The GOD Box by Melissa Horan Read Free Book Online Page A

didn’t have the same luxury. This old man… he played five…
    Hands to his head he sat on a large mossy rock, decrepit both body and soul. How it hurt to touch so many of those memories from a stranger ’s point of view. It was more like a movie that played in his head as he attempted objectivity. It was a little disappointing the way Jonathan’s work with cloning included keeping the memories. He clasped his hands tighter over his eyes while for a few moments he visited the last forty years of his life in cold-cut clarity.
    …
    One day in one of his classes, he was giving a lecture of the comparison of happiness among cultures. He had them write down and discuss ways they thought happiness could be measured. The thought he presented to the class was that more and more of everything was available at alarming rates, and people can get everything they need or want practically at a click of a button. Did triumph over delayed gratification make people happy?
    It was a yes or no question. He wanted a hypothesis so they could eventually write a paper with their opinion. The majority of Gabe’s students were of the opinion that people still weren’t happy – and in one particular class, by the end all the ‘no’s’ conceded that if the delayed gratification was continuous, then yes, people could be happy – but that usually wasn’t the case. That particular class divided the wants and needs of people; money, relationships, progress and determined that very few were dependable sources of gratification.
    In another class, they went into greater detail wondering whether people took proper actions to achieve what they want. Someone even asked if humans were capable of making the decision of what they want without making mistakes, and , in which case, as long as humans were prone to mistakes, their choices would always have a probability of dissatisfaction.
    The response to that is what ignited the fire in Gabe’s mind.
    A student said, “No, I think that they get what they think they want, because they no longer have the capacity to decide what they really want.”
    When Gabe asked how he formulated that opinion the student said “from the bible” which he was reading for his World Religions class. Gabe had read the bible three times and was pretty sure that wasn’t in there. And, the words ‘no longer’ were offensive. To think that the society knew at one point and somehow became less capable was an irritating and provoking thought.
    That was fourteen years into Gabe’s teaching; when he still stood straight and his neck sat upright.
    He sp ent the next four years thinking about it and working with his students; formulating hypothesis and history. He required overwhelming work from them – details and philosophies from every culture and every age. What was wanted? How did they get what was wanted? Were they satisfied? Did what was wanted increase freedom? How did they define freedom: more time, self-expression, more possessions? Every night he was working over the ideas and reading their work.
    What he determined was that most of the problems came when people questioned the traditional morality of a culture. People wanted to create their own happiness without a judgmental community telling them it was wrong. People had natural desires based on chemistry and not only did the societies attempt to teach the differences out of them, but they persecuted or ostracized them for it.
    When it was time to publish his work and present it, Gabe was working with colleagues from across the nation and was introduced to Jonathan, whom he knew very little about.
    What he knew before they met was that Jonathan was not a professor, but was an authority connected with several universities and was well known among the people New Jersey and Detroit, particularly. He was well known in New York, too, where he received his Doctorate at the age of twenty-three and then remained there for twenty years doing research and being called on to