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[Misc] Christians seem to be really good people







Triggaaar

Well-known member
Oct 24, 2005
52,123
Goldstone
Yes, he was part of the team. He was not the director of the overall project:

"Nuclear physicist Tom D'Muhala headed STURP. Apart from Jackson, Jumper, and Motten the team included thermal chemist Raymond N. Rogers, Ron London, and Roger Morris, all from Los Alamos National Laboratory. Other team members included Don Lynn of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, biophysicist John Heller, photographers Vern Miller and Barrie Schwortz, optical physicist Sam Pellicori, and electric power experts John D. German and Rudy Dichtl, as well as forensic pathologist Robert Bucklin. STURP included no experts on medieval art, archaeology, or textiles."
 


kuzushi

Well-known member
Oct 3, 2015
710
You can stop right now. I am not interested in being preached to, I am not interested in being converted.

The ignore button is one click away.
I hope you don't go to that ignore button, but I just asked how you know that there is not more to you than your body.
I neither wish to upset you nor make you feel under pressure. It's just that you said the thought of not existing scares you.
Obviously, I believe the essence of the person, the soul, continues forever, but if I didn't believe that, if I believed that you die and that's it, I don't see what there would be to be terrified of. Does the thought of what it was like before you were born terrify you? Presumably it would be the same.
 




Triggaaar

Well-known member
Oct 24, 2005
52,123
Goldstone
Ray Rogers was not the one who chose which part of the cloth to test. He was charged with testing the piece of cloth he was given.
I agree with you that it was odd. Also odd that it took a freedom of information request, by a French journalist I think, to get the British Museum to release the raw data from the tests.

The data they released did not suggest that the shroud is from Jesus's time.

The conclusion of the test was that the sample was fine, and not from a repair:

"The official report of the dating process, written by the people who performed the sampling, states that the sample "came from a single site on the main body of the shroud away from any patches or charred areas."

Mechthild Flury-Lemberg is an expert in the restoration of textiles, who headed the restoration and conservation of the Turin Shroud in 2002. She has rejected the theory of the "invisible reweaving", pointing out that it would be technically impossible to perform such a repair without leaving traces, and that she found no such traces in her study of the shroud"

The fact that one of the team members has received notoriety from claiming that the sample was from a repaired patch does not make it so. Claiming that he was the director of the tests is also not correct.

If the Catholic Church, who have the shroud, had any belief that it was genuinely used for Jesus, they could simply test another part. But they don't believe that.
 




kuzushi

Well-known member
Oct 3, 2015
710
Yes, he was part of the team. He was not the director of the overall project:

"Nuclear physicist Tom D'Muhala headed STURP. Apart from Jackson, Jumper, and Motten the team included thermal chemist Raymond N. Rogers, Ron London, and Roger Morris, all from Los Alamos National Laboratory. Other team members included Don Lynn of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, biophysicist John Heller, photographers Vern Miller and Barrie Schwortz, optical physicist Sam Pellicori, and electric power experts John D. German and Rudy Dichtl, as well as forensic pathologist Robert Bucklin. STURP included no experts on medieval art, archaeology, or textiles."
It's interesting. I've just googled his name, and got this come up:

1687116658409.png


 


BBassic

I changed this.
Jul 28, 2011
12,846
Does the thought of what it was like before you were born terrify you?
Nah not really. Before I existed I naturally had no concept of anything at all. Because I didn't exist.

But having had knowledge and experience of life and knowing that one day it will end is scary.

Apologies, I didn't mean to come across so "keep that bible away from me"
 


kuzushi

Well-known member
Oct 3, 2015
710




Sid and the Sharknados

Well-known member
NSC Patron
Sep 4, 2022
5,430
Darlington
Either there's a discussion, or there's not. If someone wants to say they believe, but don't want to say in what or why, that's fine. If someone wants to say exactly what they believe in, that's fine too.
You can ask what you like and people are free to answer if they want to.
I don't think the line of questioning is constructive or conducive to a productive conversation.
 


dangull

Well-known member
Feb 24, 2013
5,145
If there is a God, I don't think he/she would be as dismissive to the other main religions today as the OP.
Jews, muslims, hindu's etc believe in the same God. Even in Christianity there are different branches. Henry the 8th for example starting the church of England :rolleyes:
I cant believe a loving God would reject all these people because their scriptures were slightly different to the correct one, whichever one that is.
 






