Mountain Multi-Cultural Multi-Faith Group

Is there a God?
If you believe and there is a God then you gain eternal life. If you don't believe you gain nothing.
You have nothing to lose by believing. Only much to gain.

such logic...I have been such a fool...thank you

Your funny Willow--thanks for the laugh

Pascal's Wager

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager

I like the "Should Xtians Quit Posting" (at least quit ministering) thread better.

Rowan---6:38 in the morning?? You've impressed me a lot this past few months but 6:38---what does that time of day look like. Curious minds wanna know.

Can't waste daylight, life's too short!

Hi, Rowan.
How's those g-babies?

;^)
pc

Hi Papa Only one, thank the Gods... he's simply adorable & already 16 mo's???

How's by yours???

Be well

Got 2 now.
Little girl just turned 3...
Little boy will be one in August.
BAM... How did that happen so fast?
lol.

Willow...you made me spray soda out my nose.

And how, I wonder does a person force themselves to believe in something? Do they keep telling themselves it's real until it becomes real in their mind; and if so, wouldn't that be the same as brainwashing? Sorry, but I refuse to lie to myself "just in case". I must be true to my heart.

And as for grandbabies...OMFG I just realized that when I get married in September I'm going to be an instant step-grandma of a 13year old!!! My grandchild will be only 4 years younger than my son!!!

that when I get married in September

Are you having a live video cast thingie??? The thought of getting that close to R.I. makes me shiver!

sorry, Windy

Gawds Rowan, I don't know. I was all set to grab a judge and a witness and sign the papers but he wants a small ceremony. I'm sure we'll have it videotaped. Hey...a ceremony means I get to buy a new dress and shoes Can you guess what color I'll wear?

Ummm... pink?

How'd you guess???? Are you psychic!?!?! LOL

...and speaking of a god...

Was Jesus' Resurrection a Sequel?

(well...ya)

from http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1820685,00....

A 3-ft.-high tablet romantically dubbed "Gabriel's Revelation" could challenge the uniqueness of the idea of the Christian Resurrection. The tablet appears to date authentically to the years just before the birth of Jesus and yet — at least according to one Israeli scholar — it announces the raising of a messiah after three days in the grave. If true, this could mean that Jesus' followers had access to a well-established paradigm when they decreed that Christ himself rose on the third day — and it might even hint that they they could have applied it in their grief after their master was crucified.

...

Such "apocalypses," often featuring a triumphant military figure called a messiah (literally, anointed one), were not uncommon in the religious and politically tumultuous Jewish world of 1st century B.C. Palestine. But what may make the Gabriel tablet unique is its 80th line, which begins with the words "In three days" and includes some form of the verb "to live." Israel Knohl, an expert in Talmudic and biblical language at Jerusalem's Hebrew University who was not involved in the first research on the artifact, claims that it refers to a historic 1st-century Jewish rebel named Simon who was killed by the Romans in 4 B.C., and should read "In three days, you shall live. I Gabriel command you." If so, Jesus-era Judaism had begun to explore the idea of a three-day resurrection before Jesus was born.

This, in turn, undermines one of the strongest literary arguments employed by Christians over centuries to support the historicity of the Resurrection (in which they believe on faith the specificity and novelty of the idea that the Messiah would die on a Friday and rise on a Sunday. Who could make such stuff up? But, as Knohl told TIME, maybe the Christians had a model to work from. The idea of a "dying and rising messiah appears in some Jewish texts, but until now, everyone thought that was the impact of Christianity on Judaism," he says. "But for the first time, we have proof that it was the other way around. The concept was there before Jesus." If so, he goes on, "this should shake our basic view of Christianity. ... What happens in the New Testament [could have been] adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story."

Not so fast, say some Christian academics. "It is certainly not perfectly clear that the tablet is talking about a crucified and risen savior figure called Simon," says Ben Witherington, an early-Christianity expert at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky. The verb that Knohl translates as "rise!," Witherington says, could also mean "there arose," and so one can ask "does it mean 'he comes to life,' i.e., a resurrection, or that he just 'shows up?' " Witherington also points out that gospel texts are far less reliant on the observed fact of the Resurrection (there is no angelic command in them like the line in the Gabriel stone) than on the testimony of eyewitnesses to Jesus' post-Resurrection self. Finally, Witherington notes that if he is wrong and Knohl's reading is right, it at least sets to rest the notion that the various gospel quotes attributed to Christ foreshadowing his death and Resurrection were textual retrojections put in his mouth by later believers — Jesus the Messianic Jew, as Knohl sees him, would have been familiar with the vocabulary for his own fate.

I like how the Christian academics whip out the 'not so fast'....saying that 'this is not perfectly clear' and 'this could be translated to mean that'....but with bible verses they know exactly what is meant and that the bible is perfectly clear!!!!

Anyhoo...thought this was interesting. Of course the Dying God mythology was around eons before Jesus came on the scene.

...sad smilie face was NOT of my making!