This probably isn't telling the whole story

This version is probably a lot closer to God's reality in creating humans

In the second picture, on the left, you can perhaps see that the human DNA package is complete, and is sparked into life by God, within an unknown medium of proteins and acids that must ultimately have a "first" for every type of life on the planet. What if the oversized feature on the right, depicted as the Father in heaven really is the shape and character of the Father in heaven? After all, in this picture, an early human is also depicted, and we are after all created in His Image.

Perhaps you could tell me what the sex, eye color, skin color, race, intelligence potential, and finger and toe count of the human on the left. No matter what it may someday be, the fact is when we most closely resemble God by our conception, we are truly closest to each other and God like at no time we will see from a philosophical standpoint until we stand before Him in heaven. You be the Judge ... is this person attractive? Will he or she be overweight or short, paralyzed or an Olympics gold medalist? In God's view of things, will any of it even matter to anyone but our short-sighted selves?

Even if life "seeded" Earth from a different star system, as we know that Earth and the other planets were "seeded" by the explosion of an ancient supernova, ultimately it all goes back to God in the origins of origins. What makes the human being on the left different than similarly sized and shaped animals is in the soul which ultimately makes us different and special, irregardless of our individual "evolution." I think it is healthy from a practical, ethical, moral, and biblical standpoint to view God as depicted here, for this outlook completely corrects the discrepancies and confusion that originate in the argument that we as humans evolve into God.

On the other hand, we start out mirroring God, and evolve from that initial form based on our set of ingenious self-contained life-giving instructions packaged into our being from our start. We would, after all, have to evolve from the initial shape and size of our spirits in order to physically survive and live on the Earth given to us. As such, the evolution continues and never stops, as our cells constantly reinvent themselves until finally, we break and our souls move on - no matter how many organs are generated from our own Adult (non-Embryonic) Stem Cells to prolong the inevitable and natural end for our mortal lives, once we all look something like the old guy with the beard.

With this in mind, how much more likely it will be that humans indeed begin as the newly conceived combination of egg and sperm as formed in the Image of God? It would be very likely that in this paradigm, we would as a culture be far less likely to kill off what comes and develops from this Image of God. Right? Right! After all, God did come here looking very much like this, and we call this event the Annunciation. Mary came in a likewise manner - but with a more traditional start but in Original Sin which Jesus also lacked - and we call this event the Immaculate Conception. Jesus proved that death is just another stage in life, like passing into adolescence and maturity. Furthermore, Jesus proved that death is by no means the final stage. It is simply another stage. There is plenty of reason to fear death if our emotions and instinct rule our lives, as death certainly is a change from the familiar and the comfortable. But in hindsight in the end, it will be revealed to be nothing more than the horrors that children face when teeth fall out and new ones painfully emerge, or a young girl's astonishment at her first period, or a man's astonishment at the first wrinkle and hint of graying hair. Death will be nothing to really fear, though, if faced intellectually and in spiritual health, for death is natural and apparently necessary as part of God's design for us. The verdict is still out for Elijah in some circles, but Jesus said more than once that Elijah had already come and gone. And as Jesus showed us, this death will also pass into a distant memory as God's plans for us will even outlast the mathematically doomed and mortal Universe.

God's size is not as important as God's power, for at its energy peak the Universe was the size of a pinhead. It is now expanding past 13,000,000,000 light years, and against all known scientific concepts, doing so at an accelerating rate. From an ancient star that exploded - probably the one forming the Gum Nebula, matter formed into our own Solar System a mere 4,000,000,000 years ago or so, and that's when Earth and its moon began to form from an originally deadly and intolerable state. Someday, the light of all stars will run out of fuel, the Universe will lose all thermal energy, and only dark and cold rocks running into each other will provide any sparks of light at all.

Long before that happens, Earth would have been swallowed into the expanding Sun in Red Giant form. How amazing it is that God created all of that by will from a pinhead-sized compact original package, and the creation of human life is even more marvelous. No matter how marvelous and complex all of Creation is, God is even more marvelous and complex in that our Universe and all of us had a common point of origin - but He didn't. The marvelous complexity of our lives literally can't hold the spark of a candle to His amazing nature, power, and radiant love.

We may even find a way to get off the planet in time before Earth becomes uninhabitable, but in time, even the Universe will die. It's a scientifically proven certainty - given projections going out billions of years. But, God won't let that be the end of our story - a story that began when Adam, Eve, Jesus, Mary, and every saint and sinner ever born looked as one in the womb. The obvious question of course is in how Adam and Eve - literally or figuratively could have formed and nursed in a healthy environment, or somehow formed as living adults - one from dust and the other from a rib. The world may never know the answer, but God does. For me, that's good enough for now. The indisputable point is that we're here, and once I get to heaven perhaps curiosity will lead me to dare to ask God how He created life from no apparent line of ancestry for the first, as well as how exactly did God pull it off all over again by the Resurrection of Jesus and Mary. It's not like we'll have to wait for aliens to come before we can all say "There must be a God!" Our best proof in the resurrection comes from the evidence of the miracle of human life in and of itself. If God can do it once (and He obviously has) then why is life after death so hard to contemplate? Given the proof of the first miracle, the proof of the second becomes all the more easy to accept. After all, every alternate theory trying to blame the cause on chemistry or atomic shifts in molecules or any other theory still must trace back to an origin in God, so in the end, the evidence proving God's existence by the study of the existence of creation and life is completely irrefutable. The fact that God gave us minds so creative that most ancient civilizations preferred to explain it all away by pagan gods invented through their synaptic imagination proves that God even has a sense of humor. He gave us such imaginative and creative brains - able to invent non-real things in our minds that can't fathom what His intellect can create for real just by a minor thought. The imaginary non-real characters can't compete with Who God is for real, and several times in the Old Testament, God asked people in His Creation to stop with the imaginary gods and trust the one responsible for the Universe they see all around them.