Blues Guitarist

Well-known member
Oct 19, 2020
550
St Johann in Tirol
Does this mean that the six inch high figure of Moses that my daughters gave me years ago as a joke for my birthday is a lie? I’m heartbroken. They also once gave me a fridge magnet of a man in contemporary clothing standing alongside a traditional depiction of Jesus, and he is saying “Jesus, please protect me from your followers”. Quite appropriate perhaps!

And in all honesty I have learnt a lot from this thread in many ways, and have enjoyed some parts of it. It’s made me think and reminded me of how sceptical I can be.…….. talking of biblical inconsistencies…..

One of Jesus’s great talents in my view was talking to people in terms they would understand - parables based on things that people had experience of like sheep and goats, sowing seed on stony ground, Jews and Samaritans. Most people today would not appreciate the real centuries old hatred between Jews and Samaritans, which makes the story of the Good Samaritan all the more powerful.

But Jesus being a direct descendant of Adam would have been accepted thinking at the time. Luke and the other Gospel writers would I guess have accepted it because they knew no different. Ordinary people of 400 or 500 years ago would believe things that we would see as patent nonsense, let alone people of 2000 years ago. So they - the writers as well as the people - would not have considered Adam fictional. i really don’t know when people would have stopped believing that.

In terms of the Exodus and Moses, I’ve seen both described as mythical and wouldn’t argue with that, but would also accept there might be grains of truth in both myths - the story of the Exodus perhaps does contain true episodes, and maybe there was someone called Moses but he did not come down from the mountain with tablets of stone. But it makes me think of the African tradition of the Griot - look up African musicians such as Toumani Diabate or Ali Farka Toure, who are part of a tradition of African story-telling going back hundreds of years, so is this not part of a similar tradition where stories were handed down from generation and elaborated to make them more interesting and memorable so that the real story got lost in the mists of time. But in terms of the people of Jesus’s time, Moses would probably been real and not fictional.

And being sceptical, the Transfuguration is something I would take with a pinch of salt, but The Jewish people of the time would have expected to see him there.

I hope this helps. Not sure it will!
Thanks for your response - much appreciated.

I am intrigued by the fact that billions of people believe in god, in the absence of any evidence other than a holy book that even believers admits is full of myths and fiction.

Is the bible the word of god, or is it the collected myths of Iron Age Mystics? If it’s the word of god, why are there so many errors and contradictions? If it’s myths from Iron Age Mystics, why do we give it so much reverence? It sometimes seems that believers want the best of both worlds. Stuff that has been proven wrong is dismissed as being written by unsophisticated people from a long time ago. But the rest is believed as being true.

Some stories, like creation, the flood and the exodus are understood as a mix of myth and fiction. But stories of the virgin birth and resurrection (which are just as unlikely) are seen as being absolutely true. Even when there is no external evidence, and the multiple biblical stories describing these events are contradictory. If the virgin birth story in Matthew is true, then Luke is false. And vice verse. Unless they are both false. I think a lot of Christians avoid thinking about it and pretend that both are true. Which is dishonest.

You made a comment that I find very strange. “But in terms of the people of Jesus’s time, Moses would probably have been real and not fictional.” I’m not sure what you mean. Moses was either real, or fictional. Whether I was born in 56 CE, or 1956 CE, doesn’t change the truth. Do you mean that they thought Moses was real, while you accept that he was mythical or a fiction?

I’m on holiday and don’t have access to my library, but I thought that in Mark, Jesus said he talked in parables to stop people understanding, not to help them understand. Or did I get that wrong?

Anyway, thanks for your insights.
 




Commander

Well-known member
NSC Patron
Apr 28, 2004
13,377
London
It's funny how people get upset if I miss their question. I've asked plenty of questions here and got no answer to many of them.


