Bill's Notes

Dean Esmay has a "best discussion" section on his blog. If I had a separate section for those, this discussion of chimeras would surely qualify.

Check it out if you haven't already. And register for comments if you're just a longtime lurker — we'd like your take on things, too, not just on this discussion but on others. Don't be shy.

I used to believe that I was a person who had extraordinarily bad luck. Then when I was 16 I decided that I was only unlucky in certain things, but lucky in others. Later, I concluded that I wasn't have problems with unluckiness as much as having difficulty interpreting events in their full context.

Which brings me to the flat tire I experienced this weekend. The tire was in terrible shape and was destined to blow. On Friday night, I was driving home in rush hour. On Saturday, I was on the PA Turnpike both up and back as well as in a moderately remote area of the Poconos. On Saturday night I was back in the Philly area and drove home late at night from a town to which I'd never been. As you know in this area yesterday was a little cold in the late morning and noon, and last night it snowed and was freezing, and this morning it is worse, windy and freezing and officially winter.

Guess when I got the flat tire? Right, in the late morning when we had the last vestige of fall. And it happened about 500 feet from my apartment, so I could go home and get help from a roommate. So one of the few times I was driving close to home, and on the warmest part of the weekend, and during the few hours when I had nothing to do, that's when I got a flat tire.

Why did I think I was unlucky? Well, I cut myself on the tire (watch frayed steel threads when removing a tire). I was on a narrow shoulder, and after all, I was almost home ... just another minute and I'd have been in my apartment complex's parking lot. And then my car wouldn't start after I replaced the tire. (Eventually, it did.)

This morning, I'm thinking what I've probably belabored. The tire was shot. If it had to go, it could've gone Saturday on the PA Turnpike at 90 miles an hour. Or Saturday night on the way home after a tiring day. Or this morning on the way to work. Instead, it went at the most opportune time for me to deal with it and not impact the rest of my weekend. That is, I was lucky.

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So yesterday I knew that I had two outstanding checks, neither of which I knew the exact figure on, and together they were pretty close to the balance in my checking account. I don't get paid until Friday and I was out of cash on hand and had no gas in my car.

So I start filling up my car with gas with my check card, because I need gas to get to work and I need to work to get rid of this temporary cash flow problem, and then I'm thinking, you know, I better not fill the tank up all the way. I could end up bouncing a check. (BTW, I haven't bounced a check in something like forever, those of you snickering.) So I stopped filling the tank at some weird number like $15.63 or something.

When I got home tonight, I checked my account balance. One check had cleared, leaving me with $27.64 in my checking account. That left the other check, which was for a doctor's office. I called, and asked them, "Hey, do you remember what I wrote that check for?" After a few moments, a sympathetic nurse says, "I thought I was the only one who did things like this. It's $27.50."

Ha. Fourteen cents to spare. Turns out I could've stopped filling up the tank another two or three seconds later before bouncing the check.

Fourteen whole cents. Hey, everyone, I'm buying ... I dunno, what do a pack of Smarties go for?

Whew!

Chris asks in the post below:

Why on earth would a chimera be the death knell for the religious perspective?

The Christian perspective is silent on animal's souls. The Buddhists ask, "Does a dog have a Buddha nature?" and the answer is the Buddha nature isn't really divisible up into things like dogs and men, or something like that. Similarly, while gorillas seem pleasant, we do not know the nature of the gorilla's soul. We do not know if he has one (I suspect yes), whether it requires salvation (I dunno) and whether or not Christ's redeeming sacrifice applies to gorillas.

Say the New York Giants grow a bunch of mostly human brains (but some gorilla brain) inside of gorillas' bodies (but perhaps modified with human genes) for an offensive line for the 2078-79 season. What is the status of such an individual before God from a Christian perspective?

Because you end up in pretty dark places, pretty quickly. Is 1/8 of a man and 7/8 of a gorilla still a man? How about 1/32? Does a human brain mean it has a human soul? If so, does that mean the brain and the soul are the same thing? If they are not humans, can we dispose of them after their usefulness has waned, such as the football players above?

You end up in a pretty materialistic perspective.

And we don't even want to get into sexuality here, especially talking about the morality of it.

Biblically based ethics are going to be one stage removed from the debate before the debate begins. And people may criticize the Bible, but "Love God with your whole heart and love your neighbor as yourself," solves gazillions of social problems, even if applied [very] imperfectly over the centuries. Without an appeal to authority for this kind of charity [not to mention internal change], societies have a difficult time replicating that morality, and abandon it in favor of tribal and pure-power politics. A chimera will just add a big monkey wrench into it.

No one is going to complain if the science is used around the edges ... I'm talking about Blade-Runner-esque nightmares.