"Excerpt 1... The room fell silent. Jim looked at the men sitting around the table. "You people can't be serious," he said softly. "Even though such a thing could be done your premise is utterly flawed. A clone of Jesus won't make him Jesus. He'd be a twin-" "No," Bishop Hickie interrupted. "You don't understand. He would be another son of God." Jim closed his eyes and shook his head. "Look. . . all due respect to. . . everyone-but cloning human beings is a major negative. You should know that. It's illegal now, and for damn good reason. Each animal cloned today represents hundreds of failures. Most clones are stillborn. The ones that live are likely to have horrendous mutations, many of which manifest later in life, usually killing the animal prematurely. What are we gonna do with the mutated baby Jesus'- throw them away? And what happens if we are successful, and we get a perfectly healthy baby? What then? What kind of life can he have? For the love of God . . . people won't understand. People will think he's Jesus!" Excerpt 2... "We haven't had a chance to talk much about what it will be like to be the parents of such a. . .unique child." The bride pulled her eyes away from the groom and considered the priest. "I thought the Vinces wanted the baby raised in as normal an environment as possible." The priest smiled. "Yes, that is true, and for that reason you must never tell anyone who the child really is." The bride glanced at the groom and back at the priest. "They covered that when I was being interviewed, but I never really understood why." The priest stood, walked around his desk and sat on the corner. "Ok-a hypothetical situation-we go right to the media and tell them about the baby... or say, you tell your neighbors, parents, friends, that your little boy is the clone of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. First of all, they're gonna' think you're crazy, or maybe they just might believe you. Imagine how they would then react to the child. "Think of it this way," the priest continued, rearranging himself on the corner of his desk, "there are roughly around-oh, let's see-six and a half billion people in the world today. About a billion of those people are gonna' believe your little boy is God's own clone, and some of those folks can be pretty radical. There will be the crazy fringe bunch: those who will look upon the child as an abomination, or maybe a threat to their particular belief system. What I'm telling you now is not hypothetical. We know for a fact these people exist." "But, what about the baby?" the bride said. "How can we expect a little child to keep such a secret?" "Easy, we don't tell him."--