Understanding "GOD" may be crucial to our survival. God and Genetic Engineering

[David Pinnegar]

Hi!

It's a sad reflection upon society that as soon as one might mention anything about Genesis, people turn away, either thinking that they've heard it all before and it's a load of bunk, or that one is a rabid creationist, atheist, evolutionist or some besotted bible basher.

But the reality I perceive from the number of organists who post on Facebook during a boring sermon is that the priests clearly have not got it right and have not reached the kernel of God, or certainly in any way that brings God to relevance in everyday life for everybody.

Until now, perhaps that has not mattered, and the Victorian priests got God so wrong repressing any acknowledgement of function of the animal in the human realm that Freud and later had to stand up for humans' animal rights . . .

The directions of modern technology require an urgent review of our perception of God and as to what God means in what we do and the directions we take.

God? What God? Father Christmas? The God that makes Muslims persecute infidels and Christians to shout "Jesus loves you, Muslims are Bad and let's not talk about the Jews"? The God that makes physicists smash together particles to try to find the Higgs Boson? No - clearly the answer is forty-seven - which it is not.

The reality is that Genesis is not history, it's not a fairy tale but it is a history of philosophy of the most profound nature and importance.

John Chapter 1 is pretty difficult to reconcile with Genesis 1, or at least it has been for me. "In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God". I appreciate that there are different translations of this, referring perhaps to "sound" or perhaps "law" in respect of "word", but all make reconciliation with Genesis 1 and the intelligent creator somewhat awkward.

Perhaps by this stage I have lost half my readers? Please take courage and read on.

Elswhere I have written about God as Energy, a force of order, but more completely the Force of Construction. If one substitutes "Construction Force" anywhere in the Bible for "God", I propose that it makes sense and in particular with a validly unifying concept.

So in Genesis 1 we see how the Construction Force brings energy and matter together in the most useful way, and that is the nature of all that we experience.

What is the proof of that? The opposite of Construction is Unconstruction. I have deliberately not used other forms of the word to avoid the prejudice of connotation . . . Deconstruction implies some intelligent taking apart whilst Destruction carries overtones of disasters. In contrast, Unconstruction has no intention, no intelligence, is mindless, random, dispersive and nihilistic. In short, Unconstruction disperses all that it meets, causes whatever it touches to do nothing and does nothing to anyone or anything and it sends all to nowhere. It is the absolute zero.
Clearly all that has come together to make everything, and us, results from Construction and we can have no experience of anything related to Unconstruction.

All that we experience therefore comes about through The Construction Force. There appears to be a fundamental process in nature that causes matter to come together in the most constructive manner. The mechanism is by way of an infinite experiment in infinite time to put all into contact in an infinite number of permutations leading progressively one by one to more useful and interesting ways of combination . . . from atomic particles to atoms to molecules to molecules that result in life. All in the universe is alive with the results of the Construction Force.

So when Christ said "Love thy God" - he was not referring to the Christian god rather than the Muslim God - there is only one God, the Construction Force that made me, you, our environment, our earth, our sun and all that exists. If we love the Construction Force, then it will enable us to work with it better so that we exist, and if we don't, we face Unconstruction. . .

Christ then brought the commandment of the Construction Force into the human realm - Love thy neighbour as thyself, and in these two commanments, he said, is all of Christianity.

Having journeyed through this process of thought, isn't it apparent that as Christians or scientists we can live with Evolution? Cannot Creationists therefore find Evolution to be the Act of God, the Act of the Construction Force?

In the above, we find the heart of what used to be BioPhysics, engineering bacteria in a closed system to act as robots chemically changing chemicals from one to another, to what the money merchants invested in as Genetic Engineering.

GM is certainly not all that it was cracked up to be - GM cotton farmers in India have committed suicide. Well perhaps that's one way of reducing the world's expanded population . . . But GM crops will cause a good deal more damage to us - damage that hits home to each and every one of us.

Monsanto does not understand Construction Force in the process of Evolution, so according to
http://www.naturalnews.com/036254_GM_corn_rootworm_crop_failures.html#ixzz1yYIjAdJN
their crops don't even do what they are engineered to do - and the bugs have evolved to outsmart the genetic insecticide.

Bugs are one thing, but humans are more complex, and those humans that we lose to the survival of the fittest and the destruction in evolution, the compost heap effect, are a loss to us. We do not like to see nature reducing us to compost to decompose us to see if next time nature's attempt will be better. So the weedkiller ingested by bugs intended to kill them leaves behind those bugs most capable of adaptation . . . and when we eat of the food, the weedkiller intended to kill the bugs, kills good bacteria and other chemical processes in our intestines. Diseases such as Crohns and IBS unknown to most of us when children are now increasingly commonplace.

The problem with Monsanto Genetic Modification and similar Genetic Engineering is that random sections of DNA sequence are injected into foriegn DNA. Although when we eat such foods, the DNA is supposed to be broken down, we know through the horrible effects of Thalidomide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide which are not prevalent from its opposite handed isomer analogue, that left-right handedness of molecules is important. Imperial College have been investigating left and right handed sugars coating DNA.

Chemical multiplication of RNA and DNA requires molecules to fit in sequence. It relies on other chemicals having their atoms in the right places to fit. In this way, GM proteins can result in sugars, starches and proteins that appear to be fine chemically but have their atoms in the wrong place. When recombining in formations of RNA, the wrong molecules can recreate the error of the RNA and DNA incorporated by Monsanto into the host receiving organism.

