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Tuesday, February 2, 2016

God's Ephiphany

God’s Epiphany

Although omniscient, advancements in Science gave God pause to consider paradoxes he hadn’t originally considered.  As John opined in the chapter bearing his name, "I solemnly assure you, no one can enter God's kingdom without being begotten of water and Spirit.” The necessity of baptism seemed reasonable at the time but now God was mildly concerned about the souls of the unborn or babies that died at birth or, for that matter, babies that died at any time prior to baptism. He knew the Church taught that it does not know of any means other than Baptism that assures entry into eternal beatitude. Limbo, which had a good run but was ultimately retired, was a speculation as to what happened to the souls of children who died and, who through no fault of their own, were not baptized. What should happen to souls that have neither been baptized or accepted the Spirit? After all, it was his own son who directly instructed that, "Unless a man be born again of the water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God.”

God had doubts back around 1560 when the Council of Trent decreed: "If anyone says that Baptism is optional, that is, not necessary for salvation, let him be anathema” and thought about intervening. However, Martin Luther had done such good work and it appeared as if people were finally starting to understand and get along. Eventually, the window of opportunity closed and by the time Pope John XXIII Vatican II’s: "What was, still is” circulatedhe felt  it was too late to interfere.

But God worried.The dilemma he faced was how to reconcile the requirements for baptism and accepting the Spirit with the fact some souls simply didn’t have the opportunity. Some scholars tried to rationalize that, "The Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God” but even God knew this was a cop out.

One option God was aware of is that souls can get into heaven if they die a martyr. Those who through no fault of their own have not received the sacrament of Baptism can be saved through what he called baptism of blood or desire. An unbaptized person receives the baptism of blood when he suffers martyrdom for the faith of Christ. Not every death is martyrdom, but if aborted children have in some way been killed because of Jesus and his teaching, they might qualify to be among those souls that were slain for the word of God.  The caveat being that either the martyr must choose death for Christ, or else the murderer kills out of pure hatred for Christ as a motive. Perhaps the reason mothers abort their children is due to the nefarious workings of Satan and thus, unborn baby souls are martyrs who have suffered the heinous act of murder by mothers under Satan's spell.

God felt he was making progress on finding an acceptable solution until he came upon a New England Journal of Medicine article on fertilization within the female species of Homo sapien sapien, the humans he created back in the Garden. The article reported that as many as 70% of fertilized eggs do not survive through to a live, viable birth. Though not a doctor, God grasped the explanation that the maternal RNA transcripts -- that is, the molecules that carry instructions from the mother's DNA to the embryo's protein-making factories -- must be actively degraded in each cell of the embryo, and that this degradation is necessary for the cells to begin to express embryonic genes. Cells that fail to execute some part of this delicate process get out of sync with their neighbors and jeopardize the life of the embryo. God realized the whole endeavor is complicated, and how this might explain why human embryonic development is so precarious and unique.

What a quagmire though. Seventy percent of souls never take a breath, get a chance to sin or embrace the Spirit and are then kept from eternal paradise? What kind of world was this?

God shared his concerns with Gabriel and Peter. Peter acknowledged the difficulties and shared his own concerns over the paradox of when life begins and how many souls never get the chance to even try to fail.  Peter told God about his confusion over the case of monozygotic (identical) twins: each twin does not exist as an individual when "its life begins" - that is, when it is conceived because the embryo doesn't split into two parts until later. “If we told them life begins at conception, and ensoulment is the defining factor indicating life, how is possible some get souls earlier than others?”

God began to consider giving himself a mulligan and starting over. It was clear he had not put as much thought into this as he probably should have. If lasers or electron microscopes had been around back in the day he might have looked a little deeper into his creations.

“What a clustermess”, said God.