Biology of the Christian Community
by
Charles Graves
What is the adhesive element in Christian community and how is it related to brains and bodies? We have witnessed which might be called the ‘Covid-19 community – those who share the virus and some die of their ‘membership’. Does the Christian community have an adhesion similar to the COvid-19 biological community?
The potential Christian community is the whole human race since the ‘holy spirit’ as described above lives within the possible neuronal structures of all human brains and therefore in all ‘souls’ and ‘spirits’. Every human, in a certain sense, has his/her own ‘spirit’ or charisma, be it ‘holy’ or otherwise. But, as stated in our previous articles on Theology and Biology, these spirits live in a world of ‘free choice’ and most religions propose that the free choices may be ‘judged’ somewhere or somehow. Unrestrained selfishness, with miserable results for society as a whole, cannot be tolerated, so that somewhere, somehow it has to be judged. As we look at the history of the universe, i.e. God’s creation, it appears impossible to believe that bad actions will, in the end, triumph. This would make our lives absolutely hopeless, and so we believe in a ‘final judgement’ over such evil.
Hence, although (according to general belief) humans have freedom to choose among alternatives – to choose between good and bad – we must also believe that the good side eventually wins. Thus, religion and ‘philosophies of life’ promote love rather than hate for their followers.
The same ‘love’ is projected into God, the Creator, or into the ‘Ultimate Source of Being’ etc. The final ‘Cause’ must also have the nature of Love, not wickedness. Thus, both among the Creators or among his/her creatures, the ideal ethical stance is to have love and show love. Hardly any religion would disagree. But, perhaps, even if the divine entity can live up to this challenge, humans find it difficult. They weakly make some good ethical decisions or do not make them. But to have love and show love is often quite impossible to attain.
Yet, basically, without this element, the human community cannot exist in any meaningful, positive way, We might assert that the ‘cement’ of good community life is a shared love among its members.
As far as experiments to realize such shared love is concerned, the Church is one of them. And the source of the love within that community was called the ‘Three-person God’ or the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit). Supposedly those three persons could become active ‘inside the Church’ and inspire the necessary love. We have seen previously how God (a ‘Father’ in heaven), Jesus (an historical man) and the Spirit (outside of, but also ‘within’ humans) could cooperate to deal with the main problem of humans. This problem was how each human could sufficiently make ethical choices keeping him/her away from ‘no-god’ and thus stay on the right path to heaven (where God could provide for all needs including food).
The Holy Spirit inside the brain and body would facilitate this aim through healing and conversion. But this interior work of the holy spirit was valid for an individual human through the baptism similar to what Jesus experienced. But how are these individual ’Christians’ related to one other? The answer is that the same ‘echoing’ which was possible between Jesus and the individual baptized person also exists between the believers themselves.
The holy spirit within one individual is ‘echoed’ by the holy spirit within another individual and when this happens, it is the basis of that love which we have seen as an essential element in history (unless we come to believe it is hate that rules the world and its destiny). And since every human being possesses the holy spirit as an integral element in his/her life, the possibility of shared love is imbedded in our biological existence. The Christians have their own particular way of activating this shared love through the Incarnation and Redemption from Sin and the ‘echoing’ work of the Holy Spirit. Other religions have their own methods of promoting this shared love.
Here we have been taught in theological seminary that the Bible and Greek classical tradition propose three kinds of shared love; agape, filia and eros. Agape is sacrificial love, demeaning one’s own importance for the sake of elevating someone else’s importance; filia is love for a companion or family member; and eros is sexual love in a couple. These kinds of love are available for every living human being and each religion uses them for the purpose of shared love. How does Christianity use them? Jesus had said ‘love one another as I have loved you’ implying by this that certain elements of all three types of the above love are necessary – sacrificial, fellowship-type family love, and erotic love. Basically, the Christian attitude towards love includes married persons’ love as well as Church love and political, community love. Other religions, in general, include the same since ‘human nature’ must be at the basis of a religion if it is to have any success, and human nature does include these three possibilities of loving.
So, if all religions have the same concept of the nature of love, why are there so many religions in the world, and what is the place of Christianity among them?
Each in its own way is trying to promote human cohesion and the avoidance of a situation where hate will not be judged at ‘the end of time’. Each religion is devoted to improving the morals of humans in demonstrating that it has the key to how humans can cooperate with the divine Creator to defeat ‘no-god’ and provide to humans a heaven after death.