In the words of Daniel Baremboim, All Things are Connected.

Perhaps it's no coindience that in Bill Gates sponsored Genetic Modification of Drought Resistant Wheat, natural selection is the means by which the new crop is being bred. This is safe. Perhaps Bill Gates above all was aware of the coding principles upon which I was writing in the '90s: http://www.hammerwood.mistral.co.uk/ethics.htm#link2

Understanding Genesis, therefore, and all the wisdom that follows about how to handle "Construction Force", has a real bearing upon the decisions we make, what we do, how we treat other things which have resulted from Construction Force, and how we treat each other.

What happens in Churches and centres on Places of Organs has a real relevance to each and every one of us.

Best wishes

David P

[MusingMuso]

Dear David,

The answer to life, the universe and everything is 42; not 47.

It is quite miraculous, (if not a little spooky), that when Douglas Adams wrote "The hitchhiker's guide to the universe," he wrote that the computer programmed to calculate the meaning of everything and which took 7.5 million years to complete the task, came back with the answer 42...a number plucked from obscurity if not infinity.

In fact, 42 happens to be, (either by amazing co-incidence or divine intervention), the figure which correlates precisely to the "Hubble Constant," which measures the rate of expansion of the universe, and from which the age of the universe can be calculated.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIy76M-4txo&feature=related


Could it be that the creative force of art is superior to that of religion?

Best,

MM


PS: I believe that the "word "used in Genesis correlates to the word "logos".....in other words, "meaning" or perhaps "purpose."

PPS:  Don't be too hard on Victorian clergymen. There were some who struggled to gain greater enlightenment, and the Unitarian Church is especially interesting; spawning the likes of Joseph Pristley.

[David Pinnegar]

Dear MM

Well .. . thank you for correcting me so precisely and astutely! Clearly I had been right in commenting that the answer was not 47! Wasn't I lucky to have got it wrong!

There is another possible twist to St John's "logos" - meaning or purpose . . . Elsewhere here I have hinted at the Consciousness achieved by the human over the animal resulting from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. That Consciousness is that of understanding how the system works, the system that evolved us that is God (I had thought of heading a thread Is God a System?), the understanding that allows us to go and know how to grow our own crops.

But in relation to Logos . . . as the word or whatever else, perhaps it's the ability to take on _language_ itself that distinguished us from the animals in Eden. Without language, although we can understand a little of the immediate past to ourselves, we cannot pass this on to our future generations nor know anything about our great grandparents. We might be able to relate to another as animal without language but we cannot make the abstraction that predicts the result of our interaction with another in relation to a third-party save by the intervention of interaction from the third party. The power of reason of prediction is denied to us: we cannot understand nor predict how systems work or behave.

In this way, the pursuit of introduction of non-Construction-Force tried, tested and approved genes into the chemical codes which have been tested and known to work by the Construction Force itself and for the pursuit of Money in opposition to Construction Force, is as blind as the behaviour of non human unconsciousness and will lead to Unconstruction.

Best wishes

David P

[MusingMuso]

Dear David,


Although I knew that the number 42 had real significance rather than just a humorous association with a sci-fi novel, I had to look it up myself, so I'm afraid I cannot claim that I was doing anything more than quoting others. However, the improbable absurdity of the irony is probably funnier than the comedy, coming to think about it.


Although I respect the rationale that consciousness is that which brings understanding of how systems work, there is also the possibility of knowledge being wrong, such as that which led to the horrors associated with DDT or Thalidomide. Science, like all systems, is seldom perfect, (being an evolving entity), and it is for this reason that the random processes of natural selection, (with unlimited time and mathematical permutations), is usually the more reliable method by which the path of evolution succeeds and other methods fail. It is, I suppose, the difference between natural selection and unnatural selection, and what emerges from a study of the former, is the way in which randomness may be perceived as part of a creative and seemingly ordered path, when it is really nothing of the sort. I find myself coming back to the words of the song, "That's life; it's just the way it is."


My problem David, is that I know next to nothing about biology, life sciences and even gardening; my perfect garden being astro-turf and plastic flowers. I can just about manage a couple of window boxes and a solitary potted rose, for which I require little more than a sharp kitchen knife, a pair of scissors, a small bottle of tomato-feed and an old table-fork. Were I to venture into the field of genetically modified plants, they would probably emerge like the man-eating plant in "The little shop of horrors."


Of course, the formation and use of language is that which separates us from the animal kingdom; though we should be aware of quite a large repertoire of inherited and learned vocal and sensory exchanges and responses in the animal kingdom. Abstract thought and leaps of imagination are certainly, I think, the sole preserve of the human race, while sophisticated systems of language not only define human beings, they permit the flow of information and the transcendent continuum of knowledge within specific flows of disciplines and structured learning; viz a viz, "education."  If language has a problem, it is that of not only defining race and culture, but that of also preventing dialogue and co-operation between those of different languages and cultures, which we see as racism, tribal behaviour and culture.


I think I would have to add other forms of communication such as the visual arts, poetry, creative writing and, of course, music; some of which do not rely on words, but nevertheless have a recognisable, cultural structure and a language all their own.



Best ,

MM