When were the Gospels Written? The External and Internal Evidence.

[Angrboda]

@Nishant:

I've got to run, so I'll give your post more attention another time, but I do have an immediate thought. I'm listening to an audiobook about the science of mindfulness and one of the points he makes is that, ordinarily, we seem to always be needing that "next thing." The example he gives is of when he and his peers got their psychology degrees. At the time, they were ecstatic and they celebrated their accomplishment. Yet years later, they do not get up each day and think, "Hot damn, I've got my degree" and celebrate getting their degree all over again. Once achieved, anything begins to fade in value such that we need something else to replace it. I experience this myself as I'm a compulsive shopper and am always buying things in the vain hope that the improvement I net in doing so will bring satisfaction, but instead it simply creates a treadmill in which I'm ceaselessly setting my eyes on some new acquisition in spite of what I've already acquired. There is a Latin idiom that says that "glory is fleeting." I think, ultimately, happiness, too, is fleeting. It's our human nature. And thus, the only way to bring about eternal happiness would be to change my human nature in some way to make it possible, but then I would no longer be me in a very real sense. Is being eternally happy worth giving up the things that make me who I am, essentially giving up being me and being turned into someone else solely for the experience of a feeling?

I don't doubt that whoever thought up the idea of eternal happiness was intelligent, but I think the idea and that it would satisfy are the thoughts of children. I'm not saying these men were unintelligent or lacking in insight, but rather that their world wisdom is a product of their time and culture and of the limits of what they knew about the world and human nature. But we're not similarly limited. We can see a little farther. And in doing so, we can see that their conception of what would making living, striving, and dying worthwhile doesn't hold up in the fullness of time. Their views about what the ultimate would be have not aged well.
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