The Ghost Verse

This edition of the Hoole Intelligence Report will bring to your attention the existence of a fake, but immensely popular Bible verse which somebody (nobody knows who) invented to prove a silly point about masturbation (which nobody can agree on). That the holy scriptures offer succor and guidance to untold millions across the globe goes without saying. It is my hope that the tale of the Ghost Verse will make it clear that fake scripture can be a profound source of inspiration in its own right.

It was during a week night session of church some time in the Eighties that I first heard it told. The dude who sat down in the metal folding chair next to mine was a singular fellow, who I'd never met before. A son of one of the church regulars back from somewhere (prison? some low-rent art school?) outfitted in a late-Seventies style typical of a certain kind of twenty-something loaner. His name would have been something like Dan or Jimmy.

His hair, parted in the middle and carefully combed over the ears, framed glasses that made him look more square than studious. He had on a black t-shirt, and in his back pocket was tucked the inevitable comb. I'd seen the costume before and even then, it suggested something definite -- the insistence on an obviously dated style was the outward sign of a simmering refusal to get on with the business of adulthood.
The pastor must have mentioned something that related to masturbation from the podium (itself a strange circumstance), which prompted Jimmy to turn, look me in the eye, and declare with monotone intensity:

The Bible says "It is better to cast thy seed in the belly of a whore than to spill it on the ground."

His intention was obvious - to suggest that the Bible was much more complex than the preacherman was letting on, that he was a special authority on the ambiguities of scripture, and that he was personally very much in the belly-of-a-whore camp.
Being a surly misfit myself, I'm sure I nodded my head at the fellow or grunted and returned to the tedious business of sitting through church. I was staggered, nonetheless. It had the ring of authentic scripture, but the theology seemed contradictory to what I'd read myself in the Bible. Paraphrasing it, one hears God as a Marine Corps burn-out father -- "You gotta get yourself laid son, wanking it's for wimps."

The story of Onan, the Bible's famed masturbator, seems to be the inspiration for the verse. It's laid out in Genesis 38 like this -- a guy named Judah sets his son up with a wife, Tamar. God turns on the son and ends up killing him (standard operating procedure in the Old Testament, it turns out). It then falls by tradition to our man Onan to knock up his brother's widow, so that the offspring can carry on their dead father's line. A close reading reveals that though Onan was only too happy to "get down" with Tamar, he wasn't trying to father any kids that weren't his, which led him to withdraw at the vital moment and famously "spill his seed on the ground."

The popular gloss on the story is that Onan settled for "shaking hands with the unemployed" instead of hooking up with Tamar. And thus he was fingered as a wanker by posterity and "Onanism" became a synonym for masturbation. Worse still, poor Onan didn't get a chance to enjoy his new found fame as God killed him shortly afterward.

This misreading of the story is a big semantic leap toward the Ghost Verse, because it presumes that Onan chose masturbation over the chance to sleep with an actual woman (an opportunity sanctioned by God himself, no less). You won't have to ask too many teenage boys to find out why that's absolutely nuts. Nuts enough in fact to rise to the level of Sin. And this is the thrust, if you will, of the Ghost Verse -- male masturbation should be a source of guilt because it is a distraction from the totally awesome business of getting laid.

The beauty of the Ghost Verse is that it has survived and flourished. Search for it on the internet, and you'll find that its status as authentic scripture is refuted time and time again, but such protests only seem to increase its popularity. People continue to quote it because they like it, even if it's not "real."

For some, it confirms Christian hypocrisy and the flawed, anachronistic nature of scripture. For others, like Malachy McCourt (Frank's bro), its presumed Biblical origin is a source of comfort, explaining adolescent sexual anguish as fealty to a strange and cruel god. As for Jimmy, my first and greatest tutor in fake theology, wherever he ended up, I'm sure he continues to do God's work to this day.