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If you lived in Jesus' day, how would you of responded?
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RE: If you lived in Jesus' day, how would you of responded?
(March 10, 2014 at 10:26 pm)Revelation777 Wrote: Not that you believe, but let's just say that you lived and witness Jesus as He is described in Scripture. Out of curiosity, you listened to Him speak, you saw him heal, you witnessed the miracles, etc. How would you of reacted?
That's a bit of a broad question, and without context it's difficult to answer with any sincerity. Who would I be if I lived at that time? Presumably I am another person and not the "me" that exists now, with the knowledge and experiences I have. Would I have witnessed all of these miracles, or just heard about them as the gossip spread and the story inevitably changed? Maybe a wandering preacher helped a man to his feet when he fell and bruised a leg, and the story soon became that he healed the man's broken leg? Or that the man fell and died and was resurrected?

Had I been there to hear his sermons and he really spoke in a way that separated him from other men, it's very possible that it would be enough to get me to follow, assuming that I was brought up to be superstitious and religious and credulous. If I'd seen him feed a huge crowd from a plate of fish and bread, and then recover a dozen baskets of leftovers, I would consider that a bona-fide miracle... and ask him to stay with us because at the time getting food to eat was a laborious and almost daily effort.

Had I seen him heal a crippled or paralytic person, or restore sight to a man I knew was blind, I'd have accepted his claims to godhood, assuming I did not also harbor beliefs that some other god was the real god and that this powerful man was really a demon seeking to lead others astray. After all, the real god did great things as well, and I had plenty of anecdotes provided by people who knew people who knew people who SAW IT. I might just believe that this man was an agent of evil, sent to lead people away from the real god.

...

The issue with such a question is that it either requires that we wipe out ~2,000 years of knowledge and understanding and my own 45 years of life experience and questions and answers. Or it requires that we inject the modern me into a completely alien situation and ask that I make a decision on whether this guy is god, when the whole time I'm thinking "HOLY SHIT WE DEVELOPED TIME TRAVEL?????" I can only judge things today, as I am and with what I know and have learned. And the me of today finds the Jesus story lacking.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."

-Stephen Jay Gould
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RE: If you lived in Jesus' day, how would you of responded? - by Tonus - March 11, 2014 at 10:07 am

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