Such a person would be no more wrong than someone like you, who has been brought up in the secular west not to believe in God. At least Muslims know that God exists, even if the Quran says that Jesus was never crucified (Surah 4).



It's the same process as everyone goes through who ends up believing in Jesus. You start from one point, not believing, and then as you find out more and start to understand, you reach a point where you decide that it's actually true, and you repent and get baptised. It is the job of Christians to spread the message, but also there are many cases of Muslims seeing Jesus in dreams and renouncing Islam to follow him. https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=Dreams+and+Visions:+Is+Jesus+Awakening+the+Muslim+World?&crid=2LFBLNZ3ZT5TO&sprefix=dreams+and+visions+is+jesus+awakening+the+muslim+world+,aps,282&ref=nb_sb_noss


Do you mean how do I know that Christianity is true and Islam is false? One reason is the one I've just mentioned in this post, the fact that the Quran denies that Jesus was crucified, that's how I know Islam is false.



Many scientists put the age of the earth at 4.5 billion years old. This is based on geology and cosmology. I have no problem with this. I think scientists are sincere people who simply want to understand the truth about the world around us. There is the idea that the earth has to be much younger because of stuff in the Bible, but I'm not sure that the creation stories are supposed to be taken literally. St Augustine of Hippo said as much over a thousand years before Darwin. God doesn't require us to believe in Adam and Eve or the global flood to be saved. The only thing he requires us to believe in is the resurrection of Jesus, and that happens to be the part of the Bible that is easiest to find supporting evidence for. Bart Ehrman agrees that Jesus's disciples believed he had risen from the dead, but can't bring himself to believe in the resurrection, so he chooses to believe in a group hallucination. But St Paul couldn't have been part of a group hallucination.
So you genuinely think that if you had been brought up in a strict Muslim country, you would have eventually found out that Christianity is the truth, and Islam is false?

Based on the fact that Islam says Jesus wasn’t crucified, so the inaccuracy confirms the fallacy of Islam. Yet in the same post you also admit to many inaccuracies in the Bible, but those are OK because you don’t have to take them literally.

It’s for reasons like this that I find religious people absolutely fascinating. Their ability to shape and mould their own favourite group of stories to fit their own personal beliefs and desires and reconfirm everything they hope to be true as facts is amazing. I’d love to be able to do that. Good luck to you.
 




kuzushi

Well-known member
Oct 3, 2015
710
Only because the Catholic Church wouldn’t let him shag someone (can’t remember the details offhand). How Christian was he?!
He was married to a Spanish woman (Catherine of Aragon).
She had in fact been his brother, Arthur's wife previously.
Henry was not set to become king, but Arthur died. So Henry was now first in line to the throne. He married his brother's widow.
She bore him a daughter. Henry wanted a son.
He sought to divorce her, but the Pope refused permission, so Henry left the Catholic church and started his own, the CofE.
 




Guinness Boy

Tofu eating wokerati
Helpful Moderator
NSC Patron
Jul 23, 2003
36,594
Up and Coming Sunny Portslade
I suppose because it's spiritual, not physical.
You still seem to be ignoring me. Therefore, I’m going to draw my own conclusions. I think what you’re saying is that a part of us that can’t be seen is going to a place that can’t be discovered based on whether we believe in something that can’t be materially established. Our dogs may, or may not, be there and no one is sure if there are flowers there, and bees to pollinate them, or if it’s a less earthly place than that. And heaven could be really boring and hell full of people doing gear to AC/DC LPs. Or not.

:shrug:
 


Triggaaar

Well-known member
Oct 24, 2005
52,123
Goldstone




Blues Guitarist

Well-known member
Oct 19, 2020
550
St Johann in Tirol
You still seem to be ignoring me. Therefore, I’m going to draw my own conclusions. I think what you’re saying is that a part of us that can’t be seen is going to a place that can’t be discovered based on whether we believe in something that can’t be materially established. Our dogs may, or may not, be there and no one is sure if there are flowers there, and bees to pollinate them, or if it’s a less earthly place than that. And heaven could be really boring and hell full of people doing gear to AC/DC LPs. Or not.

:shrug:
You are a vicar and I claim my £5.
 




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