Holy communion wafer all wheat, no meat: Raelians

31 October 2014 - 12:49 By Times LIVE
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A group of Raelians managed to get ahold of some consecrated communion wafers in a bid to do some DNA test on them.

Damien Marsic, PhD and Mehran Sam, PhD of the Association of Raelian scientists in Las Vegas decided to test the wafers due to the fact that the Catholic Church has a huge influence on society, yet "despite professing fantastical claims that are seldom questioned or challenged."

According to their paper in the Scientific Raelian the Raelians collected consecrated wafers from five Catholic churches in the United States and Canada, placing them in plastic bags to minimise contamination.

They then got ahold of some HEK-293 cells as a human control, and some unconsecrated altar bread purchased from a church supply store was used as the wheat control.

To test the samples they used the GeneJet genomic DNA purification kit (Thermo Scientific, USA) according to the manufacturer's instructions.

They then isolated the genetic material in their samples, used gene amplifiers for wheat and human DNA, and found that, the consecrated wafers were still wheat.

They had a bit of human DNA on one of them, but it wasn't any more than they found on the wheat controls.

The Raelian church is noted for having some peculiar beliefs of its own - for example it believes that life on Earth was the product of alien intervention, and that those aliens have a supercomputer recording the DNA and memories of human beings, which will then be used to bring people back from the dead for judgement.

But all of that doesn't change the fact that a piece of bread doesn't appear to change into human flesh when people pray over it.

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