Tuesday, 15 December 2015

The Face of the Future

Sin, its judgment, and its mitigation:

The original sin occurred in the Adam and Eve narrative in the book of Genesis, which led to the downfall of humanity. The book of Genesis teaches that the nature of sin is related to the unbelief in God’s commands and promises, and human pride. It also teaches that sin affects all dimensions of one’s relationship, with oneself, with God, with each other, and with the rest of the creation, and physical death will come as an inevitable consequence to all. Furthermore sin spreads like wildfire and has a tendency to become more severe as it spread from a personal to a community level. God’s acts of judgment were always related to a particular sin, and punishment became increasingly more severe with the increasing spread of sin. The general pattern seemed to be a movement from human sin to divine punishment to divine forgiveness or mitigation of the punishment[1]. On an individual who sin, as in ‘The Fall’ and Cain, God’s dealing could be highly personalised, where they were punished for their sin but were partly relieved of the severity of their punishment, as Adam and Eve did not die immediately and God had put a mark of protection on Cain when driving him out. But where a whole community’s relationship with God was involved, the operation of justice in punishment can sometimes be undifferentiated, as in the ‘Sons of God’ episode, where all humanity’s life-span became shortened because of the sins of the ‘Sons of God’. When the vast majorities sinned and were punished as in the Flood narrative, there was the near annihilation of mankind with mitigation taking effect only for one man and his family. In the Tower of Babel, all of those who have sinned were punished with ‘dissolution of mankind’s unity’ and there was no direct mitigation[2]. For more details about this essay I wrote, please see http://dryvonnewang.blogspot.com.au/2014/05/what-does-book-of-genesis-teach-about.html

Globalisation:

In the patriarchal narratives, we see the theme of a line of seeds arising from Eve that will crush the head of the serpent and become a channel of blessings to all nations on earth. We can also see hope even in the imperfect characters whose lives became greatly transformed and blessed by God when they recognized divine action previously hidden from their eyes, as in the case of Judah. 

The punishment for the Tower of Babel incident was ‘dissolution of mankind’s unity’. Personally, I think the process of globalisation is part of the mitigation for this ‘dissolution of mankind’s unity’. In other words, a reversal of what happened in the Tower of Babel. It is an extremely difficult but inevitable process which produces devastating conflicts. With globalization, the whole world is connected, whether we like it or not...

Morphing - The Face of the Future:

I suddenly remembered an interesting photograph on the cover page of my high school biology textbook. This author used 16 photos of the students from my high school and morphed them together. This face illustrates the likely product of several generations of inter-racial marriages.


This job was done for the Biology textbook Patterns of Life by Meg Bayley (published by Addison Wesley Longman New Zealand, 1998). The brief was to create a composite portrait. To quote from the text:
The face in the large picture was formed from one-sixteenth of each of the sixteen girls shown at the top. Brian Donovan of the Audio Visual Centre at Auckland University created it for us. We gave him 16 photos of girls at Diocesan School, selected to reflect the ethnic distribution of New Zealand's population today. Brian then paired up the photos and linked each pair together at approximately 100 key points around the face and hairline (a very time-consuming process!). A morphing program then 'mixed' the pairs of photographs together. So, the pictures in the second row are composed of half of each of the two photos above.
'This was then repeated with each new photograph until we got the final face: one-sixteenth of each girl. We added some hair, and there she was.
'This process mimics the mixing of genetic factors down five generations or 150 years ignoring the fact that each photo is of the 'daughter' of two girls! Of course, rather than particular features coming through (as might happen in real life) we have ended up with a girl who is an average of 16, but we hope you get the general idea.'
Note the increasingly smooth complexion in each 'generation'; if minor facial characteristics such as freckles, lines and other marks are regarded as 'noise' and the major features - the shape of the face, eyes, eyebrows, nose, cheek lines, and mouth - are regarded as 'signal' then the signal-to-noise ratio is increased with each successive transformation.
The notion of a composite photographic portrait is not new: in the late nineteenth century in England, the statistician Francis Galton pioneered a technique for making such composites (to illustrate human types among other things) by successively copying registered portrait prints onto a single photographic plate. The exposure for each individual was determined by dividing the total exposure by the number of prints in the sample. Among his experiments were averaged criminals, mixtures of family members, and composites of heads on ancient coins such as Alexander the Great, Nero and Cleopatra. If Galton had expected the composite of Cleopatra to reveal her legendary beauty he was to disappointed; still, he wrote, it was better than any of the individual components, none of which gave any indication of her reputed beauty; in fact, her features are not only plain, but to an ordinary English taste are simply hideous.



[1] Clines, The Theme of the Pentateuch, 66-67
[2] Clines, The Theme of the Pentateuch, 68-70

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