Alarums, Alarums, To Arms, To Arms!
7 years ago
"God is a comedian
playing to an audience
that is too terrified to laugh."--Voltaire
PADUCAH, KY (ONS)—Throughout his life, 22-year-old Matthew Leske has been a devout Christian, attending services three times a week at Holy Christ Almighty Lutheran Church in his hometown of Paducah, regularly participating in Bible-study devotionals with his mother and four sisters, and faithfully adhering to the dictums of his strict fundamentalist Christian upbringing.
Throughout his post-pubescent life, Leske has also, like all male humans, been gripped by an intense, all-consuming desire to ejaculate sperm, but has been unable to do so out of fear of incurring the wrath of God and suffering an eternity of agonizing punishment in the afterlife.
A part-time prep-cook and odd-job yardwork handyman when not volunteering as a Bible witness to local shut-ins and nursing-home residents, the young Leske has never had much time for socializing with members of the opposite sex. Nevertheless, last week, Leske announced his intention to marry fellow Christian Luann Ruth Perkins, also a member of Holy Christ Almighty, whom he met on a church-sponsored Luther League hayride two months ago.
Leske cited his irresistible desire to achieve sexual climax and ejaculate sperm without having to go to hell as the number one factor in his decision to propose marriage.
"I really want to discharge semen," he said. "I mean I really, really, really want to really bad."
Living his 22 years inviolate under strict fundamentalist doctrine, Leske has never ejaculated, for to do so outside the holy bonds of sacramental matrimony would mean non-negotiable, eternal punishment upon death.
"I don't want to go to hell," said Leske, explaining his decision not to engage in premarital ejaculation. "I am absolutely terrified of the burning and scorching of my impure, unclean flesh in the Lake of Fire; the prodding and stabbing by pitchforks wielded by demons; and, in particular, the unending, eternal torment in pits of boiling pitch as Satan the Deceiver laughs in sadistic glee."
Burning with a desire to ejaculate so overwhelming that it has threatened to dwarf even his love for Christ, Leske has, ever since puberty, researched the subject at length, discovering "five score and seventeen" different methods by which males can achieve ejaculation. Unfortunately, Leske said, not one of them is permissible under fundamentalist-Christian law.
"Homosexuality, masturbation, oral-genital contact, frottage, shoe fetishes, barnyard animals, leaning up against a washing machine on spin cycle—I could go on and on," Leske said. "I would have gladly tried any one of these, because, like I said, I really, really want to ejaculate. Regrettably, though, they are all punishable by eternal torment in the demon pits, so it was pretty much either get married or give up on ejaculating completely."
While Leske is greatly looking forward to marriage and the sweet release of sperm it will bring, he noted that even in holy wedlock, fundamentalist Christian doctrine limits permissible ejaculation to just one circumstance: sexual congress for the purpose of procreation.
"I'm going to want to start a family pretty much immediately," he said. "If I can get a raise and a second job, I figure I might be able to eventually support a family of as many as six or seven offspring. That means I should hopefully get to ejaculate seven times before I die. I know, you're thinking, 'That's not much.' But believe me, it will sure beat the heck out of what I'm doing now, which is not ejaculating at all."
Leske does admit to harboring some doubts about his upcoming nuptials. "What if Luann, never having seen a naked man before, is so frightened that she refuses to allow me to ejaculate?" he said. "Divorce would be out of the question, and I'd be trapped forever in a non-ejaculatory marriage. It will probably work out okay, though: Once she becomes my wife, I should be able to command her to do whatever I say, and, even if it's against her wishes, it will be her Christian duty to obey me."
No date has been set for the wedding, but Leske said he would like it to take place "as soon as humanly possible."
"I have opened my heart and mind to Jesus Christ, the Son of God the Father, my Lord and Savior in Heaven, who died on the cross for my sins, that I might be born again in His blood. And I yearn for the righteous power of the Holy Spirit to fill me with holy inspiration. But I also yearn—desperately yearn, yearn with indescribable longing, I mean really, really yearn—to ejaculate. If it were up to me I would prefer to ejaculate right now. This minute. No lie."
Could you have a Neanderthal in your family tree? Scientists say modern humans did more than simply coexist with our evolutionary cousins. New research shows that Neanderthals and non-African early humans had sex — and produced offspring. Genetic evidence suggests that early "humans" (Cro-Magnon folk) interbred with the Neanderthalers. There's more.
Be careful whom you call a Neanderthal. You may be one yourself. Or at least you may have Neanderthal ancestors.
That's the conclusion of a study being released Thursday that examined DNA extracted from Neanderthal bones more than 35,000 years old.
More Than A Handshake?
There's little question that modern humans and Neanderthals bumped into each other once upon a time.
"The archaeological record shows they overlapped between about 30,000 and 80,000 years ago," says David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School.
There was some fossil evidence that they may have done more than shake hands in passing, but the initial genetic evidence suggested otherwise.
"And so the big open question was whether they exchanged genes during that time when they overlapped in the Middle East and in Europe," he says.
To find out whether the two human species interbred, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, launched an audacious effort to sequence all 3 billion letters of Neanderthal DNA. As hard as it may be to believe, fragments of DNA can survive in bones that are more than 30,000 years old. New techniques can sequence those fragments, and new software can line the fragments up.
The main strategy for finding whether modern humans and Neanderthals exchanged genes was to compare the Neanderthal DNA with DNA from modern humans — some whose ancestors had remained in Africa, and others who had migrated to Europe, Asia and the New World. If the Neanderthal DNA was more similar to the non-African DNA, it would indicate that Neanderthals contributed their genes after the first modern humans migrated out of Africa.
Reich says that's what they found.
"The non-African is more closely related to the Neanderthal," Reich says. "Quite definitely. Highly statistically significantly overwhelming evidence that they're more closely related on average to Neanderthals."
In other words, Reich and his Leipzig co-authors are totally sure that Neanderthal genes found their way into modern humans when the two species intersected. They report their findings in the journal Science.
"The simplest possible explanation is that it occurred once," Reich says. "But it very easily could have occurred on multiple occasions. Perhaps it's likely that it occurred on multiple occasions."
Reich says it's hard to pin down exactly how much DNA Neanderthals contributed to modern humans. Reich says it's hard to pin down exactly how much DNA Neanderthals contributed to modern humans. "We estimate about 1 to 4 percent of the genetic ancestry of non-Africans is from Neanderthals," he says.