An Exercise

I'd love to hear what anyone comes up with for this. A scenario and an exercise....

OK.  Let's imagine that YOU are a  geneticst and microbiologist in a newly-developing country.  You are brilliant, even though you aren't well-known.  In the course of your research, you discover that a cohort of yours has engineered a virus that can evolve slowly over time to wipe out all of humanity.  This evil cohort has his reasons, but basically, he feels that humans are the cause of everything bad, and need to just eventually go away.  You do some calculations on the rate of mutational change in this virus.  2000 years, give or take.  Then, WHAMMO.  No more humanity.  It's inevitable.  It's going to happen. 

Only YOU have discovered this impending doom.  It's more than a little hard to believe, and it's so far in the future... who would care?  So you work tirelessly to figure out a way to stop it.  You research, you test, and ONE DAY, you discover that the cure is something astounding... your own DNA.  YOU just happen to have the EXACT genetic code to  divert impending doom.  But it can only "cure" the virus in 2000 years, when the virus is fully mutated.   There's no one else in all of history with YOUR exact DNA.  Only YOU  have the answer to save the world.

What do you do from here?  Those people, 2000 years from now, need to know how to combat the destruction that's coming.  That's a long time, and you can't count on civilization looking like it does today.  Society's collapse... they have before, and they will again.  You can't rely on electricity, computers, the internet.  Technologies change and become obsolete.  You can't know what language people will speak at that time.  This is not time-capsule stuff.  This information has to be OUT THERE, in order to do it's job.

What would you do?

AVE MARIA - Celine Dion

A Thought on the Creation Story

My son crawled into bed with me this morning, and began reading his new "Action Bible" for kids.  He started on page one.  "In the beginning, God created Light."

All of a sudden, as he read that, it came to me what Light meant.  I'd always thought the Creation story was so.... out of sequence.  God creates light on day 1, but doesn't make the sun until day 4.  So... how did that work?  IN my ego-centric, earth-centric mind, light came from the SUN.  But that's DAYLIGHT.  Not LIGHT.  And it says that God separated the Light from the Dark.  Could that mean Heaven?  Is the story describing the separation of Good from Evil, Love from Hate, God from the Devil?  He CREATED light - the dark was just the void without light.  So often we use words to describe God, as if they're analogies, but sometimes I think certain created things in our experience are actually BEYOND analogies.  Light.  Water.  God's not just "like" light. It's not merely a description.     I think LIGHT is an imprint of God on His creation, the universe.  Jesus is the LIGHT of the World. There's a reason that Jesus appeared bright as the sun during the Transfiguration.  Radiance, life-giving energy.  That which allows us to SEE the world around us, causes all things to grow.  That which reveals what is hidden.  That which is pure energy.  Light.   God's first creation.

HMMMMM.

An entry in A Blog I Follow

By Jennifer Fulweiler


Reach for the Light: The moment I was no longer an atheist

These cucumber sprouts my husband put on our window sill caught my eye this morning as I was washing dishes. I noticed that they were growing at an angle, reaching out towards the sun rather than standing vertically. It reminded me of a key moment in my conversion.

Somewhere in this plant’s DNA are instructions that say something like, “By default, grow vertically. Unless the sun can only be found one side; in which case, reach for the light.”

BY DEFAULT, GROW VERTICALLY…REACH FOR THE LIGHT…

If I were to see these statements written on a piece of paper, I would understand them to be information. Instructions. I would take it for granted that someone wrote them. It would never occur to me to think that random forces constructed those sentences. The idea of creator-less information is an absurdity.

I remember back in 2005, when I had barely dipped my toe into the world of agnosticism after a life of atheism. I wasn’t sure if I believed in God or not, though I was leaning toward not. One afternoon I was reading about the subject of DNA, and I got butterflies in my stomach when I realized: DNA is information. It’s a set of instructions.

The implications of this realization could not be overstated. I leaned back in my chair, thought for a moment, and asked myself: “Can information — instructions — ever come from a non-intelligent source?”

I realized that the answer is no. And my life was never the same again.