What if the way that Jesus is supposed to come back is

[TheFarseer]

we are supposed to clone him from the Shroud of Turin? Wouldn't that be the perfect irony to conservative's "Fuck you, science!" attitude

[Fiona]

1. you can't clone paint

[Baconfoot]

15. If you can bring people back from the dead, you can clone paint. n/t

[DivinBreuvage]

39. It ain't paint

Which is why science can't definitively debunk the Shroud as a fraud. In fact science hasn't yet been able to figure out what made the image, which must be rather painful for those who have a significant psychological investment in convincing themselves that the Shroud must at all costs be a forgery.

Personally I find it rather hard to believe that some slackjaw from the credulous and unscientific world of Medieval Europe -- which had no problem whatsoever in accepting countless religious forgeries of the most incompetent and childish sort -- would either have felt it necessary or would have been able to concoct a monumentally sophisticated fraud that would stump 21st-century science. But I guess the much-touted principle of Occam's Razor is only allowed to cut one way.

The biggest thing the debunkers have going for them is the carbon dating, but some people have raised questions about that. On the other hand, a Swiss textile historian who did restoration work on the Shroud has stated that the only other known examples of that style of weaving date from first-century Palestine -- not Crusader Palestine or Medieval Europe.

Now, of course, none of this proves that the man on the Shroud is the Biblical Jesus; or even if it is the Biblical Jesus, it still doesn't prove that he was the son of God or that he rose from the dead. In short, there need be nothing miraculous about the Shroud at all, unless you consider things like Roman coins or the remains of Ramses II to be miraculous. But what interests me is the behavior of self-professed "sceptics" or "rational" people who feel compelled to twist logic and reason in an almost pathological need to deny the existence of anything expressly biblical. I'm not talking about people who argue that since men cannot walk on water or return from the dead, Jesus must have been a regular guy; this is a perfectly valid, sound, and rational argument. I am speaking of people who need to reject the possibility that a first-century Rabbi named Jesus ever existed at all.

[arwalden]

43. Oh Brother!

:eyes:

What a rant... truly funny!

[quaoar]

45. So I guess you have nothing substantive to say

about his argument, which doesn't sound at all like a rant to me.

[arwalden]

48. I Imagine That It Wouldn't Sound That Way To You.

:eyes: Some things are so rediculous on the face of it that no "substantive" commentary from me is needed. Simply rolling my eyes and acknowledging the absurdity of these fanciful claims is quite enough. (I know that for some people it's frustrating, but they will just have to cope with my lack of interest in their desire to publicly masturbate.)

[quaoar]

53. Oh, pretty please!!!!!

Why do you deny us the enlightenment of your superior intellect? Here we sit, mired in red-state ignorance, awash in foolish myths about an itinerant carpenter who got himself crucified for challenging the political correctness of his time.

Take pity on us red-staters and shine the light of your superior reasoning on us. Our spiritual well-being is at stake.

[arwalden]

54. Heh-heh-heh.

:eyes: To me, that sounds like a personal problem that you need to deal with yourself. I'm afraid I can't help you as those things rank among the the LEAST of my concerns.

[DivinBreuvage]

55. Thank you for providing a living example of the point I was making!

You doubtless have no problem accepting the idea that cloth can survive from the fortress of Masada or from the tombs of Egyptian or Scythian mummies. You doubtless have no problem accepting the idea that sweat and bacteria can produce discoloration on cloth. But when Jesus gets dragged into it, all of a sudden the cloth has absolutely, positively got to be a fake, no matter what evidence may suggest!

It should at least be easy for you to point out what "rediculous" or fanciful claim I made. I did not say that there was anything miraculous about the image on the Shroud, nor that anything about it can be used to prove anything supernatural. But the mere idea that the cloth itself might actually date back to the place and time of Jesus -- and therefore carry an infinitessimal chance that the image on it was produced by the perfectly mortal and non-resurrected body of a carpenter rabbi whose followers founded a religion that you have issues with -- is frightening enough that it has to be smashed with the devastating argument that you are rolling your eyes! (You play it nicely, by the way, to cleverly intimate that you could make a substantive argument if you really wanted to).