Since the problem of the death of the biological mind and body faces every individual, ‘religion’ must assert that there is ‘life after death’. And most religions include the concept that what is beyond death includes what happens in each individual’s life – that what we have done in life vis à vis ourselves and neighbors will be ‘taken along with us’ into death. This not only apples to individual lives but also to lives ‘in community’, in politics, in history and international affairs. History will see to it that all of this is ‘judged’.
Such views of history both personal and communal must, by their very nature, include the issue of ‘redemption’ – redeeming the debt that we as individuals or groups owe to others because of how we have sufficiently ‘loved our neighbor’. Those who did not love their neighbor are not going to be rewarded for this ‘at the end’. How much they will be ^punished’ however, in most religions seems to be left in doubt because humans are not ‘all-knowing’.
Christianity and the Church has tried to deal with the issue of redemption in its own particular way. Christianity asserts that Jesus ‘took upon himself the sins of the world’ and that when he was crucified, he ‘made satisfaction for the sins of the whole world’. Because of what he did in this sense, Christians are relieved from the necessity of redeeming themselves for their ethical dealings not in accord with the virtue of love, since Jesus had already satisfied the ‘Judge’ about them.
Christianity had a certain appeal to the masses because of this fact mainly revealed by the apostle Paul as part of his theology for the Gentiles (non-Jews). ‘Sinners’ could be forgiven their sins because Jesus had been ‘judged on their behalf’ and they must simply be thankful and try to lead a better life. This is a very interesting element in Christianity and it enhances the other elements mentioned above about how Jesus ‘heals’ and ‘converts’. This element of redemption fits into the major human concerns about ‘what are we going to do about all the bad things we have done – in this present life - when we die’ What is the world of humanity going to do, when the universe ends?
Humans should probably be thankful that the Creator made us with a conscience, but it is nevertheless ‘up to us’ and not to the Creator, what we do with our conscience when it accuses us? Christianity, according to Paul, had an answer for this: that Jesus’ death on the cross took care of the issue. Later, we shall discuss the effect of the idea of ‘redemption of sin’ within the church and in our individual brains and bodies. How do the neurons and synapses promote ‘redemption from sin’? And how is this related to ‘healing’ and ‘conversion’ in the Christian and Church context? That will bring us to the discussion about the role of the ‘Holy Communion’ within the Church.
Biological Redemption from Sin
Kevin J. Mitchell, in his book called Innate. How the Wiring of our Brains Shapes who we are (Princeton University Press 2018) tells how the mRNA for Covid-19 vaccine is created – it is injected into humans in order to neutralize some later entry of the same genetic material in the COvid-19 virus. The problem of ‘redemption from sin’ is similar- what needs to be injected in the neuronal-synaptical system should ‘neutralize’ the type of mRNA which has been passed on through the ethics-related genes in sperm and egg over the millennia of human history.
We might believe that a ‘sacrifice for sin’ protein complex exists in the human genome from the beginning of Creation, just as a ‘holy spirit’ exists in every newborn which when stimulated can promote ‘love’. How can the mRNA of this be described in terms of neurons and synapses? It is probably related to the holy spirit mRNA which combats against ‘no-god’, The holy spirit mRNA brings ‘healing’ (related to trauma) and conversion (related to unfortunate ethical choices) by impeding certain complexes of neuronal and synaptic biological realities, and causing the impeded complexes to ‘go into retirement’. In the case of ‘redemption from sin’ the combatting mRNA complex of neurons and synapses ‘dies’ in the face of the ‘no-god’ adversary, but the death of this biological complex leaves a vacuum for other protein-providing genes to replace it and themselves to become mRNA complexes. This may be the biological reality of ‘sacrifice for sin’ – a method to satisfy the ongoing gene structure which will appear later in sperm and egg. So this is an inbuilt, biological ‘sacrifice’ because there is a transmission of ‘ethically bad genes’ from parents to children (‘original sin’).
Why should this be necessary? It represents, apparently, what theologians call ‘original sin’ – that the Creator allowed human creatures the ability to choose to recognize their Creator or not.
If an individual does not recognize the Creator and does not ‘obey its will’ then within him/her has been planted various biological mechanisms to deal with such non-recognition and obedience, one of them being the holy spirit which provokes ‘love’ and another being the gene of ‘sacrifice for sin’ which provokes ‘forgiveness’.,
It must have been in the Creator’s mind and to insert such features, after having given the human creature the power of free-will. If the free-will has been used ‘against the Creator’ then there must be a possibility for the ‘forgiveness’ related to this ‘sin’. And the (by God) instituted features, including the holy spirit, spirit of love, spirit of forgiveness etc. are circular. They influence one another in the genetic process of new human births and family expansion.
