, the cities we live in, our cell phones and their networks and all our other toys and gadgets, even the food we eat and the governments that keeps the whole shebang together) has been put together, very obviously, by fellow humans whose physical gender, also very obviously, is entirely obscure and utterly irrelevant. We don't know whether the builder of our house, our car, our sandwich, our legislation, the electricity from our sockets or the water from our taps, are male or female because it simply doesn't matter. Our world is nearly entirely genderless.
When we humans look upon animals like dogs or cows, we, like the dogs and cows themselves, see at once who the males are and who the females. But when dogs or cows look upon humans, they have no idea who is which. To animals like dogs and cows, we humans look not like dogs or cows but like birds: we walk on two legs and our bodies are completely covered, and our gender-specific body parts are invisible. We humans are not only covered in clothes, but also in cars and houses and mannerisms and language. We humans are aware that beneath all of that layering, there sits a naked animal. But dogs and cows don't know that. They only see the covering. They think we're birds.
The key take-away here is that no single person or committee or government ever decided that humanity at large should be like this. Instead, it's a natural development. Nature (or God through nature) is transitioning us from physical animals to creatures whose identities stem entirely from layers upon layers of rationality: feathers made of thought, if you will. And why would God do that? Well — as anybody who actually knows God will attest — that's because God is a bird.
God is a bird, which is why the Bible says: "He will cover you with His pinions, and under His wings you may seek refuge" (Psalm 91:4). And that means that we are his chicks: birds-to-be (see Ruth 2:12, Psalm 17:8, 36:7, 57:1, 61:4; also see Genesis 15:1 and Matthew 23:37 and of course John 1:32).
After all, "God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them" (Genesis 1:27);
→ "A man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh" (Genesis 2:24);
→ "Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is One" (Deuteronomy 6:4).
All this means all kinds of things, but also: as long as humanity is divided in a male half and a female half, humanity is not One and thus not according to the image of God. Or as Paul wrote: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28, also see Luke 20:34-36).
This in turn means that among the queers there are surely a great deal of fakers, attention seekers and perverts (the inevitable false prophets who seek personal benefit rather than communal holiness), but surely also a driving core of true prophets, true children of the Most High, whose intuited sense of gender-transcendence gets warped by warped minds into the dark gospel of gender-fluidity. What few seem to realize is that the false queers are the egg shell around the true ones, to protect the unified body of true queers from predators looking for something to devour.
People who go around asking: "What is a woman?" do so because they are genuinely concerned about the sanity and thus the sanctity of humankind. What they, therefore, in their confusion actually mean to ask is: "What is a saint?". The obvious answer: Pure femininity is femininity utterly void of masculinity, which is a society void of individuality: a barren virgin (Revelation 18:7). Saintly femininity, on the other hand, is a bride pregnant with a son. Pure masculinity, likewise, is masculinity utterly void of femininity, which is utter anti-social isolation, equally barren (society's equivalent of what cosmologists call heat death). Saintly masculinity is a husband entirely invested in and consumed by his bride.
Ovum positum est: the egg got laid (Isaiah 3:15).
Unfair competition
Nature is trying to turn us into living tic tacs, with our soft fleshy core covered in layers of solid hardness (1 Peter 4:8); living stones, if you will (1 Peter 2:5). And of course, there are those who try to work against this naturally occurring marvel, this living temple we are becoming, this divine nature we are receiving. Such people intent to maintain mankind's animal nature, and thus the obviousness of the division between physical men and physical women. And so, they sell us make-up and high heels (designed to imitate estrus) and cowboy hats and Lamborghinis (designed to convey power).
What they don't sell is the obvious insight that humanity is designed to cooperate and derive pleasure from cooperation. That's how we created language and law and civilization and science. That's how we made the lame walk and the blind see, and did even greater things than those. Feminine engagement aims to unify. Masculine engagement aims to conquer. That's how we can tell men and women apart. Masculinity divides, confronts, attacks, derides, condemns, belittles, mocks, robs and slays. Masculinity considers world domination as the greatest human achievement, and equates good with pleasant and evil with unpleasant. Femininity considers kindness as the greatest human achievement, and equates good with inclusion and bad with exclusion regardless of one's private tastes (or the satisfaction of desires). Femininity loves its enemies, imparts wisdom and teaches freedom. A woman is maturity, and men are her toddlers.
For decades we've been told that competition is good for markets until finally some brave few noted that competition drives everybody to the brink of bankruptcy and only monopolies can render a company the financial space to develop beyond the immediate demands of the market. Not exhaustive competition but mastery and sovereignty fuels true progress. The lame walk when they cooperate, not when they compete.
Sport competitions, likewise, are the residual vestiges of deeply ingrained barbarism, of going over the fence to bash in the skulls of whatever strangers might be on the other side. Modern wars, you'll agree, don't spontaneously "break out", as the vernacular suggests, but are "declared". Wars are designed in exactly the same way in which producers of consumer goods create a market to compete in. Wars are designed by designers in designer suits in designer offices, very much alike sport competitions, for the sole purpose of bleeding off excess testosterone from society, lest the bearers of itchy balls help themselves to productive State properties. Chicken farms gas male chicks and grind them into dog food. Humans have wars for that, of which sport competitions are the domesticated version. The holiness of gender-transcendence is interfering with this arrangement, but that shows that there is something wrong with competition, not with gender-transcendence.
