09 Sep 1999 Australia:
Tiger lives, God extinct
By Andrew Bolt.
If I were God, I'd worry about the humans muscling into my line of work. Sydney scientists now say they are working to bring the Tasmanian Tiger back from extinction through cloning. This beats Christ raising dead Lazarus, given the man may just have been in a coma. All those old miracles are - one by one - being superseded by the miracles now being wrought by humans.
We can create life from a single cell in a test tube. We can cure the once incurable. We can cross plants with genetic material from animals to grow crops as welcome as manna from heaven. Scientists are now mapping the entire human DNA, which may one day enable us to design new humans. God may have sent the walls of Jericho tumbling down, but humans have bombs which could destroy all of Israel and Jordan, too. True, we'll never replicate the Big Bang, but we're working on Noah's flood, if it's true about greenhouse warming. And we are giving ourselves a once God-given right to kill the unborn and frail.
In The Discovery of Heaven, a lauded novel by Dutch author (and hot Nobel Prize tip) Harry Mulisch, the angels are furious to see Heaven's powers usurped. They plot to retrieve the lost tablets containing the Ten Commandments, and leave us to our own devices. Feels a bit that way now.