The Great Empyre wrote:
again..your taking your own assumptions and half-fetched theories to discredit evidence..be it 100% proveable or not. nothing you can come up with scientifically (or have) bears any difference to the partially proven evidence I have proven.
congratulations..your now no different than the bible-thumpers everyones complaining about. your just pushing a different product.
Eh? Why is it "proof" to accept something purely because a book tells you so, but it's "half-fetched" to accept something because thousands of people have thoroughly researched something and come to a particular conclusion.
You are the one with assumptions here Empyre. Not Joph. Not me. You are assuming that everything written in the Bible is 100% correct.
We are assuming nothing. We only accept what is reasonably supported by the evidence and data. On the one hand, we have a shroud that some 15th century monk claims covered Jesus' body. There is no historical proof of this. Only one mans word. As Joph stated, the shroud has been tested several times by several different methods and has consistently been dated somewhere around 1300AD (the cloth specifically). How exactly do you refute that? How much proof do you need?
I have no idea what you are talking about with this alleged spear. This is the first I've heard of it. I'm going to assume (yeah, I know. But I'm betting I'm not far off), that this is yet another myth that has cropped up somewhere along the way.
As to Jesus leaving a tomb "guarded by Rome's best soldiers"? Huh!? Where did you get that? What bizaare version of any Gospel did you read? Did you just make that up? Did someone in Sunday School make that up? There is no mention that Jesus' tomb was guarded by anyone, let alone Roman guards. Um... Given that Jerusalem was basically the armpit of the Empire anyway (aside form being handy for trade), I seriously doubt that any Roman soldiers stationed there could by any stretch have been the "best" of anything.
By most accounts, Jesus' tomb was unwatched by anyone. In the Gospel account (Mark I think, but I'd have to check to be sure), the women arrive at the tomb to find the stone rolled aside and Jesus' body gone. Um... If there was someone there, don't you think maybe they would have mentioned it? Even if it was a simple "Hey Flavius? What happened to the stone?". Yet there's no mention of anyone being there, or an mention that anyone was supposed to be there. Why on earth would Roman guards stand over a Jew's tomb? No reason at all. No Jew would have, it was the Sabbath (and passover no less!). They all had to be indoors for the day.
For someone with such firm beliefs, you aren't terribly well informed about your own religion.
Um... I'm going to say this again. Evolution is a scientific theory. Creationism is a religious belief. You may call Creationism a "theory" all you want, but it does not have enough evidence to support it to justify teaching it in science class.
That's the real issue here folks. What should we be teaching our children in *science* class (biology specifically). My problem is that you can't *not* teach evolution. It's a legitimate science. The only reason to leave it out would be because it happens to contradict the religious belief of creationism. Thus, if we leave it off our public school curriculum, then we are allowing religious beliefs to determine our public school curriculum. Is there anyone here who's arguing for that?
So, we can't *not* teach evolution. Let's just accept that fact. We can't not teach evolution anymore then we can not teach chemistry, or physics. So, the next question becomes: Should we be teaching creationism in that same science class? I'd say not. It's not a science by any definition. It doesn't even merit a mention (as some are trying to suggest). Why mention it? I mean, I could mention old Monad theory as an aside to teaching physics, but we don't. We don't because Monad theory was based on a philosophical approach rather then a physical one. It does not belong in a physical sciences class (as biology, chemistry, and physics are). We are free to teach that in a philosophy class. Just as we are free to teach creationism in that sort of class as well (call it world culture, philosophy, religion, whatever).
The key point is that those ideas should be taught in the appropriate classes, and should be taught in such a way that it is clear that they are based on people's beliefs of how things are, and not necessarily based on any physical evidence.
I think it does a great diservice to hard sciences to toss ideas like creationism into the middle of them, and imply to a school child that they are equal in validity. They simply aren't. Not in the context of the class you are teaching anyway. You've got to remember that the whole point of teaching science classes to students is so that they learn the ideas of scientific method. You undermine the entire concept if you toss in unscientific stuff like creationism on an equal footing in that context.
I just don't understand why people have such a hard time with this. The two are completely different types of thought and are conclusions about things based on completely different processes. You simply can't compare them. You certainly can't try to teach them side by side in the same class as though they are equivalent "theories". They just aren't...