Steve

If you guys hadn't noticed by now-- just about every sentence you post on this Blog inspires a marathon from me. You may have expected my brevity of speech at our get-togethers to carry over to Blogdom. Ooops! Your mistake.

Lance, you are correct in your assessment of the lives of Jesus' disciples. Most of those named in Scripture were eventually executed. Paul (Saul) since he was the writer of a major portion of the New Testament gives a lot of information about his life. Before his conversion (knocked off his ass onto his ass) he was on the Hebrew fast track. He had great expectations of becoming a member of the Sanhedrin (Jewish ruling council) and possibly hoping to become Chief Priest. Hebrew high cotton. After his conversion-- 5 times 40 lashes, 3 times beaten by rods, once stoned (to a supposed death), 3 times shipwrecked, otherwise often without sleep, food, etc. Christian high cotton.

We celebrate Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims spent their first winter watching half of their loved ones suffer and die. So, going into their second winter they... Held a feast of thanksgiving to God. Like Paul, they just didn't have an intellectual assent to the existence of God, they had God's own gift of faith implanted in them and a personal relationship with him.

That's an aspect of my question about Lincoln. Christ had witnesses to his life and statements. Ditto with his arrest and crucifixion. He had 500 witnesses to his resurrection. Many witnesses to his ascension. (Not one claimed to see the wires suspending him.) The Jews and/or the Romans could have brought out his dead body to disprove the claims and shot the whole religion to hell. Paul could have become Grand Poobah and the Pilgrims could have stayed in Holland drinking Heineken and keeping prostitutes busy. What criteria does one use to accept as evidence the witnesses to Lincoln but not the witnesses to the life, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ?

Again, this isn't a proof that God exists or that Christianity is true. That knowledge comes by faith, but not the proverbial blind leap. It is a blind leap to accept that we arose from the primordial soup under the auspices of the god of chance and developed in all the ways we have. I've been there. I once hypothesized that Ilya Prigogine's Nobel Prize winning work (1977) in nonequilibrium thermodynamics showed that the long development of life through evolutionary processes was a development of a temporary 'organization' to speed completion of entropy. Just as an 'organized' tornado develops to bring to equilibrium differing pressure systems, so the evolution of humans would hasten entropy's direction. Thermodynamics is hot!! (Now it's not quite so hot, now a bit less, now a hair cooler...) What great faith I had. And purpose! I was an integral part of a mindless scheme to bring the destruction of everything in the universe and bring that same universe to absolute zero degrees. (Hey, Strawberry, wake up, man! You got any more of that acid, dude?)

Jack: You got up...Routine...Work?...Came home...Were nagged at by Kirstin...(that's all she did?-- it's a miracle!)