For such people even admitting that there may have been a non-miraculous core of truth at the center of the Christian religion is too much. They are just like Biblical literalists who have to believe that the earth is only 6000 years old and dinosaur fossils were planted by God to test their faith. To such minds -- whether the badge of superiority on which they stroke themselves is called "faith" or "scepticism" -- the merest splinter of doubt is frightening and must be thrown out lest the whole psychological house of cards come crashing down.

(I will offer no comment on the credibility of those who smirk at others for "publicly masturbating" after themselves issuing a post of the caliber of #43).

[arwalden]

58. You Assume Far To Much About Me, DivinBreuvage.

Trust me... these myths do not "frighten me". How puzzling it is that whenever one makes judgments based on *facts* (instead of myths) they are accused of being "frightened". The exact opposite appears to be the case.

>> (You play it nicely, by the way, to cleverly intimate that you could make a substantive argument if you really wanted to). <<

These battles have been fought repeatedly (by myself and others) in many fora throughout DU. But I think you knew that already... didnt' you? ;o) Try not to flatter yourself by interpreting my current lack of interest in doing battle with you as being anything other than a lack of interest.

>> They are just like Biblical literalists who have to believe that the earth is only 6000 years old and dinosaur fossils were planted by God to test their faith. <<

That is a false analogy. When I see evidence that such fanciful claims are true, then I'll be happy to adjust my thinking.

>> To such minds -- whether the badge of superiority on which they stroke themselves is called "faith" or "scepticism" -- the merest splinter of doubt is frightening and must be thrown out lest the whole psychological house of cards come crashing down. <<

Ah... there it is again. The false comparison that "sKepticism" is akin to a "faith". :eyes: Oh! And we're "frightened", right? Mustn't forget to suggest that we're "afraid" of the "truth". Eh?

LMAO! -- "Psychological-house-of-cards"???? -- Good grief! What kind of horseshit is that? (I think your slip is showing.)

>> (I will offer no comment on the credibility of those who smirk at others for "publicly masturbating" after themselves issuing a post of the caliber of #43). <<

But you just did!

[Artemis Bunyon]

64. BWAH-HA-HA-HAAA!!!!

Oh... my sides... (Hey! Don't stick your hand in there!)

[ooglymoogly]

61. the shroud of turin is a fake so

you would probably be bringing back a con artist

[Julius Civitatus]

62. That's right - It was done by camera-obscura processing

There are several theories and studies about the shroud, but the most widely held is that the fabric of the shroud itself dates back to the Renaissance, about 1300 years after the death of Jesus.

The way the image shows in the shroud seems to indicate that the figure of a man was projected onto the shroud, rather than used to actually wrap a body in it.

[secedeeconomically]

2. dude what ever you've been smoking, well pass it along lol

[Cyrano]

3. Imagine if Jesus decided to come back as a black woman.

Would the fundies follow her, accept her, lynch her, or simply convert to some other form of insanity?

[Liberal Veteran]

4. How about a poor gay black woman?

Then we'd really see them freak out.

[DrWeird]

6. Jesus was a poor gay black woman.

Not many people know that.

[Liberal Veteran]

12. Yes...It will be revealed in the DaVinci Code 2: Electric Bugaloo.

LOL

[Bridget Burke]

52. Queen Latifah will be the star!

Madonna will play Pontius Pilate.

I can hardly wait.

[shadowknows69]

40. Mother Abagail?

that would tie in nicely with the upcoming smallpox attack.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

5. Don't you find it somewhat interesting that the apostles thought that he

"was returning" from a previous life?? Or is that hard to decipher from the King James translation....

[TheFarseer]

13. I seem to remember

a passage where Jesus asks Peter(or whatever apostle), "Who do you say I am?" And he replies, "some say you are Noah, or Isaah or one of the other prophets" "But who do YOU say I am?" and he says the son of God or something. Never paid that much attention in Sunday school.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

14. And if they thought in such a manner.... what are the odds that the

mindset of the times was that reincarnation was a fact of life... cuz you see... Jesus didn't say... "what, are you nuts?? You think I am someone who died way back when??" No... he calmly responded with "Who do you say I am?"

