Yes, it is. Genes combined in a manner that they would not have naturally = engineering. The limits you're placing on it are abitrary, and the taboo is pure superstition.
God complex? That is somehow different from people claiming to represent God's law and controlling the actions of those who disobey? Sorry, Reverend. I'm not buying the high road act on this one. I think your map is upside down.
Could people have put fish genes in tomatoes 100 years ago? No. You can't just take fluid from a fish and inject it into a plant and have it take. You CAN do that with two plants. It is not arbitrary. Grafting one plant to another isn't the same as genetically engineering things, even to scientists, especially when they are trying to actually genetically engineer something. Also, genetic engineering bypasses natural safeguards to upsetting the ecosystem that hybridization does not.
https://www.foodrevolution.org/blog/former-pro-gmo-scientist/
"Former Pro-GMO Scientist Speaks Out On The Real Dangers of Genetically Engineered Food":
"In 2009 the American Academy of Environmental Medicine called for a moratorium of GM foods, safety testing and labeling. Their review of the available literature at the time noted that animals show serious health risks associated with GM food consumption including infertility, immune dysregulation, accelerated aging, dysregulation of genes associated with cholesterol synthesis, insulin regulation, cell signaling, and protein formation, and changes in the liver, kidney, spleen and gastrointestinal system. ."
"Monsanto writes “There is no need to test the safety of GM foods”. So long as the engineered protein is safe, foods from GM crops are substantially equivalent and they cannot pose any health risks.” "
"The US Food and Drug Administration waived all levels of safety testing in 1996 before approving the commercialization of these crops. Nothing more than voluntary research is necessary, and the FDA does not even want to see the results. And there is certainly no need to publish any of it. If you remember 1996, the year that the first crops were commercialized, the research scientists of the US FDA all predicted that transgenic crops would have unpredictable hard to detect side effects, allergens, toxins, nutritional effects, new diseases."
https://www.safe-food.org/-issue/view.html
"Is this a natural extension of traditional breeding practices? It does not look that way to me. Whereas traditional breeding makes use of natural reproductive mechanisms, and must respect the natural reproductive barriers between species, genetic engineering uses artificial means to aggressively penetrate those barriers. Genetic engineers can isolate genes from virtually any organism on the planet and introduce those genes into any other living thing on earth. When you introduce a gene from a fish into a tomato or from bacteria into corn, or from a virus into a squash, you are doing something that would never happen in nature.
For the genetic engineer, there are no limitations, except their own creativity and good judgment. We know that human creativity knows no bounds, and we have seen time and time again that human judgment is far from infallible. This sets up a situation in which abuses are almost guaranteed. And, as we will see, they have already happened."
'An example of this inability to reliably predict and control the outcome of genetic manipulations already came to light when genetic engineers in Japan altered the genes of bacteria for the purpose of making them produce large amounts of the food supplement tryptophan. They had already been using these bacteria as little factories for tryptophan production, but hoped to make this process more efficient, and therefore more profitable, through genetic engineering.
They succeeded in souping up these bacteria so that they produced tryptophan much more efficiently, but, unexpectedly, their genetic manipulations also caused the bacteria to produce a powerful toxin. The genetic engineers had no idea that their tinkering had created this deadly contaminant, until the supplement was put on the market and people started getting sick and dying. Altogether, 1500 Americans were permanently disabled and 37 died from this defective product. Because it was not labeled as genetically engineered, it took months to track down the source of the problem and take the product off the market."
That tryptophan that killed people decades ago was GENETICALLY ENGINEERED, and showed the dangers of genetic engineering, and NOT of natural nutritional supplements.