The truth of the matter is that humanity is naturally producing a select group of people who relate to the rest of humanity the way the brain relates to the rest of the body (lovingly dubbed Eternals by pop culture: Psalm 89:48, Matthew 16:28, Luke 2:26, John 8:51, Hebrews 11:5). Humanity is evolving into a super-organism, whose brain is a unified cluster of Eternals that evolves out of the Temple, which evolved out of the Tabernacle, which evolved out of the burning bush (since there YHWH first met Moses). But only some of our children will be part of that super-organism. Many of humanity's children alive today will not be part of that, and revert back to the animal world, where the differences between males and females are obviously and immediately recognizable by everybody.
Another often heard objective is that we might accidentally fall in love with someone who, upon further exploration, fails to meet our physical expectations. Those are valid concerns, but possibly not for the reasons one might expect. Back on the farm, we fell in love on steamy hay days, when dust billowed in a honey colored haze and wafting pheromones triggered hormones and we got all horny. Nowadays, we take our cues mentally and creatively. It may be a surprise to some but Godly people have never entered a physical relationship on the basis of wafting chemicals, but have always understood who their eternal partners were on basis of their mental compatibility: taking their cues directly and only from God.
Brutal honesty gets you home
Today, we're moving into an avatar world and if someone wants to identify as a talking sofa or pink penguin, they should very much go ahead and act like a talking sofa or pink penguin. The rule is: whoever acts like a banana will be treated like a banana and thus called a banana.
And speaking of rules: the rule in Bitcoin land is: not your keys, not your Bitcoin. In all other lands, the rule is: not your authority to raise your children the way you want to: not your children.
A parent is whoever raises the child: whoever gets to download their legislative framework upon the working conscious of the child, whoever gets to infuse them with a sense of reality, justice, duty, purpose and hope. A father is the person whose image and identity the child ultimately assumes, not the guy who produces the hardware but the guy who downloads the software. Many of us share our physical postal addresses with some little ones, but they're just there for us to feed. And for that the State is duly grateful, because they are its children, not ours. The State has them the entire day and breeder-feeder couples get them at the end of it, when the kids are too exasperated to absorb any more instructions and the elders are too tired to object.
Now that the State raises our children, only a very small minority of our activities are gender specific or have anything to do with raising, feeding or protecting kids and thus with the ultimate future of humanity. Dorothy left Kansas a long time ago, but the memory of mommy, daddy and little Goldilocks still simmers in our collective cultural memory, like having fins or running from giant spiders.
The truth of the matter is that the entire human collective is presently splitting up into bird-people and herd-people. The herd-people are those who are natured to desire a clear demarcation between boys and girls, clarity in matters of reproduction, courtship, social structures as centralized on the lead bull (or ram or whatever), and so on and so forth. The bird-people are those who are natured to desire a homogeneous non-breeding community (like the brain, whose cells don't divide because they don't die) or at least a community governed by such a homogeneous non-breeding community.
We're parting like a zipper. Or perhaps more like two large flocks of animals whose two shepherds met for a chat but are now saying their goodbyes and are parting their ways. All their animals know the voice of their respective shepherd, and also (possibly more importantly) all other animals who also know the voice of their own shepherd. But all of us are displaced and surrounded by confused people, who are all trying to get a grip on the new dealio. Finding one's kin is crucial but not always very straight forward: they hide in the weirdest places (Luke 15:1-2). But the split is not happening at some magical point, like a door where every single animal has to make a blind decision with eternal consequences, but broadly over the vast dynamic of a single mixed herd spread out over a vast plain (Revelation 20:9).
But that also means that while the split is occurring, there will be herdlings that get mixed up with the birdlings, and vice versa. Some will realize their error quickly, whereas others will cling to their initial choice until they realize they are very far away from their people and anybody they know, including their own shepherd. And of course, there will be predators who will dress up as either birdling or herdling but only with the objective of helping themselves to the easiest pickings.
A two part key
Masculinity and femininity are very precise qualities that appear within a person on a spectrum and multiple points. A person's mind is multi-facetted and corrugated like a key or a puzzle piece, with some qualities peaking in the masculine end, and other qualities peaking in the feminine end. Two people match when their entire spectrums match, and no nose can ever smell that. One's full-spectrum compatibility is only known by God, and only God can bring compatible people together. All other relationships contain coercion, violence, disgrace, drama and noise. This is why so many couples divorce.
Birdlings are people who are driven by the deep yearning to transcend their physical gender, for the purpose of being available to mentally unite with a great multitude of matching receivers, and create a variety of Oneness that compares with the Periodic Table or the Cambrian Explosion. That's not an easy objective and the desire to be Godly — especially in a world where Godly tutors are rarer than winged horses — very often results in strings of most unsatisfying compromises, that in turn yield shame and anger rather than dignity and peace.
The perversion of righteousness is a horrible thing to behold, but not rarely the result of someone's sincere quest for insight and maturity and wholeness. Much more pernicious, however, are willful distortions of people that mock and provocate and deride the young and weak, the tumbling fledglings and the stumbling fawns.
There is a disastrous amount of ignorance, indignity and self-seeking deception in our present world. Our children are taught by godless teachers and left abandoned at the mercy of predatorial protocols that eat their minds and souls. The vast majority of people who volunteer to either teach or govern or entertain do so out of selfish motivations and are just there to score. Only a very small minority teaches the right stuff and takes great care to stay out of the spotlight. The world is coming to an end, and anyone who thinks big will die big. Remember the dinosaurs: think small and inherit the earth.