Comments on: Confucius Say: Test Your DNA

By: Genetics and Health » Gene Talk #4: Confucius’s DNA

Genetics and Health » Gene Talk #4: Confucius’s DNA — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 11:22:16 +0000

[...] The Pop Occulture Blog speculates on why people might be interested in proving their link to historical figures and celebrities: What it comes down to, I think, is that people just want to feel special. They want to feel set apart and important and they want that feeling to just be handed to them by rights, rather than needing to do a lot of hard work on themselves to get it. Chances are, of course, that if they did actually do the hard personal work to acquire that feeling of specialness and separateness, they would realize just how unnecessary that all really is in the end. [...]

By: Test Your Jesus DNA - Pop Occulture Blog

Test Your Jesus DNA - Pop Occulture Blog — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 21:41:30 +0000

[...] Just like we predicted, somebody is offering a test to see whether or not you are a descendent of Jesus and Mary Magdalene over at TheTrueJesus.org. (Thanks to JM for sending me this!) [...]

By: Mr. Blind

Mr. Blind — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 01:38:00 +0000

“Especially if the brilliant teacher preaches the Golden Rule and brotherly love yet lets his own brother be tortured and killed.”

What if it was his brother’s choice?

By: Tim Boucher

Tim Boucher — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 20:58:50 +0000

Well good, then there is a lot of money to be made in this sort of thing!

By: Jennifer Emick

Jennifer Emick — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 20:42:36 +0000

Iirc, almost everyone in the world ‘;descends’ from Confucius. (Just as everyone in the West is descended from Muhammed, Charlemagne, etc)

By: Hsien Lei

Hsien Lei — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 16:53:41 +0000

Dang. I write a genetics blog and I totally missed this bit of very interesting news! Thanks for posting about it. I’ve highlighted your post at Genetics and Health’s Gene Talk #4.

By: slomo

slomo — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 15:28:11 +0000

Well, I donâ€™t think the only value of Jesus would be the fact that he got on the cross.

True, in spite of what the Nicaean creed would have us believe. But I don’t think the descendant of a brilliant teacher deserves any special treatment 2000 years later. Especially if the brilliant teacher preaches the Golden Rule and brotherly love yet lets his own brother be tortured and killed.

I’m just saying, the narrative of this Japanese fellow is a little fucked up. Whether Jesus had valuable things to say is an entirely separate issue.

By: Mr. Blind

Mr. Blind — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 14:51:01 +0000

Well, I don’t think the only value of Jesus would be the fact that he got on the cross.

By: slomo

slomo — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 13:52:06 +0000

So… Jesus put his brother on the cross so he wouldn’t have to face the hereafter, yet we’re supposed to think his bloodline is somehow special anyway?

By: Mr. Blind

Mr. Blind — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 22:28:20 +0000

There was something I read a week or two ago about a guy in Japan being related to Jesus. The story went something like this — Jesus put his brother on the cross instead of him, escaped to Japan and married a girl. In the town the priest was supposed to have recently discovered this in the records, and they put to the use of ash on babies foreheads and the star of david in kimonos as evidence. I thought that was interesting since the Da Vinci Code movie had just recently come out.

By: slomo

slomo — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 21:54:24 +0000

Yeah the whole divine bloodline thing encouraged by the DVC also has me a little wigged out. Part of me thinks that the DVC is a memetic Trojan Horse: on the surface, it looks like a repudiation of meanstream Christianity; but hidden inside is this insidious idea of bloodlines, with which comes the idea of the divine right of kings. Very ugly.

On a different note, the Chinese are way ahead of the curve in bioinformatics. Doesn’t surprise me that they’d be ready to market this kind of thing. (But there are vanity genotyping services available here in the West, although to my knowledge nobody is proposing a genetic test for Merovingian lineage.)