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.
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