Parusia

In the past 150 years, we have witnessed an explosion of

knowledge in both the natural and social sciences. We have learned
much about the physical universe, its origins, and its evolution. At
the same time, we have begun to understand how life arose on
Earth shortly after the Solar System formed, and how life has
evolved to create the disequlibria on our planets surface we call
the biosphere. We have learned that the human species is a very
late event in the evolution of life, and that the exponential growth
of our species is changing the biosphere, and now threatens our
survival in the future.
Our science has dispelled many of our myths of creation, and
provided us with an explanation of how physical events occur, in
such detail that the origin and evolution of life now appears to be
the result of a combination of fortunate physical and chemical
events. The claim that life is the result of intelligent design is
perhaps an arrogant wish based on our own as yet limited
intelligence. Our intelligence as a species is at best infantile,
because we still engage in war and sadistic torture. We cultivate
enough food to feed the more than 7 billion people currently living
on Earth, yet more than one of every seven persons suffers from
hunger. We understand the causes of, and have treatments for,
AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, yet more than one of every six
persons suffers from at least one of these diseases. We are
conspicuous consumers, and will exhaust the worlds petroleum
reserves in less than 100 years, given our current rate of
consumption. However, this rate is increasing. If we do not change
our patterns of behavior as a society, in 60 years, there will be no
more oil, and more than one-third of the population will be starving.
Although science has taught us how our universe, our planet,
and life have evolved, science does not explain why we are here.
Nor does science tell us how we should behave as a society to
continue our existence a a species, while maintaining a quality of
life for all.
Clearly, a quality of life for all demands that we must end
hunger and minimize disease. Access to nutrition and health care

must become basic human rights. However, physical health is not

enough, if we disregard the need to prevent the mental disease that
leads to crime and war. In harming others, we harm ourselves.
We, the authors, are not Christians in the usual sense of the
word. We doubt that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. However, we, as
medical professionals, believe that the teachings of Jesus Christ
extend the spirit of the medical profession, initially embodied in the
Hippocratic oath. This oath begins with the promises that we will
prescribe treatments for the good of our patients according to the
best of our abilities and judgments, and will never do harm to
anyone intentionally.
We, the authors, were both raised as Catholics, and believe
that the teachings of Jesus Christ, especially those embodied in his
parables, show us a path to walk, a way to practice our profession.
We believe that practice, not faith, is key to being a Christian,
and as Paul said, in his Epistle to the Corinthians, with faith but
without charity (), we are like the incomplete sounds of
hollow bronze or a tinkling cymbal.
As Teilhard de Chardin explained, our planet has experienced
three stages of development, the geosphere, the biosphere, and the
noosphere. The geosphere lasted only the first four hours of the day
of Earths history. Life began on Earth almost instantly after our
planet coalesced from the disk of interstellar dust that also gave
birth to the Sun. During the era of the geosphere, the Moon was
carved from the Earth by Casaerian section, when a Mars-sized
planet impacted ours. The surface of the Earth was relentlessly
bombarded by metors, as the series of tumultuous events that gave
rise to the Solar System subsided. The geosphere has given us the
minerals to build devices we use to communicate with one another
and to transport ourselves among our society. We are using the
resources of the geosphere unwisely, discarding tons of refined
metals in garbage heaps, when we should be recycling these limited
resources for use.
Life arose in the deep oceans, in darkness, and with no free
oxygen, within the first 700 million years of the 4.5 billion year
history of the Earth. After 3 billion years of evolution, life in the
biosphere learned how to produce oxygen and capture energy from

sunlight, and oxygen increased in abindance to represent 40% of

what was once an atmosphere of almost entirely nitrogen. Life
emerged from the oceans to colonize the land. Life on land burned
in pouring rain in conflagrations sparked by frequent lightning
strikes for hundreds of millions of years, until the oxygen level
decreased to the 20% we now enjoy. We have learned recently that
life transforms the elements essential to life, including carbon,
nitrogen, phosphorus, and iron in global cycles that it maintains in
chemical disequilibria. Although some doom-sayers claim that our
damage to the carbon cycle of the planet is accelerating global
waerming, it is probably arrogant to assume that human activity is
changing the 22,500-year global cycle of warming and cooling
dramatically. Both ice age and warming periods have occurred with
a cycle of about 22,500 years for the past 200,000 years, long
before human impact on the carbon cycle. However, with the growth
of our population, and our need to grow and grow more food, it is
clear that our use of nitrogen fertilizers is damaging the nitrogen
cycle. The Mississippi river basin, the Chesapeake Bay, and the
Black Sea are now dead-zones for marine life, overfertilized with the
run-off form land by ammonium and nitrate fertilizers. The
Mediterranean Sea also is beginning to die. We are beginning to
threaten the integrity of the delicate biosphere, on which we
depend.
We humans evolved from our common ancestor with
chimpanzees only 5 million years ago, during the last two minutes
of the day of Earths history. During the last 200,000 years, at least
two other species of hominids went extinct, leaving only Homo
sapiens to struggle for survival. Eve, the mother of all daughters,
lived about 100,000 years ago. Early human survival was so tenuous
that Adam, the father of all sons, lived about 50,000 years ago,
about 300 generations after Eve, and 300 generations after many
near-extinction events. Then, 50,000 years ago, the noosphre was
born, when Adam, or one of his sons, extended charity () to a
very special animal, and domesticated the cat.
The domestication of the cat permitted humans to migrate out
of Africa. Cats are the predators of perhaps our worst prehistoric
enemy, rodents. The domestication of cats permitted humans to
store grain during their migrations into Europe and Asia, across the
Bering Strait, and south into the Americas, without the mortality

