Can technology provide not only access to, but understanding of the origin of our design/evolution? According to Arianna Huffington, some family and friends of Google are getting into the business of decoding genomes. The Mountain View company 23andMe, Inc. is offerring to help you “make sense of your own genetic information.” According to thier web site, this means understanding:

“the 23 paired volumes of your own genetic blueprint (plus your mitochondrial DNA), bringing you personal insight into ancestry, genealogy, and inherited traits.”

To make sense of our own genetic information. To see what the genotype under the phenotype is. Is this like choosing “view source” on your web browser? To those who wonder about the ‘great web developer in the sky’ and its intentions for them, viewing that source code might come as a shock. Even with the passage of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, how long will it be before a religious idea like “chosen people” becomes something verifiable through the revelation of ‘fact’?

From a summary of the preceedings of the 2000 AAR meeting: “Models of God in Religion and Science”

“Cyborg religion” also came up at a Religion and the Social Sciences section devoted to, “The Moral Life of Cyborgs: Issues in Forging, Navigating, and Resisting Virtual Communities.” A foursome from Union Theological Seminary, including Rachel A. R. Bundang, Nancie Erhard, Davina C. Lopez, and Aana Marie Vigen, offered a fascinating exploration into this cutting-edge topic.

This Union Theological Seminary group argued that virtual technologies are profoundly re-mapping “the actual way in which human beings relate within the world.” Presenters situated cyberspace within the larger political-economic-cultural context of an emergent visual age. Four themes were discussed: (1) the impact of visual images upon people, (2) the impact of cyberspace upon ecological relationships in the non-human world, (3) issues of morality as they are related to the body and sacred community of life, and (4) the relationship between the proliferation of information technologies and changes in patterns of human labor within the internet economy.