Here we have the evangelist’s preaching that ‘Jesus died for our sins’. It means that the Creator, through the historical person of Jesus, wished to inform humanity that there was a process within their brains and bodies which could deal with ‘sins' (or faulty moral choices) and that, in fact, humans were ‘already forgiven for their misuse of free will’. The death of Jesus on the cross was an example, in human history, symbolic of the fact that forgiveness existed in a physiological sense within our brains. By looking at the historical Jesus and his cross of suffering and rejection, we are looking, in fact, at the sacrifice for sin in our neuronal-synaptic essences which are ‘dying’ and giving way to new, more positive combinations of neurons and synapses.
The existential reality of this seems to be relevant to our modern world since we quite clearly could accept the fact that if you believe you are ‘forgiven’ by someone, you would - because of this - love the forgiver. This, apparently, is what the Creator intended by including such processes within the human genome and the construction of the human brain.
Such a discussion leads us to one of the principal elements of church life, namely the Holy Communion. Holy Communion is the ceremony by which the believer - the baptized church member - ‘eats the body and drinks the blood’ of Jesus, in memory of an instant of Jesus’ life with his disciples, at a ‘last supper’. He told such disciples that after his death they should perpetuate such a Last Supper indefinitely, and that a part of the memorial of it would be that what they would eat and drink would be ‘he himself’ in his physiological essence of body and blood.
Hence, this is an historical parallel to the inner, biological ‘redemption for sin’ element within the brain. The historical event of the Last Supper and its meaning ‘echoes’ the human’s inner reality of ‘receiving forgiveness’. At the time of Holy Communion, this reality ‘echoes’ in the believer’s mind. When he/she is eating the bread and drinking the ‘fruit of the vine’ (for some churches it is grape-juice) they are remembering that, within their brains, they are experiencing ‘forgiveness of their sins’ and other elements of the inner holy spirit’s activities. In this Holy Communion the reality of what the Creator God had implanted within us, becomes realized. And because the forgiveness also provokes ‘love’ (the holy spirit is active in this) it also provokes the concept of ‘church membership’ which is a by-product of the Holy Communion experience.
Charles Graves
The potential Christian community is the whole human race since the ‘holy spirit’ as described above lives within the possible neuronal structures of all human brains and therefore in all ‘souls’ and ‘spirits’. Every human, in a certain sense, has his/her own ‘spirit’ or charisma, be it ‘holy’ or otherwise. But, as stated in our previous articles on Theology and Biology, these spirits live in a world of ‘free choice’ and most religions propose that the free choices may be ‘judged’ somewhere or somehow. Unrestrained selfishness, with miserable results for society as a whole, cannot be tolerated, so that somewhere, somehow it has to be judged. As we look at the history of the universe, i.e. God’s creation, it appears impossible to believe that bad actions will, in the end, triumph. This would make our lives absolutely hopeless, and so we believe in a ‘final judgement’ over such evil.
Hence, although (according to general belief) humans have freedom to choose among alternatives – to choose between good and bad – we must also believe that the good side eventually wins. Thus, religion and ‘philosophies of life’ promote love rather than hate for their followers.
The same ‘love’ is projected into God, the Creator, or into the ‘Ultimate Source of Being’ etc. The final ‘Cause’ must also have the nature of Love, not wickedness. Thus, both among the Creators or among his/her creatures, the ideal ethical stance is to have love and show love. Hardly any religion would disagree. But, perhaps, even if the divine entity can live up to this challenge, humans find it difficult. They weakly make some good ethical decisions or do not make them. But to have love and show love is often quite impossible to attain.
Yet, basically, without this element, the human community cannot exist in any meaningful, positive way, We might assert that the ‘cement’ of good community life is a shared love among its members.
As far as experiments to realize such shared love is concerned, the Church is one of them. And the source of the love within that community was called the ‘Three-person God’ or the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit). Supposedly those three persons could become active ‘inside the Church’ and inspire the necessary love. We have seen previously how God (a ‘Father’ in heaven), Jesus (an historical man) and the Spirit (outside of, but also ‘within’ humans) could cooperate to deal with the main problem of humans. This problem was how each human could sufficiently make ethical choices keeping him/her away from ‘no-god’ and thus stay on the right path to heaven (where God could provide for all needs including food).
