I just read Mobius' post from whenever about a personified God vs. a pantheistic view. While I agree on the pantheism thing, If there were a personified version of God I think God would play some jokes on us. Maybe the masturbation prohibition is not to be taken at face value?

I had a class last semester at Oberlin with our German writer-in-residence Katja Lange-Mueller. One of the pieces of hers we read was a story about a student studying martial arts and mediation with his master.
One day the master presented the student with a bottle, inside of which was a live duck. The master demanded that the student explain how the duck got in the bottle. The student was at a loss to explain and the master beat him severely for it. The next day the master presented the same bottle with the same question. The student scrambled to think of something, suggesting that perhaps the glassblower had blown the bottle around the duck. The master said he had guessed wrong and beat him severly again. This scenario repeated itself twice more before, on the fifth day, the student decided that his master must have gone mad. When demaded for an explanation of the duck in the bottle, he announced that he was leaving, although the master had been good to him for many years he was now afraid that he had taken leave of his senses and couldn't subject himself to it any longer.
The master began to cry and embraced his student, telling him how glad he was that he had finally learned this valuable lesson, and how difficult it had been for him to be so harsh with the student. He had put the student through senseless questions and beatings to teach him never to blindly accept something so clearly fraught with madness just because the perpetrator was his "master".