and morbidity caused by rodent infestations of stored food. Even

today, we find that residents of the USA that have cats as pets live
five more years on the average than those without cats. The reason
is simple: cats transmit very few diseases to humans, whereas
rodents transmit many. Not only can the migration of human out of
Africa be traced by the fingerprints of human mitochondrial DNA,
passed on only from daughter to daughter, but also by the
variegation in the coat-colors of domesticated cats that
accompanied humans in their successful migrations.
The human population grew as humans expanded into and
cultivated new territories. With written communication, social
structures evolved rapidly, but the development of society was
limited periodically by short periods of global cooling and plagues
that repeatedly killed one-quarter to one-third of the worlds
population. It was only after the last major plague in 1918-1920, an
epidemic that killed more than 5% of the worlds population, when
periodic extinctions due to infectious disease became a demon of
the past.
In Jesus time, the average life-span of humans was 20-25
years. This remained unchanged until the mid-1800s, when the
importance of clean water was discovered in London. The birth of
microbiology occurred in the late 19th century, and the causes of
most bacterial human diseases were identified before 1920, as the
average human life-span increased slowly to about 35 years.
The most important discovery that changed human society by
permitting a long average life-span, the synthesis of aspirin,
occurred in 1897. Ironically, the inventor, the German Jewish
chemist, Arthur Eichengrun, was later discredited for the discovery
by the Nazi regime, and interred in a concentration camp. Mortality
due to the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic was probably reduced to 20%
of what it might have been, due to the use of aspirin, an analgesic.
Aspirin suppresses the most lethal symptom of the flu, the fever it
causes. The discovery of penicillin in 1928 by Alexander Fleming
began the directed search for antibiotics. Together, the use of
analgesics and antibiotics extended the human life-span to well
beyond 60 years. With its increased reproductive success, the
human population exploded.

We now have a face-off between two trains on the same track.

One train, waiting on the track, carries the Earths limited
resources. The other train carries the human population, continuing
to explode. The two trains are an instant away from colliding with
one another. We, and our grandchildren, passengers on the second
train, have two options. We can either apply the brakes, or hope
that we survive the crash. Paul will tell you that hope without
charity, like faith without charity, is mental famine. We have grown
so fats, that, right now, neither Central Park nor all of the green
areas in Manhattan can accommodate the graves of the people
living in Manhattan.
In his 24 parables, Jesus told us how to apply the brakes, and
how to use our collective mind and spirit to do so. His parables are
parables of not only our relationship with the biosphere, but also of
our behavior as a society, on which our survival as a species
depends in the near future.
THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
The parable of the leaven.
Among the 24 parables of Jesus, xx speak of the Kingdom of
Heaven. All xx describe the growth of a living organism, and are
parables about the growth of the human population and society.
Perhaps the simplest among these is the parable of the leaven
(yeast). This parable occurs in two of the Synoptic gospels, Mark
and Luke, and the Coptic gospel of Thomas, and is a simple
description of how the growth of living things is exponential.
The kingdom of heaven is like this: A woman takes some yeast an
mixes it with a bushel of flour until the whole batch of dough rises.
Matthew 1:33
Again Jesus asked: What shall I compare the Kingdom of Heaven
with? It is like this: A woman takes some yeast an mixes it with a
bushel of flour until the whole batch of dough rises. Luke 13:2021
Jesus said, "The kingdom of the father is like a certain woman. She
took a little leaven, concealed it in some dough, and made it into
large loaves. Let him who has ears hear." Thomas 96

The bread and brewers yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, has

become a model system to study the biology of microbial growth,
and the division of human cells. Yeast is among the simplest of
organisms in one of the three kingdoms of life, the eukaryotes, to
which belong all plants and animals. Bread yeast is a single-cell
organism that divides by budding. Cell division occurs when a
daughter cell is extruded through a ring of chitin on the spherical
surface of the mother cell. Like all microbes, the growth of yeast
occurs in four stages, called the lag, exponential, stationary, and
death phases.
When yeast is placed in a mix of water and flour, it takes a
short time for the yeast to begin to grow. This is called the lag
phase. During this short time, the yeast senses the presence of
food, and begins to make the enzymes necessary to digest the food.
When the yeast can import sufficient nutrients to grow in size, and
make the materials necessary to reproduce a daughter cell, it
replicates its chromosomes, makes a chitin ring, and extrudes a
smaller daughter cell. In turn, this daughter cell must grow in size
to make another daughter cell. The process of reproduction in yeast
is controlled by a process called the cell division cycle. This process
is so similar in human and yeast cells that the proteins which
control checkpoints in the division of human cells function to control
the same checkpoints in the division of yeast cells. Yeast and
humans are the products of the same process of evolution. Like
Teilhard de Chardin, who participated in the discovery of Peking
Man, a discovery integral to our understanding of the evolution of
humans as primates, we must account for the reality of evolution in
any religious explanation of why we are here.
After the lag phase, yeast grow exponentially. Yeast are
fermenters, and make both carbon dioxide and alcohol as the
products of sugars, such as the starch in flour, to obtain the three
commodities that all organisms need to grow, energy, electrons, and
carbon. It is the same yeast we use to make bread that we use to
make wine (and beer). Bread rises because yeast produce carbon
dioxide, and wine and beer contain alcohol, because alcohol is the
partner product to carbon dioxide of fermentation.
The discovery of how to use yeast to make bread and wine was
important for the growth of human society, because yeast make

