The Holy Ghost is a Bastet

I believe the Holy Ghost was represented in ancient Egypt as Bastet, the cat goddess, which was in part a protector of food.  You could say the Holy Ghost is a protector of spiritual nourishment, but that’s not what I’m really getting at here.   Let me explain.  Often in LDS sermons, you will hear or read dialogue like the following from apostle Joseph Wirthlin:

“Brothers and sisters, do we turn away the still, small voice? Do we do things that offend the Holy Ghost? Do we allow influences into our homes that drive the Spirit from our homes? The type of entertainment that we permit into our homes will certainly have an impact on the power of the Holy Ghost. Much of the entertainment of the world is offensive to the Holy Ghost. Surely we should not watch movies or television shows that are filled with violence, vulgar language, and immorality.”

How do we offend the Holy Ghost? From this we learn that the Holy Ghost is afraid of entertainers.  I can imagine that juggling clowns scare the bejeebus out of the HG because he doesn’t have physical hands to ward off any rouge flying balls or pins. The TV and movies also scare the HG, particularly if they use certain words and phrases.  You could say the meanest cruelest thing possible with the most polite words and nicest tone of voice—the HG will sit there and nod in approval at your proper etiquette. But use a foul four-letter word in praising your “f*cking amazing friend”, and the HG is startled by your lowly-worded compliment. 

Video violence, apparently, is also bad juju for the HG. If you’re a 14 year old boy playing soldier in Call of Duty (which happens to be similar to a Mormon phrase about the priesthood), the HG gets very anxious that you would kill computer characters instead of reading your scriptures.  Reproving someone betimes with sharpness, using guilt and shame in a form of emotional abuse according to D&C 121, and the HG will cheerlead your spiritual violence. Besides where was he when Joshua of the Old Testament was slaughtering women and children in actual violence?  He was on the right hand of God.   

If your  computer screen shows someone with too little clothing on screen, the HG will blush and run.  The HG is invisible, so how many naked people has the testator seen?  I mean, if you were invisible, you’d see as many naked bodies as you could.  It should be a lot, but apparently the slightest naked elbow will send shivers up the ghost’s spine.

Isn’t the HG’s job to be a comforter?  Isn’t he supposed to help you know right from wrong?  But the moment anything wrong happens, he’s out of there so fast, you won’t get a wave goodbye let alone a lesson on what’s bad.  He’s supposed to be busy flying around helping everyone gain a testimony, but if you dare think a single bad thought, chant a prayer just wrongly, show a single bare shoulder, curse under your breath once, well the Holy Ghost is offended and will fly away faster than Casper.  The HG is a selfish slacker on the job.  The HG doesn’t play ball with sinners.  Wear immodest gym shorts and try passing him the ball, and you can count on him to throw it into the stands and leave the building with his tail between his legs.  

The Holy Ghost is a scared little dog.  No, make that a scared little pussy, to put it bluntly.  The holy ghost is a pussy.  Yes, I just wrote that.  Bastet, the cat goddess, was fierce and bold.  The Holy Ghost, the pussy god, is fearful and timid.  Unlike the nocturnal Bastet, the HG is afraid of the dark, and goes to sleep at midnight whenever you stay out late.   Bastet whipped away the rats.  The HG will rat on you to the bishop by giving him the gift of discernment and toast your ass on the guilt barbeque grill.  He’s supposed to be a gift, but some gift he is.   The HG is a Lamanite Giver.  When you’re nice to him, he’ll bless you and bestow gifts of spirit on you.  But the moment you screw up, he’s like a collection agency reposessing those gifts.  Good luck getting back the gift. Like the Lamanite’s DNA, he’s just gone.  You’ll have to beg and pray and promise everything to God so he'll give up a sliver of his ghost again.  And if you read your scriptures and sacrifice your first born to a mission in Tanzania, he might reappear for brief moments of time and cause you to feel like crying.  He likes to get people crying.  If you’re not crying, then the HG is crying.

The Holy Ghost is the ultimate borderline personality disorder manipulator.  One moment he’s in love with you, the next, he's a catty emotional bitch. It all comes down to whether you’re doing whatever he wants. Do the right thing, you’re the golden child. Do the wrong thing, you have hurt the Holy Ghost and made him cry.  You’ve offended and scared off that pussy and he’s not coming back until you can prove to him you’re going to bow and worship just right.   It’s what happens with insecure tyrants.

What’s worse, apparently, you might mistake your own emotions for the Holy Ghost.  Boyd Packer wrote:

“Be ever on guard lest you be deceived by inspiration from an unworthy source. You can be given false spiritual messages. There are counterfeit spirits just as there are counterfeit angels. (See Moro. 7:17.) Be careful lest you be deceived, for the devil may come disguised as an angel of light.
“The spiritual part of us and the emotional part of us are so closely linked that is possible to mistake an emotional impulse for something spiritual. We occasionally find people who receive what they assume to be spiritual promptings from God, when those promptings are either centered in the emotions or are from the adversary.”

Yeah, the spirit, such a sneaky bastard. You could be manipulating yourself with your own inner pussy.  Or it could be the devil playing pussy advocate with your mind (which is a nicer way of saying it than the “devil is f*cking with your mind”).  You haven’t a chance, according to the elder Packer, of guessing the difference between the half-cracked holy spirit, your own Freudian emotions or the firebrand trickster.  No matter how you slice it, you’re screwed by this pussy.  He’s not going to help you get anything right if you do anything wrong.

So that begs the question, what does the holy ghost actually do that  you're not already doing?  If you're good, then you feel better because you have the spirit with you. If you're bad, the HG leaves you to feel worse.  Does the invisible HG do anything at all? 

I know that some of you are going to say I am committing the unpardonable, son-of-perdition sin of denying the Holy Ghost. Jesus once said, “Whoever denies me before men, I will also deny him before my Father.”  It seems that without ever denying the HG, he chickens out and denies us long before we get the chance.  The biggest denial here is that the HG is actually here … to help or not.  While Bastet was a myth, at least we have paintings and carvings of her.  The holy ghost? Invisible is as invisible does.