What does gene editing mean for society? How complex is the procedure? What is the likelihood that mistakes will be made in the process? What happens to discarded embryos?
Tag: Religion
Human Gene Manipulation: Screening
Suppose you are a prospective parent. Can you and do you want to affect the properties of your baby. Would you like it to be disease free? How about athletic or intelligent? What is the science? What are the ethics?
Epilogue
The Mind and the Body
BIG IDEAS IN SCIENCE, ART, AND SOCIETY
Hello fellow space-time travelers. My name is Roger Jones. I am coming to you from steamy downtown Pensacola, Florida. It is 7:30 in the morning in late June, so you can see the morning sun streaming through the east-facing windows behind me. This is the first post on this channel, TheX-Press channel, so I thought…
Rancho de Taos Church
This immense block of church masonry and metaphysical undercurrents stands like a monolith at the approach to Taos, a guardian angel strangely looming out of the road, Ayers rock in miniature, but not in any way inferior to the gigantic red monolith in the Australian desert. A titan’s block, immoveable and immeasurable, an omniscient god looks out from the windowless adobe pueblo inhabited by the spirits of the ancestors, the Anasazi who vanished around eleven hundred A.D., long before the Rancho de Taos church was built.
Musings of a Curious Atheist: What does the Bible say about life after death?
Election season is the time that the crazies come out. We have seen the serial adulterer and Kentucky county clerk, Kim Davis, thumb her nose at the law of the land by refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. She says she wants to uphold the sanctity of marriage as specified by her religion. There is the ironic case of the mistake of a 14 year-old Muslim geek for a bomb-making terrorist in Irving, Texas. The mayor of Irving is the woman who is trying to protect the U.S. from Sharia law. In older news, Joe Barton (R-Texas), says that man had no effect on climate change because the Great Flood was climate change and man-made hydrocarbons were not involved in that extreme event. The 2012 Republican Party of Texas platform declared that critical thinking should be discouraged in Texas schools—they threaten long-held beliefs. (If it looks like I am picking on Texas, it is just because they are such an easy target.)
Wabi Sabi, Ikebana & Zen
Wabi Sabi represents a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.” It is a concept derived from the Buddhist teaching of the three marks of existence specifically impermanence, the other two being suffering and emptiness or absence of self-nature .
The Great Dewdrop in Space
When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.

— JOHN MUIR