Man enters God’s lab

FAITH

By FRANK SENGE KOLMA
OUR beliefs are as old as man and stem from our deepest fears of the unknown.
From this deep dark well have sprung gods and demons and all other creatures of the spiritual realm.
We have worked our own human wonders creating each set of god or demon in our own image and likeness.
Having created our gods, we attribute them our human characteristics and the prevailing language, dress, mood and knowledge.
Always new knowledge has chased and changed our gods.
Once the sun, moon and certain starry constellations were gods.
Now we know different.
Scientific knowledge has greatly advanced our understanding of the cosmos and the knowledge has chased and changed our gods.
Searching man has arrived at another frontier, the realm of empirical science, and I repeat the question that has plagued man since he emerged from iniquity: Is there really a god or gods?
Is there a spirit realm and an after life?
For an answer let us turn, not to ancient books and prophecies, but to modern science and cutting edge technology.
If there is a god or a spirit realm it will be discovered there.
Always we have tended to dress a spirit being in physical form, perhaps the better to understand it.
Ancient man imagined spiritual forces out of his ignorance and from the inexplicable phenomena around him. Did death extinguish life or was there some continuity? Why did dreams occur and where did the dream self go when people were alive or when they died? What was the orb in the sky during day and another after dark with their twinkling companions? That the sun and moon were responsible for life on earth was known at that early hour of man. The how and why had to be guessed at until the advent of science much later in the day.
Diseases, caused by invisible critters no naked eye could see at the time, were attributed quite rightly it turned out to the working of some malignant invisible being. The description was correct, the names for the critters were wrong as were the manner in which they made people sick.
So ignorance concocted spirits – good and bad – and they were allocated specific homes, each given special fields of expertise such as gods of war or of fertility and of the harvest, clothed in the human fashion of the time and such like.
God spoke Greek, English, Hindi, Inca or Tok Pisin, depending on where It was preached. For a long time he was exclusively white and a frightful, prideful male chauvinist.
Human ingenuity, creativeness, and craftiness filled in the rest. Spiritual forces needed vassals, priests, prophets, places of habitation and their band of followers on earth. So humanity provided these institutionalizing spiritual presence among men and adorning them high places and accolades and credence and credibility.
For the time they held court, they seemed as real as you and I.
Yet these spiritual aspects were never discernible by any of man’s sensory preceptors.
You could reach out but never touch a god or smell them out or taste them, much less see or hear them.
When they seemed to appear, it was always on the periphery of our senses – a sudden movement or a blurry vision or a whisper.

Dolly was cloned from a cell taken from a six-year-old Finn Dorset sheep and the egg of a Scottish Blackface sheep. She was born of her Scottish Blackgate surrogate mother on this date.

The spirit has to be found in the spirit. It exists in the imagination and it is the imagination’s baby – in dreams – that humankind made any contact with the God creature.
It was in dreams, both waking and sleeping ones, that messages from gods appear to have been conveyed down through the centuries.
Mankind, imagining himself to be free, was bound right from the start, held prisoner to his own imagination.
Gods, the most persistent product of the imagination, have ruled untrammeled for as long as humans have graced earth.
Inquiry of their existence was forbidden to men from an early age.
This is the arena of no knowledge, the area of the beyond, the no-go zone for inquiry or experiment or travel.
In the Ten Commandments, the first recorded laws of mankind as comes to us from the Old Testament, humans are forbidden inquiry into the nature of God, to not even give It a name to call it by.
To know that It exists, to not call It by any name or take any description of It in vain and to allocate a day in the week to observe in Its honour.
These rules are written in the first three laws of the Ten Commandments. The remaining Seven have to do with rules of conduct for mankind.
In the Book of Genesis, God forbids man the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge. Why ever not, you wonder? The Tree of Knowledge – the one link to becoming all powerful and God-like with all knowledge – and God forbade humanity’s first parents that fruit?
That does not sound right or It knew something It was not sharing. Perhaps it was knowledge that might have unravelled all existence and God did not want such dangerous knowledge in the hands of the finite being he had just moulded out of the earth and to which dust he was to return after a short life span on earth.
You will again see this fear of God for the creature of its imagination in the story of the Tower of Babel when It finds it necessary to scatter people by the quite ingenious method of giving different languages so they did not communicate with one another to reach the Heavens.
What did God fear in man that he made strenuous rules and if man trespassed these, he banished them from Paradise, then feels pity and picks them up and makes rules of conduct for them and then punished their transgressions.
Or are these all figments of the imagination of man, that if there is a God or gods, they occupy a different realm and operate at different planes, not the same as man’s.
On July 5, 1996 Dolly the sheep was born. Dolly was cloned from a cell taken from a six-year-old Finn Dorset sheep and the egg of a Scottish Blackface sheep. She was born of her Scottish Blackgate surrogate mother on this date.
A sheep had been cloned in the exact form as the sheep from which a single cell had been derived.
Man had finally arrived in the arena of God. He had created life in the splitting image of another.
Absolutely nothing stoped him from doing the same of his own kind.
And he could do it better than the haphazard manner in which nature had been sustaining the species.
He could get rid of malignant chromosomes or genes that caused diseases and he could create super beings whose cells did not age as quickly as the naturally produced ones.
He could, by tweaking the genes of food produce more and far healthier ones than those produced by nature.
Nothing stopped him from creating an army of super soldiers who thought and acted alike. Man had entered the laboratory of God.He had created life.
He had tasted of the forbidden tree of knowledge.
He had attained powers he once attributed to his god.