2. The human situation

Dear children,

We live in a place that is burgeoning with life. I am glad to hear you have been introduced to bio-diversity. Perhaps you will study biology and genetics. (That Greek prefix bio means life.) The ancient writers understood that the earth brought forth life of many different species in the water, in the air, and on the land, including us. I hope you will read my translation of these stories with me some day. They are fascinating both for what they say and what they cannot say. 

Of course the texts assume that God is involved with these processes. That's the thing about the Bible that I am reading. It is about God and what God loves. In that first book called Genesis, God speaks and bingo! things happen. Sometimes it's a process. Sometimes God constructs animals, and sometimes rather than construct or make, God creates animals. It takes time to do this - so the writers imply that this God is acting within the bounds of time and with created material - and a dose of mystery.

"And God created the great dragons" htninim hgdolim.
Other translations gloss tnin as sea-creature or whale.
[Image clipped from International save the sharks day]

The problem we have is that we find ourselves alive, and we have no idea how this happened or why but we know something happens day by day, time creeping at its petty pace, stroke by stroke, seed by seed, animal by animal, each according to its species.

Our science has developed a model that gives us some insight into almost all forms of life. The life of a plant or an ant or a great sea creature or a human (or even a virus) works because of specific patterns of genes. A gene is a sequence of base-pairs in a double helix called DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). DNA is a bit like living Lego that fits together governing each cell, functioning, promoting, binding, insulating, silencing, enabling, producing, dividing, and folding and remaking itself through itself. 

The double helix DNA -
genetic material in the nucleus of a cell,
like living Lego
https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/basics/dna/

These design plans for life forms are like a huge puzzle, much more complex than a jigsaw puzzle. The picture above has 15 base pairs - you can count them.

There are two connections between the 4 bases: A connects to T, and C connects to G. And each base pair connects to a sugar molecule (s) and a phosphate molecule (p). So you could model these with Lego - all you need is six different pieces. But you need lots of them. These groups of 4, called nucleotides, then connect to each other in sequences. The sugar and phosphate molecules make the 'backbone' - alternating s-p-s-p. It would be quite a trick to produce this with Lego!

The sequences are called genes. Their lengths can be from a few hundred nucleotides to a couple of million. Each of us has 6.4 billion base pairs - organized into 46 chromosomes, 23 from mother and 23 from father. This information that defines us is in the nucleus and the mitochondria of each of our 37.2 trillion cells. The functions of each gene are much more complex than the functions of a chess piece. And the life processes that the cells enable are much more complex than the game of chess.

We find ourselves - each of us a very complex life form, in the middle of a garden of other life forms, created from much the same stuff. All these life forms are mutually inter-dependent. We seem to be the one that has to manage it all - for the benefit of the created order. 

All this is good, very good. 

But things go wrong in the mechanisms. We know about this through genetic illnesses like cystic fibrosis and external attacks on a body through infections like a virus. You have direct experience of both these examples. You know the ways in which parts of the body are made to work better by using specific medicines, like enzymes to manage digestion for a person with CF. Each of us has a CFTR gene on chromosome 7. This gene is called the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator and to be brief, it allows the body to make mucus, sweat, saliva, tears and digestive enzymes. If it works right, we can eat and digest, and breathe, and so on, our very own slime.

And you've seen how vaccination teaches the body to fight against a virus. A virus has no cell so it can't live without invading a cell and stealing its mechanisms to divide and reproduce itself. Clearly not all life on earth is good for us. A virus is an example of microbial life - very very small stuff. Most of life on this earth is microbial, very very small - invisible to us.

Some say there are over a trillion different kinds of microbes on the earth - 50% of life on land and over 90% of life in the water. Just in the soil around your house there will be 10,000,000,000,000,000 microbial organisms. That's ten times ten times ten ... 16 times, 100,000 times (ten times ten 5 times) more than there are stars in our galaxy (ten times ten 11 times). [About 2% of our bodies are also microbial life - generally living with us peacefully and doing things that are good for us.]

That's a lot of bits of life! And there are still more difficult puzzles to consider.

We have to deal with birth, death, our relationship to the earth, its plants and animals, and how we treat each other. 

We find ourselves in a place where there is trouble and violence. Things go very badly indeed. Some trouble is natural and some of it is our fault. We hurt the earth with our overuse of its resources and our garbage. We hurt the plants that our earth depends on. And the animals who live with us, we hurt by destroying the places where they live. And we hurt each other with our negative attitudes and self-serving actions. 

So here is the problem of the human situation. We are in the midst of bounty and beauty, life and goodness. But we really make a mess of things. We lie to each other. We kill each other. We take advantage of anyone who is weaker. We destroy. We complain - It is not fair. But what do we do? How do we tell the difference between what is good and what is not? And how do we manage both?

One rule to begin with when solving a puzzle: we can't force a piece into its place. If there is a solution to a puzzle, it won't be achieved by force.

That's enough for this letter. There's plenty to figure out. 

Till the next letter ...