Easter science: the JC Project

April 24, 2011 • 1:06 pm

I happen to share the same initials as our Savior (except for his middle initial “H.”), and so it’s appropriate on this day of resurrection to highlight a scientific initiative, The JC Project, that shows perfectly the compatibility of science and faith.  P. Z. will be helping with the first step of this experiment.

Be sure to click on the diagram.

h/t: Kyle

34 thoughts on “Easter science: the JC Project”

  1. I always thought Jesus’ middle name started with an “F”… as in Jesus Fuckin’ Christ.
    Could I have been wrong all these years?

  2. They had me at: “There is so much love in this world for Jesus, and rightly so.”

    This seems completely practical to me.

  3. Oh, my — that’s brilliant!

    They don’t mention…but, technically speaking, shouldn’t the surrogate mother be a virgin?

    And, it also occurs to me…how will they know that they cells they harvest will actually be Jesus cells as opposed to contamination from food handlers — or even non-human cells? It’s be quite embarrassing to complete the project only to discover that you’ve cloned an birthed, say, a rat instead of a Jesus.

    I think they should first obtain numerous samples from all across the globe, sequence them all, and determine which genome is the Jesus genome by virtue of the fact that it’s the one that’s always present in every sample.

    Cheers,

    b&

    3. That’s a mistranslation (“virgin” was actually “young woman”).

      All she needs to be is a walking uterus. That is pretty much how Catholicism views women.

      1. If it’s a mistranslation, then it’s a mistranslation that was fully fixed by about 140 CE, because Tertullian wrote extensively about the importance of a virgin birth.

        In fact, in those days, there was nothing out of the ordinary about a virgin birth, or the birth of a human with a god as a father.

        Plato was alleged to have been such a birth — his father was said to have been “prevented from lying” with his mother until after Apollo had impregnated her.

        Alexander the Great and Caesar Augustus were both said to have been impregnated by gods (coming to the woman in the form of a snake — hmm).

        The founder of Rome — Romulus — was son of the god Mars and a vestal virgin (gee, sound familiar?).

        Oh no. It’s only in modern times when we consider such a thing as being just plain silly do we get such apologetics as “it was a mistranslation”.

        1. Yes, I’m familiar with the other virgin births. That doesn’t mean that virginity of the mother of the Messiah was originally an ambition of Hebrew tradition, it is just as plausible that it was an angle that got co-opted in at a later date in a copy-cat move. The Judeo-Christian tradition is like a kid in a sweet shop when it came to pick-‘n-mix add-ons from surrounding cultures.

          Ironically, we finally have the technology to achieve a Real Honest to Ceiling Cat Virgin birth. But it still doesn’t detract from the point I was making: the Good Christian Woman is not much more than a walking uterus. The virginity aspect was simply the primitive human way of “being sure” of the paternity if the fetus.

          1. Oh, I fully agree with your assessment of the church’s view of your “value” and “place” as a woman.

          2. “the paternity [of] the fetus…”

            I agree with you that virginity is desirable to immediately precede a natural impregnation, to help establish paternity.

            But I don’t get how it matters with supernatural impregnation. If one god could get her pregnant without breaking the hymen, why couldn’t another? How do we know that Jesus wasn’t the son of Apollo?

        2. All hail the wolf-mother! Perhaps the infant Jebus number two could be suckled by some appropriate creature.

  4. If it worked, would Christians then say “oh, just ignore the resurrected Christ and His new miracles: science and religion are still non-overlapping magisteria?” And would they get angry with atheists over their ‘scientism?’

    We’d have both science AND Jesus Christ. Pwned!

  5. Ohhh… I see a problem already… If you hide under the alter, you may run into one of the Priest’s choir boys…

    1. Brilliant!

      Similarly, you could take skin cells from one of the Jesus clones and make a Son. In which case we get to ask the Father: “child birth, back problems, _beards_ – WTF?”

  7. P. Z. will be helping with the first step of this experiment.

    Hmm. One wonders if he wishes he had thought of it, or whether he would have considered playing this, at the time, a distraction from the simple and clear message that it’s just a cracker. I remember thinking, at the time, that what PZ did play was a distraction from defending the student. Then he used the attention to remind people of the historical role of accusations of host desecration in Christian anti-Semitism. Brilliant.

  8. Sheeeessh.

    It’s only the substance of the bread that transes, hence transsubstantiation.

    The accidentals remain forever the same. So no cells or DNA or any other stuff.

    Haven’t you people read any Sophistimacated Theolology™? This is Catlicker 101 stuff.

    What you want is a Eucharistic miracle. You need the Host to bleed real blood.

    On that count dr Coyne is irreplaceable, though, since tradition demands that a Jew abduct a Host and then stick nails in it.

  9. Once the embryo reaches day 8 to 12 and splits during this timeframe, the “seeing double” effect will take place and we’ll have monozygotic pareidolia.

  10. I wonder why Christians aren’t up in arms as hundreds of millions of JC’s clones are incarnated every week and then just minutes later are mashed and digested to death. How many times does this dood have to live and die? Being the son of god is a tough career.

    1. Of course it must become mandatory to save every potential life. They will fill the world with Jesuses, hence ushing in the Rapture.

      Or Rape-tour, considering what the religion wants to do with a perfectly working world.

      “It will end, not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a stench of unwashed feet!”

  11. Sounds good. Will you be having a contest to pick the Surrogate Mother? That could help offset the cost. Surely the government cannot pay for this.

  12. For the Brits in the audience – at least those of a certain age – this may bring recollections of the 1979 “Not the 9 O’Clock News” spoof of the discussion by John Cleese, Michael Palin, Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark on “Life of Brian”.

    Among the suggestions of sacrilege in the NTNON spoof being that “this Jesus character even shares his initials with the comic messiah himself, our lord John Cleese”

    That JC, it seems, has an M (Marwood, it says on wikipedia) as a middle initial.

  13. I hate to be a gloomy Gus, but I fear we may end up cloning the Pillsbury Dough Boy in error.

  15. If they can clone one Christ there’s no reason why they can’t clone many. Perhaps with a little help from Ken Ham and the Hovinds they could open a JC theme park. Just think, they could have a sermon on the mount reenactment with a genuine Jesus delivering the lecture, a raising Lazarus ride (where you bring a dead relative to be reanimated), an interactive Passion of the Christ (where the audience gets to choose alternate endings)… All the staff would be JC clones including all the servers in the McChrist’s food court where you can by body-of-christ crackers and loaves-and-fishes McFillets.

    So many possibilities…

  16. There’s really no need to go through this entire procedure.

    Just go to Lanciano, Italy. You’ll find a slice of Jesus’ heart right there, on display. As it has been since about the year 700.

    The story is told that the priest was blessing the bread and wine — and it REALLY AND TRULY turned into flesh and blood.

    In the 1970s, an Italian (Catlick) pathologist was allowed to “examine” (read: look at) the relic, and declared it to be human heart tissue.

    There. Nya nya nya.

    The Catlick church recognizes this as a “true” miracle — so it MUST be heart tissue from Jeebus.

    Extract a little DNA, do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight, and “voila” — new Jesus.

  17. Actually, if JC no.1 physically ascended into heaven, surely no.2 would mean he had two bodies? So we would have a quaternary instead of a trinity -? Confused!

  18. According to Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Jebus’ middle initials are “TF” for “Titty F*cking”. Pronouncing the full name is a good way to annoy Christians.

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