On Dec. 28, when a religious group called the Raelians announced the birth of the first human clone, pundits, politicians and commentators began to run amok. They did not wait for Cloneaid, the genetics company that claimed to have engineered the alleged clone, to prove that this was not a hoax, that the baby and its 31-year old American mother have identical DNA.

Scientists involved in reproductive research were highly skeptical of the Raelian claim. But President Bush was reported to be “deeply troubled” by the news, and clergymen were outraged that we were “playing God.” More on this later.

Whether or not they’ve cloned a human, the Raelians have succeeded in cloning a lot of suckers. According to their Web site, the Raelians have more than 55,000 members in 84 countries, all of whom believe that a French motor racing journalist, Claude Vorilhon, saw a spaceship land in a crater in central France on Dec. 13, 1973, and disgorge an alien who was 4 feet tall, had long dark hair, a beard, olive skin and almond-shaped eyes, and “exuded harmony and humor.” The close-up of the alien looks like Geraldine Chaplin with a goatee; if I were her, I’d sue.

The ensuing story of Claude and the alien is a mishmash of bible, biology and a bad script from Star Trek. During the next six days, the alien, a male called Yahweh Elohim (Old Testament Hebrew for God Lords) told Vorilhon that Elohim scientists had created life on Earth 25,000 years ago “using their perfect mastery of genetic engineering and DNA synthesis,” which was banned on their own planet as too dangerous.

First, they made DNA and “elementary life forms,” then, in succession, plants, aquatic animals, “birds of all sorts” and terrestrial animals, each in perfect ecosystems. Lastly, against the orders of their own government, the rogue Elohims on Earth made humans in their own image by cloning their own DNA. Vorilhon was told that he is really Rael, the Messenger of the Elohim, the last of the prophets after Moses, Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed, chosen to spread this gospel of “scientific creation” and eternal life through cloning, and to establish an embassy near Jerusalem by 2025 to welcome back the Elohims.

My first reaction is that the Elohims can have their lousy DNA back. You call these crummy chromosomes the “perfect mastery of genetic engineering?” Human DNA is shot through with errors and bad genes that cause death, disease and genetic deformities. If I had wanted miserable genes in my family I didn’t need the Elohim, I could have mated with _____ (fill in the blank with whomever you’d like to insult). So the line at the courtroom starts behind me once Geraldine Chaplin gets through with her lawsuit. I’m going to sue Elohim’s scientific pants off for giving us garbage genes. If enough folks join me, we can have a class action for genetic malpractice.

My second reaction is to ask a bunch of obvious “whys.” Why Jerusalem in 2025? Why not Newark? Or Topeka? Why would we want to entrust eternal life through cloning to a bungling bunch of Keystone cloners? And why claim it all happened 25,000 years ago when science, revered by Raelians, tells us that life on Earth appeared at least 3.5 billion years ago and humankind at least 2 million years ago?

Rael is a prophet for profit. His real business is cloning suckers to buy his snake oil, which explains how his book, “The Messages Given by the Extra-terrestrials,” has sold more than 1 million copies in 22 languages. In 1997, he founded Cloneaid, which offers reproductive products and services for humans and pets to buyers hungry for hokum.

Finally, it’s time politicians, clergy and other pundits quit playing the “playing God” card at mere mention of cloning or stem cells. It’s hypocritical, because in the next breath we ask modern medicine to deliver test-tube pregnancies for infertile couples and new tissues for burn victims or Alzheimer’s sufferers. The Raelians, too, aren’t “playing God” except in the literal sense of cooking up a new prophet, a new mythology and Elohim extraterrestrials.

The difficult truth is that humans have been “playing God” on a larger scale ever since we appeared on Earth and took dominion. For better or worse, we have rerouted the Colorado River, genetically engineered new strains of mice, corn, tomatoes and pigs; mowed down 90 percent of Africa’s forests and almost half of the Amazon’s; exterminated the dodo, passenger pigeon and countless other animals and plants; and let tallgrass prairies become waste dumps. Every day on every corner of the planet, we tinker with life and with the natural systems on which all of life depends. Playing God is more than just cloning around.

— Leonard Krishtalka is director of the Natural History Museum & Biodiversity Research Center at Kansas University.