The book put out by the A.R.E. back in the 50's "The Hidden History of Reincarnation" would knock your socks off... I wish I could find some text to put up here... the early church was not what everyone thinks it was... not in the least.

[peacetalksforall]

23. Supposedly, Theodora (of Justinian and Theodora) had all references

to reincarnation removed from the bible.

[TheFarseer]

24. So Eastern Orthadox doesn't believe Jesus will come back? n/t

[HysteryDiagnosis]

26. Aha!!!!! You have read it.... good read eh?? n/t

[nascarblue]

7. The Republcans and Bush would have us believe....

...that Jesus is coming back like this....

[BeyondThePale]

11. laughing and crying (all at same time)

[Cleita]

8. Well, according to the New Testament, when Jesus was

resurrected he supposedly became immortal. He supposedly has walked amongst us for the last two thousand years. I kid you not this is what the nuns taught us in religion class. He apparently can exist both in Heaven and on Earth. So according to the sisters, you could be sitting next to Jesus on the bus or share a counter with him in a restaurant. His mother, Mary, also has the same privileges.

So anyhoo, the second coming is about when he decides to reveal himself, not about being reborn because he never really died. Mom seems to make appearances every now and then too if you believe all that stuff about Lourdes, Fatima, Guadalupe and grilled cheese sandwiches having her portrait.

[nascarblue]

17. Well, one things for sure.. if he is walking among us...

...with the way our government has become so corrupt lately, Jesus is probably sitting in jail or being hunted by Homeland Security.

[Cleita]

19. No kidding!

He's probably in Gitmo because he looks suspiciously Arab.

[Yupster]

37. If our intelligence agencies are after him,

then he's probably pretty safe.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

28. What if.... what if spirituality ends up being tied to or involved with

quantum physics and or inter-dimensionality... now wouldn't that be grand. I think it would be grand.

[Cleita]

31. I think it might in the long run, however, I don't know

if it will be in my lifetime, maybe yours, if you are young enough. I really think the truth will be revealed through Quantum Physics. I do believe there is a dimension we share with other beings that we can't see, feel, hear, or touch because we don't have the right equipment to do so. But, we feel there is more to this existence than meets the eye. We haven't learned to make contact yet. Remember no one knew about bacteria and viruses until the invention of the microscope, yet we knew there was something invisible out there that caused disease.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

32. I saw the trailer to "White Noise" which is sort of related to all this..

it looks like the sort of movie that will have you jumping out of your seat... so I don't necessarily recommend it... however the idea that entities have been caught on electronic equipment... (entities that aren't what we would consider "real") is fascinating.

Trailer here.....
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375210/

[Cleita]

34. Hehe.

Looks like my kind of movie. Thanks for the link.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

35. The trailer rocks... to be sure. Welcome n/t

[ThreeCatNight]

51. I agree with you....but

even if someone discovers proof of this, it will see the light of day.
Do you think that the religious industrial complex is ready to give up their hold on the publics pocket book?
That scientist will have a "convenient" lab accident, which just happens to take out all the data.

[Cleita]

57. Well, we need to fix our government so this doesn't happen.

Also, scientists beware! Be very careful whom you let in on the news until there are enough in the know so that the knowledge can't accidentally be eliminated.

[CarbonDate]

63. Jesus is a vampire?

Well, that explains the whole "whomever eats my flesh and drinks my blood shall be granted eternal life" bit....

[tridim]

9. Newsflash.. Jesus aint coming back.

Nobody is.. When you're dead, you're dead.

[karlrschneider]

10. Never expect irony to register with a fundy.

I am serious. :grr:

[superconnected]

16. I don't remember exactly how it went

but in revelations it's really sketchy wether he comes back at all. In fact the details fundies give it seem to be modern fiction.

Revelations is Johns I had a dream speech, a lot of those I had a dream speeches that were books in the bible are now listed under the Apocrapha. Many times throughout history it was believed that revalations was speaking about the fall of rome, or other empires and purely metaphoracle.

