It's all in the label baby; however, it has made our check out time go so much faster. A barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data. It's on nearly every product. In fact it's a APP (really two of them) on your iPhone. Cool application but did you know that the first use of barcodes was to label railroad cars? The concept was not commercially successful until they were used to automate supermarket checkout systems. And your point is?

From the third chapter of Genesis humanity has been "barcoding" and it's not all good!

Homo sapien sapiens are barcoding creatures for sure. I guess we could blame it all on God (something the Devil escapes now) since it was the first activity given to Adam in the great creational myth (actually there were two creational myths: Gen. 1:26 and Gen. 2:7). And while we need to LABEL things to streamline and simplify, it's not always used as a good way.

When we stereotype people (from the Greek word stereos) we're prone to being rigid, stiff, and not compassionate. It brings many of the downsides of the concept of profiling.

Religious bias is akin to racism with it's highly charged emotional prejudices. Barcode bashing VITIATES any possibilities of reasonable dialogue and tolerance for another person's opinion. If there is a strong message throughout the life of the historical Jesus it is the only LOVE can break these barriers down. Only LOVE is strong enough to withstand the name calling, labeling, and barcode bashing. In fact, Jesus who became the Christos was the ultimate barcode terminator!

Jesus broke through all religious and sexist barriers: to the dismay of the Pharisees.

Wonder what life would be like if we today did the same thing: broke through the political, religious, sexual orientation, and gender battles. What might happen if women were treated as equals, homosexuals as God's children, and if we saw no minorities because we are ALL ONE? A mind blowing concept to say the least.