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Poo-cakes anyone?

By Discordia --

"But Rabshakeh said unto them, Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to thee, to speak these words? hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?" 2 Kings 18:27
“And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight.” Eze 4:12

That sounds totally disgusting. Who in their right mind eats dung? The very idea is nauseating to us here. A popular insult is telling someone to “Eat s**t and die.” Yet here are verses in the bible where people are eating dung and drinking urine and it’s a good thing. What is up with that?

None of those verses made sense to me until I started gardening. A quick survey of organic products for plants in most dedicated gardening stores is gross when you really think about it. Blood meal (for nitrogen), bone meal (for calcium, something tomatoes need to avoid blossom end rot) and fish emulsion (made from pureed fish left-overs). Milorganite is a popular nitrogen fertilizer made by the Milwaukee Metro Sewer District. As a gardener, I have used composted cow, earthworm and chicken manure on plants. I know people who use rabbit and horse manures as well. The plants love poo and grow like crazy when they have it.

Ever notice after an animal pees in your yard, the grass in that area is green, except for the middle, where it is dead? That is from the ammonia and nitrogen found in urine, also good fertilizers once bacteria in the soil break them down into a form plants can take up. Those same chemicals, however, will burn and kill plants when too much is applied. The same is true of any fertilizer for plants and is also true of vitamins for humans. (By the way, fertilizer is nothing more than vitamins for plants. It is NOT food. Plants use photosynthesis to make their own food.)

Imagine yourself a primitive human, worshipping a thunder-mountain god. You notice that where ever your animals relieve themselves, the plants grow better. The grass is greener and the plants larger and probably the fruit of those plants is bigger too. WOW! That smelly stuff that comes out of you and your animals is MAGIC! It makes plants bigger and better and they have better and tastier fruit! You want more children and…. (pause in thought)…BAM! It is like god has spoken to you!! If it is good for plants then it must work on people too! After all, if dung is good for plants and plants are good for people then dung is good for people!!!! Since humans are better than animals then the human stuff is better too!!! YAY! It’s a miracle!

It seems to me that the people in the bible (primitive humans) noticed that animal droppings made healthier plants so used what passed for logic and concluded that dung would be good for them as well. That’s why the ignorant people who wrote the bible put that in. They knew NOTHING of the bacteria that live in guts and come out in feces. They had absolutely no understanding of sanitation or the diseases that come from unsanitary waters or food so they had no aversion to the practices in the above verses. So, from that angle, it isn’t so disgusting and it follows logically from observation. After all, they thought that the demon-theory of mental and physical illness was cutting edge science for everyone living on a flat Earth so why they'd think that poo-cakes would be bad is beyond me.

Gardening has taught me many interesting things, and that insight is one of the more memorable ones. Is my conclusion correct? I do not know but it does make those verses appear less crazy.

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