...on yahoo news today about the genome of the duck-billed platypus? It is fascinating stuff. Here is the link if you haven’t read it.

Science is amazing and fascinating, and also terrifying. It is amazing to me that DNA is something that has only been discovered in my lifetime. As with all scientific knowledge, this new understanding can be used for good or evil, and sometimes even what seems to be good at first turns out to have unintended bad consequences in the longer run. I wonder about unintended consequences of the changes that we are making to the DNA of a variety of living organisms with genetic engineering.

I did not know anything about Queen Victoria and her part in the practice of giving pain medication during labor. I have never been through the pain of childbirth, but a friend described it as a feeling of being run over by a train. I think that if I were to go through childbirth, I would want that option of pain relief. Like the example of the trial of Galileo, this seems like another example of how people have a tendency to take the Bible too literally. The Bible is a large collection of writing from different authors at different times and in different circumstances, and it seems to me that it isn’t possible to take the entire Bible literally, yet there are people who claim that they are able to do it.

Not unlike scientific knowledge, the words in the Bible can be used to good ends and can also be used to justify evil. From what I understand, the words and ideas of the Bible inspired the creation of the first hospitals. The Gospel stories in the Bible inspired that poem by Peter Maurin that you liked very much, and inspired people who tried very hard to live out the ideals of that poem, including my own uncle.