(“Who’ve they got in there? King Kong?”)
Famous last words: “We’ve got it all under control!”
Remember Jurassic Park? Hey, we’ve got the money, we’ve got the technology, we can do anything and everything we want!
https://leeduigon.com/2015/09/06/were-living-in-jurassic-park/
Only it never quite works out that way, does it?
Since the beginning of time, no country has ever spent more money on “education” than the United States of America. And what have we got to show for it?
People who think you shouldn’t oughta shoot dinosaurs…
Hey, we saw a cool science fiction movie yesterday, a nice and scary one–Life, which we rented from amazon.
The ideology of unbelief dictates that life be found on other planets. Somehow that’s supposed to prove there is no God. You’d have to ask them how that works. Although I wouldn’t bother.
But if there were… this movie shows you what might happen.
“Oh, boy, Martian soil samples! Why, look at that–a little tiny organism… let’s see if we can wake it up…” Cue to Colin Clive in Frankenstein, screaming exultantly, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”
Actually, messing around with alien organisms seems like it would be a very bad idea. Somebody on that space station should’ve read The Andromeda Strain. But they do screw around with it, they just can’t help themselves, they give it a cutesy-poo nickname–and of course it winds up loose, and sets about killing everybody there. It’s sort of a half-octopus, half-starfish that gets bigger and bigger and smarter and smarter with every victim it devours.
And everything goes wrong. They should’ve watched Jurassic Park before they left earth. All these carefully thought-out protocols and procedures, all the bright ideas of scientific whiz kids–well, the Martian monster doesn’t know and certainly doesn’t care about any of that.
I really didn’t notice who was in the cast. All the characters were too busy trying to stay alive, and had no time to devote to personal issues. I can say the film was well-acted, well-directed, fast-paced, and with a straightforward cinematography that didn’t make my wife seasick, watching it. A very effective study in suspense punctuated by frantic action.
Again and again the movies we make tell us that our science isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and warn us to proceed with caution. On some level, we know this!
And yet we never listen. It’s not Martian monsters that devour us, but bright ideas and clever societal innovations dreamed up by blockheads hailed as sages.
Is there anybody who does not want to find cures for cancer, HIV, diabetes, and other so far incurable diseases? Really bad diseases, that can kill you?
Probably not. But next question: how far are we willing to go, to get those cures?
Dr. Mercola reports on new “gene-editing technology” that seems to offer real hope of curing terrible diseases… and is also a mine field strewn with unintended consequences and prospects for disaster (http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2017/06/13/crispr-gene-editing-dangers.aspx?utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art3&utm_campaign=20170613Z1_UCM&et_cid=DM147520&et_rid=2042432193).
It turns out to be not quite so easy as they thought. Testing on mice showed these procedures brought in “more than 100 additional deletions and insertions”–whoa! that means stuff taken out that they didn’t mean to take out, and stuff put in that they didn’t mean to put in–“and more than 1,500 single-nucleotide mutations.” Does that sound good to you? It doesn’t sound too good to me!
So, OK, we’re gonna “cut and paste your DNA” and maybe nothing but good will happen, and maybe not. We might be tempted to try to make designer babies, and next thing you know, we’ve unleashed some unimagined horror on the world.
Of course we want to alleviate suffering! Of course we want to heal diseases! And of course we’re going to try.
But, oh, boy–to pursue that course without humility! We are not going to be able to abolish disease and death, any more than we can abolish war or injustice–because we are not God. God will do those things, not us. We can only try our best to make the world a little better, a little less terrible: and that, by God’s grace and with His help, we can do. Only a fool would deny that medical science has made great strides since the 19th century.
But what we might call “moral science” sure as shootin’ hasn’t! How much power do we want to put in the hands of moral imbeciles?
Some folks out there need to re-visit Jurassic Park.
It’s Patty’s birthday this weekend, so we watched Jurassic World, aka Jurassic Park IV.
Okay, all the disastrous mistakes that plagued the original Jurassic Park have been rectified, and the new park is wide-open for business. But a whole new set of disastrous cock-ups is just waiting to erupt.
This is one of those movies that delivers exactly what you want–well, what we wanted, at least. We wanted dinosaurs, and dinosaurs we got: even a giant Mosasaurus which is not, strictly speaking, a dinosaurs, but it’s prehistoric and it eats living things.
We wanted thrills, and we got them. We wanted eye-popping special effects, and we got those. And as an added treat, there were several brief salutes to the original Jurassic Park, including a cameo appearance by Mr. DNA.
Occasionally it seemed the screenwriters were tempted to get sidetracked by penetrating insights into the characters’ personal lives, but drew back from this before any serious harm was done to the movie. I mean, you’re getting chased around by dinosaurs who are trying to eat you alive–who’s got time to worry about relationships?