many of the vitamins humans need to be healthy. Unlike yeast,

which can grow on simple sugars, human beings cannot make many
nutrients essential for our health and survival. The lag phase of the
human population lasted until about 50,000 years ago. We began to
grow exponentially when we learned how to cultivate grain and
store grain safely, our stored food guarded by our domesticated
cats.
The exponential growth of yeast does not last forever. The
exponential growth of all organisms is limited by the availability of
nutrients and the accumulation of toxic wastes. As yeasyt grows in a
bushel of flour, its growth is not limited by the availability of
nutrients. The final products of fermentation, bread and wine, still
contain many sugars nourishing to humans and yeast alike. Rather,
it is the accumulation of wastes, primarily alcohol, which limits the
growth of yeast. Once sufficient alcohol accumulates in wine, yeast
slow, then stop, growing, the phenomenon called stationary phase.
After stationary phase, the accumulation of alcohol becomes toxic
to yeast, and yeast die in what is called the death phase of growth.
Like yeast, humans also die from drinking too much alcohol.
What lessons do the scientific studies of yeast growth may we
apply to human growth? Like the community of yeast in rising
dough, human society continues to grow exponentially. However,
one of the troubling signs of human growth is that the exponential
rate of human growth is slowing. Human society is beginning its
entry into stationary phase. Like the growth of yeast in grape juice
to be made into wine, this is not due to the availability of food, but
rather is due to the accumulation of toxic wastes. The evidence that
humans are accumulating toxic wastes limiting for growth is
blatant; we are exhausting our sources of clean, fresh water, which
we need to survive and grow as a healthy society. In the past 50
years, we have contaminated more than 15% of our sources of fresh
water, and this percentage continues to grow with our unchecked
growth.
It is interesting that Jesus chose to describe the growth of
yeast to make bread and not wine. When we make bread, we do not
allow the yeast to enter stationary phase, but rather bake bread
when the yeast is still growing in exponential phase. If, when we
make bread, we let bread rise too long, the baked product is not

palatable. Perhaps the lesson of this parable is that we cannot

maintain exponential growth as a society, without matching our
growth rate with our death rate, and maintaining our population
size at an equilibrium.

(al ultimo)
The parable of the sower
He used parables to tell them many things: Once there was a
man who went out to sow grain. As he scattered the seed in the
field, some of it fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it
up. Some of it fell on rocky ground, where there was little soil. The
seeds soon sprouted because the soil wasnt deep. But when the
sun came up, it burned the young plants, and because the roots had
not grown deep enough, the plants soon dried up. Some of the seed
fell among thorn bushes, which grew up and choked the plants. But
some seeds fell in good soil, and the plants bore grain; some had
one hundred grains, others sixty, and others thirty.
And Jesus concluded, Listen, then, if you have ears!
Then the disciples came to Jesus and asked him, Why do you
use parables when you talk to the people?
Jesus answered, The knowledge about the Kingdom of Heaven
has been given to you, but not to them. For the person who has
something will be given more, so that he will have more than
enough; but the person who has nothing will have taken away from
him the little he has. The reason I use parables in talking to them is
that they look, but do not see, and they listen but do not hear or
understand. So the prophecy of Isaiah applies to them:

This people will listen and listen, but not understand; they will look
and look, but not see; because their minds are dull, and they have
stopped up their ears, and have closed their eyes. Otherwise, their
eyes would see, their ears would hear, their minds would
understand, and they would turn to me, says God, and I would heal
them.
As for you, how fortunate you are! Your eyes seer and your
ears hear. I assure you that many prophets and many of Gods
people wanted very much to see what you see, but they could not,
and to hear what you hear, but they did not.
Listen, then, and learn what the parable of the sower means.
Those who hear the message about the Kingdom but do not
understand it are like the seeds that fell along the path. The Evil
One comes and snatches away what was sown in them. The seeds
that fell on rocky ground stand for those who receive the message
gladly as soon as they hear it. But it does not sink depp into them,
and they dont last long. So when trouble or persecution comes
because of the message, they give up at once. The seeds that fell
among thorn bushes stand for those who hear the message, but the
worries about this life and their love for riches choke the message,
and they dont bear fruit. And the seeds sown in the good soil stand
for those who hear the message and understand it; they bear fruit,
some as much as one hundred, others sixty, and others thirty.-Matthew 13:3-23