I think that in our next life, we'll be outside it all, looking in on the Universe, perhaps simultaneously capable of seeing any point in time or all time, from end to end, just as God can visit anywhere and at any time when humans Celebrate the Mass - an event that literally bridges God with the beloved created beings struggling through life in this Universe. And many cosmologists are not necessarily convinced that this Universe, which does have an outer boundary with timeless unknown properties beyond is the only created Universe. But we do know that we are inseparably linked to this one while alive, with no practical way to touch anything outside of our Universe but heaven itself, by the power of angels and the Holy Spirit.

The more scientists credit themselves with brilliant discoveries, the more they realize that nothing goes beyond the observable and finite limits of the created Universe. Thus even the scientists can't observe or sensibly theorize about what is the nature of heaven beyond in a place and timeless state that frustrated scientists are forced to admit must certainly exist beyond the outer boundaries of our Universe. If they are inspired by the Holy Spirit that speaks to them from heaven with free reign in our Universe, then most of these scientists, after witnessing everything through their powerful human minds, become some of the most enthusiastic and steadfast Christians, for they come to find Truths about the nature of Creation and all beyond it in ways that only become amplified and verified as more and more scientific discoveries are made. God was ingenious in packing Creation in a way where scientific discoveries - Galileo and Copernicus aside in our imperfect past - can never disprove God, but only reinforce our existing spiritual findings - Revealed Truth about God.

Thus one point that Doctor Pepin issued must be reiterated - the proponents of Embryonic Stem Cell research are not in the least bit interested in the intellectually honest tradition of the Scientific Method - for such a thing would destroy their cause. This is a political and business cult interested neither in being intellectual nor honest. I will add to Doctor Pepin's words by saying that enough experimentation has already taken place to reveal the entire movement to be modern Alchemy, with human lives at stake. Given the amount of fraud already embedded into the movement, government regulators might someday be forced to end the practice in court based on trends already developing, as these companies knowingly mislead the investors and speculators with known false promises. With some companies, the financial net gain still makes the effort worthwhile to them, but there was a company in Texas famous for fooling themselves to believe their own lie they sold to investors, and in the end, everyone involved lost it all. This time, the stakes are even higher as innocent human life will be sacrificed by the experiments that are already doomed to failure.

I have always suggested that the Church take down the Michelangelo fantasies and replace them with something more practical and tied to the realities that our spirit is always crying out to us to hear, in prayers when asleep if not when awake. Our organs develop out of the packaged instructions, and soon we develop into individuals that only after birth are pooled into groups with words like race, skin color, deformities, defects, intelligence, stupidity, attractiveness, or unsightliness. We have every very good reason to view life as fully reflective of God from day one.  In our incredible pompous nature, it does not take long for us to think we are a lot smarter than we are, as we take on the foolish role of wise beings as we come up with value systems that degenerate into sexism, racism, and even bigotry, when in fact we all started out as Images of God, and get our value as humans from that great connection. Once we start even imagining the Father in heaven as a human adult in form and characteristics, then we start to leave people behind who don't look like the image of God created in our minds of a Black, a Caucasian, an Arab, a Jew, an Aborigine, or an Asian.

It was pretty smart of Jesus and Mary to never waste much time posing for artists, for the same reasons brought about by humanity's mental fixation with glamour, style, and appearances. But once we see the Father in heaven as that spherical fertilized egg that all of us resemble in our origin, then no one is left out, and God's connection to all of us is apparent and abundantly clear. Jesus doesn't get left out. Mary doesn't get left out. Nor do any of us, for the Father in heaven truly becomes the Father for all of us.

No matter what we physically look like as adults, we forget that we once all looked the same, even if we divide further into the form of developing twins, triplets or whatever. Before we had brains, we still had (thanks to a gift from God) the self-contained instructions to build a brain from nothingness but a chemistry set. And only later, when we got those brains and fooled ourselves into thinking we were the smart ones did we decide that things like race or eye color could ever be as important to anyone in heaven as we find them on Earth. We eventually become smart enough to become great fools, equating spiritual value to a mind's rated IQ, and seeing persons with flawed - in our words mental abilities as less than human. Some thought that Terri Schiavo's spiritual and intrinsic value as a life on Earth was related to her IQ and vocabulary. And developing babies can think and live independently even less than she could, so it is not as amazing as it should be that they too are being slaughtered.

It makes a lot more sense to just stop abortions in the name of ending an assault on the true Image of God, and once we see ourselves at Conception as the image of God, then we will as a society and as a Church wake up to more effective ways to create the atmosphere - through Truth - of stopping the nonsense. Step one is in taking down the old paintings, and putting up newer, more accurate ones in the name of showing the value of humans from the second the spark of a soul enters the miraculous little fertilized egg. And the thought that early human life is now sitting in some freezer waiting to be dissected in the name of satisfying the curiosity of some 21st Century Dr. Frankenstein ... that is somewhat chilling to me - no pun intended.

More on February as information becomes available.