The Holy Spirit inside the brain and body would facilitate this aim through healing and conversion. But this interior work of the holy spirit was valid for an individual human through the baptism similar to what Jesus experienced. But how are these individual ’Christians’ related to one other? The answer is that the same ‘echoing’ which was possible between Jesus and the individual baptized person also exists between the believers themselves.
The holy spirit within one individual is ‘echoed’ by the holy spirit within another individual and when this happens, it is the basis of that love which we have seen as an essential element in history (unless we come to believe it is hate that rules the world and its destiny). And since every human being possesses the holy spirit as an integral element in his/her life, the possibility of shared love is imbedded in our biological existence. The Christians have their own particular way of activating this shared love through the Incarnation and Redemption from Sin and the ‘echoing’ work of the Holy Spirit. Other religions have their own methods of promoting this shared love.
Here we have been taught in theological seminary that the Bible and Greek classical tradition propose three kinds of shared love; agape, filia and eros. Agape is sacrificial love, demeaning one’s own importance for the sake of elevating someone else’s importance; filia is love for a companion or family member; and eros is sexual love in a couple. These kinds of love are available for every living human being and each religion uses them for the purpose of shared love. How does Christianity use them? Jesus had said ‘love one another as I have loved you’ implying by this that certain elements of all three types of the above love are necessary – sacrificial, fellowship-type family love, and erotic love. Basically, the Christian attitude towards love includes married persons’ love as well as Church love and political, community love. Other religions, in general, include the same since ‘human nature’ must be at the basis of a religion if it is to have any success, and human nature does include these three possibilities of loving.
So, if all religions have the same concept of the nature of love, why are there so many religions in the world, and what is the place of Christianity among them?
Each in its own way is trying to promote human cohesion and the avoidance of a situation where hate will not be judged at ‘the end of time’. Each religion is devoted to improving the morals of humans in demonstrating that it has the key to how humans can cooperate with the divine Creator to defeat ‘no-god’ and provide to humans a heaven after death.
Since the problem of the death of the biological mind and body faces every individual, ‘religion’ must assert that there is ‘life after death’. And most religions include the concept that what is beyond death includes what happens in each individual’s life – that what we have done in life vis à vis ourselves and neighbors will be ‘taken along with us’ into death. This not only apples to individual lives but also to lives ‘in community’, in politics, in history and international affairs. History will see to it that all of this is ‘judged’.
Such views of history both personal and communal must, by their very nature, include the issue of ‘redemption’ – redeeming the debt that we as individuals or groups owe to others because of how we have sufficiently ‘loved our neighbor’. Those who did not love their neighbor are not going to be rewarded for this ‘at the end’. How much they will be ^punished’ however, in most religions seems to be left in doubt because humans are not ‘all-knowing’.
Christianity and the Church has tried to deal with the issue of redemption in its own particular way. Christianity asserts that Jesus ‘took upon himself the sins of the world’ and that when he was crucified, he ‘made satisfaction for the sins of the whole world’. Because of what he did in this sense, Christians are relieved from the necessity of redeeming themselves for their ethical dealings not in accord with the virtue of love, since Jesus had already satisfied the ‘Judge’ about them.
Christianity had a certain appeal to the masses because of this fact mainly revealed by the apostle Paul as part of his theology for the Gentiles (non-Jews). ‘Sinners’ could be forgiven their sins because Jesus had been ‘judged on their behalf’ and they must simply be thankful and try to lead a better life. This is a very interesting element in Christianity and it enhances the other elements mentioned above about how Jesus ‘heals’ and ‘converts’. This element of redemption fits into the major human concerns about ‘what are we going to do about all the bad things we have done – in this present life - when we die’ What is the world of humanity going to do, when the universe ends?
Humans should probably be thankful that the Creator made us with a conscience, but it is nevertheless ‘up to us’ and not to the Creator, what we do with our conscience when it accuses us? Christianity, according to Paul, had an answer for this: that Jesus’ death on the cross took care of the issue. Later, we shall discuss the effect of the idea of ‘redemption of sin’ within the church and in our individual brains and bodies. How do the neurons and synapses promote ‘redemption from sin’? And how is this related to ‘healing’ and ‘conversion’ in the Christian and Church context? That will bring us to the discussion about the role of the ‘Holy Communion’ within the Church.
