Dear Poirot,

I am reading "Endless Forms so Beautiful." It deals with the patterns and structures found in nature. Each scale on the wing of a moth or butterfly is a single cell. The eye cells on the wings divert predators. An insect can survive a bite taking a chunk of wing, but a bite to the body is much more dangerous. However, I don't feel competent to advise young or old mothers.

I will be ninety on October 31, take no medication, have no false teeth and exercise in the community pool usually five days a week. My only medical problem is hay fever. I understand when one gets old enough the auto-immune system is less active, and allergies disappear. I'm patiently waiting.

Dear Jay,

<<If one has to be afraid of one's God then the God must not be a good God. Just thinking.>>

One doesn't have to be afraid of God, my preference is to love Him, but for some people it can help.

Fearing God is a crude tool which helps some of us to fear what we really ought to fear - sin!
If we already fear [our own] sin, then we don't need that tool of fearing God.

As I explained earlier, the original Hebrew word translated as "fear" in the Psalms has in fact a triple meaning, of which "fear" is the lowest. Devotees should not adhere indefinitely to this lowest meaning.

Dear Ponde,

<<In reality this has never helped anyone and exactly to the same degree as a a placebo has not really helped anyone.
greed, lust, envy, hatred, arrogance still exist despite what fear God may have implied.>>

Well God does not imply any fear, fearing God is merely a human technique, which sometimes worked but some other times was also abused by organised religion.

Like any placebo, this technique cannot help those who do not believe.

In order for this prescription ("whoever fears God will stand forever") to work, one must:

1. Believe that they are their bodies.
2. Be afraid that their body would die (not stand forever).
3. Entertain the possibility that a body may not die.

Contemporary generations are disadvantaged by having been exposed to science, which refutes #3, but strengthens #1 and does nothing to allay #2.

The beneficiaries of this obstruction are greed, lust, envy, hatred, arrogance...

Yuyutsu,

What is sin?

Dear Poirot,

'sin' means missing the target - and the target is God.

Any commission or omission which sets us off-course, taking us in a different direction, to that extent is a sin.

It ain't no sin
To take off your skin
And dance around in your bones

The polar bears aren't green up in Greenland,
they've got the right idea.
They think it's great to refrigerate
while we all cremate down here.