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The Spanking Gene
Or
The Autistic and the Blade Appendix E
it’s a still from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Australopithecus swinging a club made of a bone
Appendix E
Religion, explained, or Evolution as Religion
It’s not the afterlife, it’s the next life, the next generation.
It’s not your soul, it’s your genes you need to be protecting, and not the way the warriors think, the way you would protect your soul is the way you protect your genes, by getting right with the world.
This is what the prophets have been trying to tell you when they talk about changing your ways, when you abuse, you harm your genes and so we are punished in the “next,” life, meaning the next generation.
“Soul,” in this sense, is a better definition for genes than the popular version, which is what, atoms, molecules, building blocks of some sort. This is life as religion here, in theory, how things may have been understood in the deeper past, before we became the warriors and lost the sense of things.
It’s been a minute since any of my silly declarations like this excited me, but this seems like where I’ve always been heading, it’s abysmal that it took so long.
This seems like where religion and reality have only just parted ways, where they are still nearly the same thing, religion and truth, maybe Allism and Autism, religion and evolution, your soul and your ever-adapting genes. It’s always the differences we need to be talking about, but this what is almost common, two versions of what you do in this life creating what we get in the next, right? It seems like the crux of the problem.
I would have us do one long find and replace text, find “soul,” and replace it with “genes,” and somehow make it real for people, this would be my, If I could change one thing answer.
First I found an ironic way that the Adam and Eve creation business can be “true,” because that’s the story of the beginning of Allistic people, and now I think I’ve done the same for Heaven and Hell, the afterlife, that’s “true,” too, if you’re talking about genes and a human Heaven or Hell that we see in the next actual life, in the lives of our descendants.
I mean, I’m surprised to see that the religious ideas are quite so parallel to the real ones, that the idea of sin and punishment is the same . . . shape, same configuration as creating a bad environment and adapting to it, surprised that the difference can be so textually small, next life for afterlife, like an error in translation. I fancy we’ve followed a divergence right back to the point where it began here, when both minds only just stopped working the same way.
Something goes badly when we codify how to live, when we attempt to record this knowledge and teach it it becomes fiction, optional, at least for the modern sort. Somehow real knowledge became, “just religion.”
It’s like when the Historical Age Humans ™ and God created each other, they stopped believing, stopped believing that what we do in this life makes our future life and this truth became fiction, became something the obviously fictional Man in the Sky said instead of the reality we lived in.
( I’m having an insight that folks are going to read this backwards, like I’m religious, lamenting the loss of religion, like Nietzsche, no, it’s the opposite, I’m lamenting God and modern humankind’s birth, not His death, I’m crying over the loss of the pre-religious truth we used to share with Earthbound life before God showed up and made fiction of the real world.
I confess, it sounds like Freddy, topics and language.
I think your soul is really your genes, but then I would have to rewrite the Ten Commandments, the rules could use a few more mentions of violence as that doesn’t seem like a problem for your soul but it sure is for your genes.
“Thou shalt not kill,” looks a bit lonely and irrelevant all by itself on that list, and it doesn’t seem like the main theme, and anyway the dead don’t have a real next life, it’s the living whose progeny will be a little further from Heaven and closer to Hell, the commandments ought to have some focus on the violence practiced upon the living. Because evolution.
Such a small textual difference, soul for genes, afterlife for next life – but from some angles the difference seems no less than a focus on death over life.
It would seem more helpful if the basis for law banned things like beatings and torture as well, for your genes, both as punisher and as victim. It hurts more than the punisher’s fictional eternal soul, it is a hazardous environment and affects their actual, physical, worldly genes in the next generations.
They don’t call that “hurt,” they figure they’re adapting. But long view, we can see the human world is not on the path of healing. Some humans are adapting, but most of the world is just dying instead. We started talking about the afterlife and lost the real future, because protecting your obviously fictional soul has always been entirely optional.
My idea is that if mythology shows us the workings of the mind, and if humans can be organized into neurotypes, both of which I believe, then mythology is almost certainly neurotype dependent and the Bible and the Greek myths, etc., are probably not for Autistics or other sorts, those would be at least mostly Allistic myths.
The Chalice and Blade describes how the people of those times pointedly wrote new myths, upon the dominance of their, well, Eisler said, “social model,” but neurotype seems far more real to me. It’s what I rewrote the Chalice for. I think that the appearance of a new set of myths since the fifth millennium BCE points to a new dominant neurotype. I think we have to count afterlife schemes among the replacement myths, is today’s rant, count them as something new and strange and . . . well, there is no other word, and equal and opposite, if we were the doctors and they were the patients . . . patho . . . patholo . . . problematic. Maybe there has to be another word for a little longer, ha.
But I’m not here to condemn, the point is only to resurrect what was replaced. I just want the real next life back.
. . . processing . . . processing . . .
So what I’m after, I guess, is your “soul,” would be your own, it’s the individualist framing – whereas your “genes,” means your children and all of humanity into the future, it’s communal.
If we actually protect this thing, call it what you will, you are protecting community, and if you decide it’s “just religion,” and blow it off while still somehow telling yourself you’re saving your own soul through some side deal with God, you are abandoning community, making life an everyone for themselves situation.
You know I think it’s the state of human childhood that forces us all to choose this, that when your own genes, your own parents attack you, that is the most logical conclusion you can draw, is that you’re on your own.
So it’s genes, it’s neurotype – but it’s not just hardware, it’s environment – and we control our environment, which puts us in control of our genes and our neurotype. It is our actions and choices that have made us what we are and we could turn this around, turn it any direction we like, if we could only know we’re doing it, if we could only pull our heads out of our fictions.
It’s frustrating to glimpse this double bind, to see this logical trap, this Murphy’s Law joke we live in, but I can’t find another path to real hope.
Thanks for listening, if you did. I’ll repeat the punchline: not here to condemn.
I just want the real next life back. Wanted, maybe.
Jeff
Dec. 26th., 2025
The Spanking Gene 