Biological Redemption from Sin
Kevin J. Mitchell, in his book called Innate. How the Wiring of our Brains Shapes who we are (Princeton University Press 2018) tells how the mRNA for Covid-19 vaccine is created – it is injected into humans in order to neutralize some later entry of the same genetic material in the COvid-19 virus. The problem of ‘redemption from sin’ is similar- what needs to be injected in the neuronal-synaptical system should ‘neutralize’ the type of mRNA which has been passed on through the ethics-related genes in sperm and egg over the millennia of human history.
We might believe that a ‘sacrifice for sin’ protein complex exists in the human genome from the beginning of Creation, just as a ‘holy spirit’ exists in every newborn which when stimulated can promote ‘love’. How can the mRNA of this be described in terms of neurons and synapses? It is probably related to the holy spirit mRNA which combats against ‘no-god’, The holy spirit mRNA brings ‘healing’ (related to trauma) and conversion (related to unfortunate ethical choices) by impeding certain complexes of neuronal and synaptic biological realities, and causing the impeded complexes to ‘go into retirement’. In the case of ‘redemption from sin’ the combatting mRNA complex of neurons and synapses ‘dies’ in the face of the ‘no-god’ adversary, but the death of this biological complex leaves a vacuum for other protein-providing genes to replace it and themselves to become mRNA complexes. This may be the biological reality of ‘sacrifice for sin’ – a method to satisfy the ongoing gene structure which will appear later in sperm and egg. So this is an inbuilt, biological ‘sacrifice’ because there is a transmission of ‘ethically bad genes’ from parents to children (‘original sin’).
Why should this be necessary? It represents, apparently, what theologians call ‘original sin’ – that the Creator allowed human creatures the ability to choose to recognize their Creator or not.
If an individual does not recognize the Creator and does not ‘obey its will’ then within him/her has been planted various biological mechanisms to deal with such non-recognition and obedience, one of them being the holy spirit which provokes ‘love’ and another being the gene of ‘sacrifice for sin’ which provokes ‘forgiveness’.,
It must have been in the Creator’s mind and to insert such features, after having given the human creature the power of free-will. If the free-will has been used ‘against the Creator’ then there must be a possibility for the ‘forgiveness’ related to this ‘sin’. And the (by God) instituted features, including the holy spirit, spirit of love, spirit of forgiveness etc. are circular. They influence one another in the genetic process of new human births and family expansion.
Here we have the evangelist’s preaching that ‘Jesus died for our sins’. It means that the Creator, through the historical person of Jesus, wished to inform humanity that there was a process within their brains and bodies which could deal with ‘sins' (or faulty moral choices) and that, in fact, humans were ‘already forgiven for their misuse of free will’. The death of Jesus on the cross was an example, in human history, symbolic of the fact that forgiveness existed in a physiological sense within our brains. By looking at the historical Jesus and his cross of suffering and rejection, we are looking, in fact, at the sacrifice for sin in our neuronal-synaptic essences which are ‘dying’ and giving way to new, more positive combinations of neurons and synapses.
The existential reality of this seems to be relevant to our modern world since we quite clearly could accept the fact that if you believe you are ‘forgiven’ by someone, you would - because of this - love the forgiver. This, apparently, is what the Creator intended by including such processes within the human genome and the construction of the human brain.
Such a discussion leads us to one of the principal elements of church life, namely the Holy Communion. Holy Communion is the ceremony by which the believer - the baptized church member - ‘eats the body and drinks the blood’ of Jesus, in memory of an instant of Jesus’ life with his disciples, at a ‘last supper’. He told such disciples that after his death they should perpetuate such a Last Supper indefinitely, and that a part of the memorial of it would be that what they would eat and drink would be ‘he himself’ in his physiological essence of body and blood.
Hence, this is an historical parallel to the inner, biological ‘redemption for sin’ element within the brain. The historical event of the Last Supper and its meaning ‘echoes’ the human’s inner reality of ‘receiving forgiveness’. At the time of Holy Communion, this reality ‘echoes’ in the believer’s mind. When he/she is eating the bread and drinking the ‘fruit of the vine’ (for some churches it is grape-juice) they are remembering that, within their brains, they are experiencing ‘forgiveness of their sins’ and other elements of the inner holy spirit’s activities. In this Holy Communion the reality of what the Creator God had implanted within us, becomes realized. And because the forgiveness also provokes ‘love’ (the holy spirit is active in this) it also provokes the concept of ‘church membership’ which is a by-product of the Holy Communion experience.
Charles Graves
Photograph: ‘rock painting’ in Australia photographed by Graeme Churchard, Bristol (UK)