But did Jesus rise from the dead?
One of the underlying traits of this thread is the assumption by so many that God exists simply to give us a comfortable life. He is to keep quiet and leave us to our own devices, but he is to be held responsible for anything that goes wrong! It is not surprising that so many reject such an idea of God - indeed it ought to be rejected because it is untrue and so doesn't make sense.
If we want to try to understand God and therefore come to understand this world and the purpose of our lives, it is a big mistake to see our own egos as the yardstick by which all else is to be measured - of course things inevitably go wrong from there.
When I was 19 I realised that I needed to come to grips with who Jesus claimed to be. I knew I had to answer the question - Did Jesus rise bodily from the dead? My response to him would be determined by my conclusions. In the course of a clinical, objective, 'judicial' inquiry I found the evidence to be overwhelming and totally compelling. I felt that he only honest response to my convictions was to become a Christian, which I did 33 years ago. I have never regretted that decision. The Apostle Paul said, "if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” (1Corinthians 15:14-19)
The New Testament was written because of Jesus' bodily resurrection - an event witnessed by hundreds of different people in different places and times within a six-week period after his death and before his ascension. None of them expected it to happen but its reality and power transformed their lives (and ours) forever.
It has been said, 'Religion is man's answer to God - Jesus is God's answer to religion'. If you want to encounter God's answer to religion, have a long, close look at the real Jesus in the pages of the New Testament. He's so very different from the 'soft-roader' that people always seem to want him to be.
this thread isnt going away!
I thought this was going to fade but I am still getting all the emails telling me its still alive. So now I am going to give my opinion too!
BTW I have not read all the thread so I may be repeating.
upfront
1. I was religious for much of my life.
2. I am now a scientist
I used to try and reconcile the Christian faith with science and for a long time was quite happy, but in the end there was just to much logic showing that all religions (and I think the Christian take has the most logic) were just to far from reality to work for me.
We have Jesus who through very well established methods did exist as a person, likely had a wife and kids but as for the extra curriculum activities they are not very well established. There lived a long time before Jesus, buddah, he also performed miracles, and guess what some of them were? Walking on water, feeding heaps of people with a few scraps of food, and some more, Jesus did all these stock standard miracles too. IMO Jesus was likely teaching some budhist principles with a Jewish twist.
Jesus was documented as being raised from the dead & although we are told hundreds of people saw him, we don't have records from those people, we are just told about it. This means the bible is not worth the testimony of hundreds of people.
To believe in Jesus being any more than a man you must also include the world wide flood, which did not happen and is so easy to prove in science its a joke. However science has also shown there was a localised flood in the middle easy at approx that time and this makes it easy to conclude that the story got passed on and tweaked into what we have today.
We also have Mt DNA which shows the spread of the human population across the globe with out of africa model. This model now has substantial evidence and goes against the adam and eve solution. Black skin also goes against the bible version of how it came about. We also have several other humanoid species prior to ours evolving.
In the end its impossible to mention all the religious problems but god is now becoming increasingly a god of the 'gaps' in science as when knowledge becomes available to explain a problem, god gets moved out.
This means to be Christian or other, you need simply to ignore human understanding and learning and then just believe what ever you want.
There is only one problem with all this and that is religious experience. EG if john comes to my place and tells me he had a beer with god last night and god said he's angry with the world and gonna drown all those without a houseboat, there is not a lot I can say to tell him he's wrong cause he saw it and its as real as real can be for him. Can he prove it? no. should I believe him? depends. but its true for him and thats all that matters. Any real scientist should accept any new information for study regardless of the source, but if the information cannot stack up to proper methods of proof then it can be disregarded. And this is why we have scientists vs religious. The scientists cant see how the religious ideas make any sense, where as the religious people dont give a damn, they know what they know and thats enough.
end.
