Thing 1, Thing 2

Two different things are bouncing around in my head. I'm not sure how they're related. A friend asked me to watch the movie Replica. The movie raises the question of what makes us human. The other thing involves the nature of sin. Let's start there.

There's one story about Jesus where the religious leaders brought a handicapped man to Him. They asked Jesus who's sin caused the handicap - the man's or his parents? Jesus gave the answer "neither".

I have to admit that my own mental workings make me susceptible to the temptation of rules. The lie that if you follow all of the rules then you're good. That's simply not born out here. Sin causes us to disobey, not the other way around.

Looking at the world from the rule's point of view, we're good until we break the rules. I think the Bible views it the other way around - we're bad so we break the rules. Sin is a spiritual state. We come into the world that way. The man's handicap came from sin. Not a sin, but sin as a general state.

Jesus wasn't good because He lived by all the rules. He lived by all the rules because He was righteous. Righteousness and sin have nothing to do with what we do. We are one or the other. And that dictates what we do.

Who We Are

So now the first point - what makes us human. The movie involves copying a person into a clone and into a machine. Yep, they managed to hit two science fiction memes at the same time. Both are based on the same premise - that you are nothing more than chemical mixtures and electrical states. These are things that can be copied from brain to brain to brain.

Except that we just discussed spiritual states that drive what we think and what we do. If we accept the spiritual, then we also accept that it sets those states, like a computer programmer who controls the transistor states through software. One changes the other to accomplish it's purpose.

Can that be copied?