According to state news agency RIA-Novosti, Russia's Ministry of Science and Higher Education has fired the head of a prestigious genetics institute.
While the report didn't specify the cause behind Alexander Kudryavtsev's termination, the Russian Orthodox Church labeled it as religious discrimination.
Kudryavtsev, who led the Vavilov Institute of General Genetics within the Russian Academy of Sciences, delivered a "controversial" talk at a conference in 2023. During this presentation, he claimed that humans lived for approximately 900 years before the Biblical Flood era and attributed the shortened lifespans of modern humans to "original, ancestral, and personal sins," causing genetic diseases.
At a conference in March the academic argued that the Universe, made by God in the process of creation, fell into 'decay' due to the sins of people. In the deep past, people lived to be 900, he said, citing only 'evidence' of a graph on the Internet. He claimed sin was the cause of mutations in genetic diseases harming modern man, he told his shocked audience in Minsk.
"Shocked"? Does no one remember what the Bible teaches?
If you don't know (because most people don't know these days), the Bible teaches that mankind was created with bodies that did not wear out or die (in modern terms, the perfect genetic code with non-shortening telomeres). After Adam and Eve sinned, God said death would be the consequence, but the Bible teaches early humans took many generations for that genetic curse to take full effect. From Genesis 5:
- "Adam's life lasted 930 years; then he died."
- "So Seth's life lasted 912 years; then he died."
- "So Enosh's life lasted 905 years; then he died."
- "So Kenan's life lasted 910 years; then he died."
The Bible indicates there was a genetic bottleneck with Noah - that all of humanity was reduced to the genes that came from him and his wife. In Genesis 6:3, God says that because of our corruptness, humans would live no more than 120 years.
After the flood, you see this take effect.
Noah lived 950 years, his son Shem lived 600 years, his grandson Arpachshad lived 438 years, and his great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson Nahor only lived 148 years. Two generations later, you get Abraham. A few hundred years after Abraham, most people were dying at 70-80 years of age (if they were lucky).
So far, Kudryavtsev's claims are, well, basic biblical teaching believed by billions of people over the last 5,000 years.
So far, it looks like religious discrimination to me!!
Another one of his claims is that children "up to the seventh generation are responsible for the sins of their fathers." Without his full speech, I'm unsure if he is tying this to Exodus 34:6-7, where God says He "maintain[s] faithful love to a thousand generations" but "bring[s] the consequences of the fathers' iniquity" to the third and fourth generation after them, or if he is specifically referencing scientific studies that have shown evidence that a parent's vices can actually cause defects in the genetic code for multiple generations after them.
Here's how he explained his comments:
I wanted to emphasise the harmful influence of so-called bad habits - what theologians call sin. They also affect the genome. If a mutation occurs in your body, in your gametes, it will be passed on to your offspring, and nothing can be done about it. The conclusion is simple: if you want to have healthy offspring, don't develop bad habits, don't fall into sin.
Kudryavtsev is saying what literally any Christian scientist would have told you for thousands of years: That we can see the physical consequences of spiritual evils. As the Apostle Paul said, sinning causes people to "[receive] in themselves the due penalty for their error."
...if you want to have healthy offspring, don't develop bad habits, don't fall into sin.
Translation: Your ability to produce healthy children is impacted by all your vices, so clean up your room and think about the generations to come, bucko.
THIS is controversial these days??
Guys, there is literally a page on the Berkeley Scientific Journal's website about "generational trauma," a term adopted by those who want reparations for slavery that happened generations ago with the dubious claim that emotional trauma carries down to great-great-great-great grandkids!
But what this scientist is saying is shocking??
Meanwhile, Fyodor Lukyanov, head of the Russian church's commission on family issues, said Kudryavtsev's termination "for religious beliefs and statements in accordance with these beliefs violates the ethics of the scientific community."
We have already gone through Soviet times, when genetics was long considered a pseudoscience.
During Josef Stalin's rule, the Soviet Union favored the ideas of Trofim Lysenko over traditional genetics. Lysenko believed that traits acquired during a person's lifetime could be passed down to their offspring.
And yeah, we've got to be careful about epigenetics and other fields that have been abused for a long time. Let's not forget that experts a hundred years ago - from chattel slavery defenders to Nazi eugenicists - used Noah's sons and the "Curse of Ham" as a basis for discriminating against non-white people.
But just because people can co-opt the Bible for faulty science doesn't mean the Bible is wrong, nor does it mean that the Bible's lessons about sin and its generational consequences are wrong.
After all, looking at how society is falling apart right now, what would you say were the consequences of the way the West chose to live over the past 4 generations or so??
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