This film gives us new dinosaurs–the Mosasaur, a really ugly pterodactyl (Dimorphodon), and, to top it all, a “not real” dinosaur that never existed in nature but was cooked up by the lab boys because the park’s investors demanded something bigger, meaner, and scarier than the real dinos. B.D. Wong is back as Henry Wu, the genius who ran John Hammond’s dino factory in Jurassic Park I. He’s back and he hasn’t learned a thing.
So they come up with this artificial critter they name Indominius–nasty, nasty, nasty! It’s full of genes from all sorts of animals, and on top of that, it’s been raised in isolation which has made it crazy. The thing I loved about Indominius is, it’s basically a giant Dryptosaurus–which was a distant relative of T. rex, about half the size, with long, powerful arms and long, sharp, eagle-like claws: New Jersey’s pride and joy.
Here is the heart of the movie. Here is Unintelligent Design at work. Borrowing from the genuine creation of the sovereign God, blockheads cobble together a new kind of animal. They do this to make money and earn science kudos. They have very little understanding of animals in general and no understanding whatsoever of this particular animal. Their hubris, their ignorance, and their greed all turn around and bite them in the ass.
Just like in the first Jurassic Park.
“Ye shall be as gods” was a snare and a delusion when the Serpent first whispered it to Eve in Eden, and is to this day the Devil’s most irresistible bait.
Aside from my inborn yearning for dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, I love these movies as parables. It’s amazing how little the human race learns from its mistakes.
Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither to they understand… For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. (Matthew 13:13, 15)
Yul Brynner was the out-of-control robot gunslinger in 1973’s Westworld movie.
Please don’t ever think I enjoy reporting on this schlock. I am trying to convince people that wrecking the culture is not something you can get away with. The Bible should have already convinced them of that. But how do you convince a heart of stone, a wooden head?
Nevertheless, I carry out my duty to sound the alarm.
Remember Westworld? Written by Michael Crichton and starring Yul Brynner, this movie came out in 1973. It was all about a big theme park where you could go for the experience of living in different “worlds” of history–like the Old West, or Europe in the Middle Ages–where the inhabitants were super-realistic robots and the paying guest could be a big cheese. This was Crichton’s theme park from hell, before he wrote Jurassic Park. Of course the gunslinger robot in Westworld gets out of hand and starts killing the guests. You can take it from there.
Now HBO is preparing a Westworld TV series. Apparently the writers have got the Old West confused with ancient Rome’s Satyricon: you won’t believe the contract they’re asking you to sign if you want to be an extra ( http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/westworld-sexually-explicit-casting-contract-828287 ).
Not to filth up my page, click the link and see what they want their extras to do in front of the cameras. Crikey–with all that sex free-for-all going on, how did they ever find the time or the energy to arrange the gunfight at the OK Corral? “Westworld,” in its new incarnation, might be more fittingly named “STDworld.”
And this is the toxin that the audience are expected to pump into their brains. “Fill ‘er up”–not with gas, but with slime.
One shudders to imagine what pornographers must have to do, to stay ahead of this curve.
This is not good for you and not good for your culture.
You are not going to like the desert island upon which all this stuff maroons you.
From the movie, “Jurassic Park”: This is what can happen when all those little glitches build up to a critical mass…
You know the story. Thinking ahead to nothing beyond getting rich or becoming famous, a bunch of money men and scientists and lawyers decide to clone dinosaurs and put them in a theme park.
They believe they are totally in control of their project.
But one by one, two by two, and three by three, little teeny-weeny things are going wrong. Because they are impressed by their own credentials and utterly convinced that they’re in control, they don’t even notice increasing randomness that’s taking over the park–until it’s too late.
The crowning disaster is brought on by something trivial. Because they had to turn off and then restart the park’s computer, and then they got everything working again, no one noticed that the park came back on line using auxiliary power only, and should have been switched on to the main power supply. Suddenly the auxiliary power was all used up and the dinosaurs started eating everybody. Just a little slip like that, and the whole thing goes up in smoke.
Tell me the daily news doesn’t remind you of that.
Let’s see… whole Middle Eastern populations pouring into Europe, mass shootings all over America (although decades ago, when per capita gun ownership in the U.S. was many times greater than it is now, there were no mass shootings), stock markets tanking, judges throwing people into prison for not taking part in homosexual parodies of marriage, you’re $100,000 in student loan debt and can’t get a job, intellectuals taking the time to invent “gender-neutral” pronouns to be used in place of human speech, and here comes the Chinese Navy…
Sure looks like a lot of our sub-systems breaking down, trending toward total system failure.
But it’s only what we get, and what people have always gotten, for turning away from God and turning toward the mirror when it’s time to worship.
“There is no cause for alarm. Everything is under control.” Not.
When the Lord is really mad at us, He lets us have our way.