Romel’s Cafe is Romel Horsman’s personal weblog expressing her deep-seated spiritual values and a place where others can gather and share their thoughts on faith and the Christian walk in close fellowship with fellow believers.
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BIOLOGICAL DEFORMITIES
This article was posted on Monday, October 20, 2008
Today, brothers and sisters (and half-brothers and half-sisters, etc.) are not permitted by law to marry because their children have an unacceptably high risk of being deformed. The more closely the parents are related, the more likely it is that any offspring will be deformed. There is a very sound genetic reason for such laws that is easy to understand. Every person has two sets of genes, there being some 130.000 pairs that specify how a person is put together and functions. Each person inherits one genes of each pair from each parent. Unfortunately genes today contain many mistakes (because of the sin and the curse), and these mistakes show up in variety of ways. For instance, some people let their hair grow over their ears to hide the fact that one ear is lower than the other —or perhaps someone’s nose is not in the middle of her or his face or someone’s jaw is a little out of shape ——- and so on. Let’s face it, the main reason we call each other normal is because of our common agreement to do so. The more distantly related parents are, the more likely it is that they will each have different mistakes in their genes. Children, inheriting one set of genes from each parent, are likely to end up with pairs of genes containing a maximum of one bad gene in each pair. The good gene in a pair tends to override the bad so that a deformity (a serious one anyway) does not occur. Instead of having totally deformed ears, for instance, a person may have only crooked ones! (Overall, though, the human race is slowly degenerating as mistakes accumulate generation after generation.) However, the more closely related two people are, the more likely that they will have similar mistakes in their genes, since these have been inherited from the same parents. Therefore a brother and a sister are more likely to have similar mistakes in their genes. A child of a union between such sibling could inherit the same bad gene on same gene pair from both, resulting in two bad copies of the gene and serious defects. However, Adam and Eve did not have accumulated genetic mistakes. When the first two people were created, they were physically perfect. Everything GOD made was “very good” (Genesis 1:31), so their genes were perfect—— no mistakes! But when sin entered into the world (because of Adam— Gen. 3:6, Rom. 5:12), GOD cursed the world so that the perfect creation then began to degenerate, that is, suffer death and decay (Rom. 8:22). Over thousands of years, this degeneration has produced all sorts of genetic mistakes in living things. Cain was in the first generation of children ever born. He (as well as his brothers and sisters) would have received virtually no imperfect genes from Adam and Eve, since the effects of sin and the Curse would have been minimal to start with (it takes time for these copying errors to accumulate). In that situation, brother and sister could have married with GOD’s approval, without any potential to produce deformed offspring. By the time of Moses (a few thousand years later), degenerative mistakes would have built up in the human race to such an extent that it was necessary for GOD to forbid brother-sister (and close relative marriage, Lev. 18- 20) Also there were plenty of people on earth by now, and there was no reason for close relations to marry. FOOTNOTE: Some have claimed this means GOD changed HIS mind by changing the laws. But GOD did not change HIS mind—— because of the changes that sin brought and because GOD never changes. HE introduced new laws for our sakes. Also, there is in the Bible a progressive revealing of the Messianic program which was in the mind of GOD from eternity. (See R. Grigg, “Unfolding the Plan,” Creation 20 (3); 22-24, 1998.) (Answers In Genesis)Next posting: Noah and the Ark
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