the slap and the wa wa

Here's another way I heard the golden rule explained you take some kind of computer simulation of the world, oh let's make it the country to make it simpler, which mirrors the current state of affairs between the races/  And by races I mean the non-biological way like on the surveys, Black, White, Asian, Amerind, and Aleuts and Pacific Islanders too, just to round them out.  The subjects of this experiment are able to manipulate the relations between the races anyway they choose, but they have to remember that they have no choosing as to what race they will be when they get into the game, they could come into it as any race, and this tends to make them all choose for equality in the relations. 

I'm not sure if that actually happened or whether it was just a thought experiment..  It sounds a little bogus because although you told them they could come in as any race they know that would never really happen.  Maybe it's better expressed like in playing a game.  If nobody knew whether they would be the shoe or the iron in a game of Monopoly they wouldn't agree in advance to any special rules for any marker.

Or how about an economy?  What if before you were born you were shown schema of various economic situations from one where the one percent owns ninety-nine percent of everything to where everybody has pretty much the same amount,  and you can choose any one of them but not where you end up in it, like in the first one you have a one in a hundred shot of being in the one percent, but otherwise you end up in the hapless ninety-nine. 

I've always had this picture in my mind, perhaps from my days at Elsdon Methodist, although this is not their dogma, that there is this long line of souls, probably in heaven somewhere and they are all lined up next to a hole in the clouds, and when you make the jump you are headed for the next opportunity, first come, first served, and maybe it looks like you are headed for a cozy childhood in  a rich family in Boston, but for some reason that sperm doesn't stick and you end up under the hot sun of Bangladesh to a family if dung collectors. 

I'll leave it to the biblical scholar to add anything to this, but I don't think that the bible has much to say about where souls are before they inhabit a body  I guess maybe they just don't exist at all, but I kind of like the idea of this endless ghostly line each one eyeing the other nervously and then the plunge and then the slap and the Wa Wa.  Oh I guess I am just a silly sentimentalist. .