Offsite Post: ‘The GMO Threat’

Genetically engineered crops have been grown in large numbers across the States since 1996.  These genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are created by taking a gene (or genes) from an unrelated species like a bacterium and splicing it (them) into a crop like corn or cotton with the intention of improving some aspect of it (to protect against herbicides, drought, etc.).  These GMOs have received the Food and Drug Administration’s label of ‘Generally Recognized as Safe’, but as Southerners, as a people with a strong Christian and agrarian heritage, we need to examine that claim.

The Southerner’s first guide will naturally be the Holy Scriptures.  What do they tell us about how we should approach the creation?  In the opening chapter of Genesis, the Holy Prophet Moses writes this about the plants and animals God made:

[11] And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
[12] And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

[20] And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
[21] And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

[24] And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
[25] And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

--Gen. 1: 11-12, 20-1, 24-5

The implication here is that every species of plant and animal will reproduce ‘after his kind’, i.e., that mixing of species was not God’s intention for His creation.  But let us test that against the Church Fathers.  They see more deeply into the meaning of the verses of the Bible than ordinary folk do.  How do they understand those we have just quoted?  St Ambrose of Milan (+397) writes,

What pure and untarnished generations follow without intermingling one after another, so that a thymallus produces a thymallus; a sea-wolf, a sea-wolf.  The sea-scorpion, too, preserves unstained its marriage bed….  Fish know nothing of union with alien species.  They do not have unnatural betrothals such as are designedly brought about between animals of two different species as, for instance, the donkey and the mare, or again the female donkey and the horse, both being examples of unnatural union.  Certainly there are cases in which nature suffers more in the nature of defilement rather than that of injury to the individual.  Man as an abettor of hybrid barrenness is responsible for this.  He considers a mongrel animal more valuable than one of a genuine species.  You mix together alien species and you mingle diverse seeds.

--Hexaemeron, quoted in Fr Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation, and Early Man: The Orthodox Christian Vision, 2^nd edn., Hieromonk Damascene, ed., Platina, Cal., St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2011, p. 185.

St Basil the Great (+379) adds,

The nature of existing objects, set in motion by one command, passes through creation without change….  …it continues to preserve each of the animals by uninterrupted successions until the consummation of the universe.  No length of time causes the specific characteristics of the animals to be corrupted or effaced, but, as if established just recently, nature, ever fresh, moves along with time.

 . . . from seeds spring forth plants related to the seeds sown.  Thus, what was put forth by the earth in its first generation has been preserved until the present time, since the kinds persisted through constant reproduction.

--Hexaemeron, quoted in Fr Seraphim, pgs. 182-3.

Our hunch about Genesis 1 is here confirmed by the Fathers:  The mixing of species, whether plant or animal, was not God’s intention.  Each species was meant to remain separate and distinct ‘until the consummation of the universe’, and, furthermore, that mingling them would result in harm for nature in some form. 

This last word from the Fathers is being confirmed in many disastrous ways.  GM crops are leading to all kinds of diseases and deformities:

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/the-gmo-threat/ .

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!