I tried to look up the whole second coming etc and all I found was the revelations crap -open the seals winged monsters fly out etc. I believe Revelations should be ripped from the bible btw. Actually I'm not too keen on the whole old testament, it can go...

[nascarblue]

18. Isn't it amazing at how much the Falwell's and Robertson's have....

...completely twisted the bible out of shape? If Jesus does come back I would expect that all those Falwell false prophets would be the first to call Jesus a commie and a fake.

[LiberalFighter]

20. Apparently Martin Luther felt Revelations did not belong in the Bible

[Columbia]

27. Cite?

Curious about this...

[LiberalFighter]

38. Something that I have heard and read but nothing...

that I have been able to lock down with confidence.

Apparently, prophecy use of the number 7 is part of it.

[superconnected]

22. I should mention something else

A lot of people (seems like especially Christians) don't know how the bible was written.

A lot of the NT was actually written and changed in the 6th century. It's belived there was a souce of Jesus sayings during his life, called the Q - german for quelle meaning source(I'm remembering this without reference right now) and from that book of sayings came made up histories of him - mathew, mark, luke and john. It was typical at that time to make up histories of people like ceaser etc. The histories were approved and published. Nothing in the modern collection believed to be quotes in the Q, says Jesus is coming back.

Half the new testament are books written by the apostal Paul who had a Jesus vision and became an apostal 5 years after Jesus death and is responsible for a lot of the spread of Christianity and Christian Churches. That half are letters he wrote the churches he founded. Some of those letters are believed to have been tampered with and changed.

Other books in the NT are believed to be written by someone other than the apostals claiming to have written them as they turned up well after the person died.

Anyway, the point is, anyone tauting it as completely the word of God is either very uneducated about it, or insane. It's thought to have been "inspired" by God, written by man.

And the christmas story - magi etc. was added around the 6th century also... it's far more likely fiction than has any truth to it. Bible scholars argue for it because of metaphorical value.

[regnaD kciN]

41. It would have been awfully hard...

...for so much of the Christian Scriptures to have been written "in the 6th Century" when the canon was fixed by church councils in the mid-300s. And, even then, that was merely codifying an arrangement that had de facto been in place since the mid-1st Century (something that's supported by a considerable amount of historical evidence from that time).

That's not to say that the Bible is inerrant. It's clearly a book about God and God's interactions with humanity, written by the latter, with all the fallibility that entails. (And, by the way, the notion of some sort of inerrancy about the Bible really began at about the time of the Reformation, when many of the new denominations had to answer the question of where they found the source of authority, if not from the "One True Church" in Rome -- it then came to its fullest flower at the end of the 19th Century, during the height of the "science versus religion" war.) But the notion that these writings got changed around half-a-millenium after Christ is simply unsupported (and unsupportable) by historical evidence.

[myrna minx]

44. More on "Q" from Frontline

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/story/hypothetical.html

Elaine H. Pagels:
The Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion Princeton University


Today there are people who talk about Q as though it's a gospel. Q, as I see it, is not a gospel, it's a hypothesis. When scholars first began to study the gospels of the New Testament, literarily, they discovered that Matthew and Luke both used Mark as the core, sort of the basic story line that they tell. Because Mark is completely incorporated - 16 chapters - into both Matthew and Luke. But they both also used other sayings, parables, and stories and so forth. And scholars observed that there's a part of the sayings in Matthew that are exactly identical with sayings in Luke. In fact they're identical in Greek. Now think -- Jesus spoke Aramaic. So if you were translating Aramaic, and if I were translating Aramaic, they'd come out different, these translations. So you would only have Jesus speaking identical sayings in Greek if you had a written translation in Greek of his sayings. And so scholars suggested that there must have been, besides Mark, something else written down that would have been a list of the sayings of Jesus, translated into Greek. And they called that "Quelle" which means source in German. And they call it for short, "Q." Nobody ever has found this source written. We can reconstruct it because we guess that there was such a written source, but nobody has seen it, and it certainly in my mind is not a gospel. It's a very good and well-founded hypothesis.
-more--

[kk897]

56. Elain Pagels is my hero. n/t

[Julius Civitatus]

65. The Nicaean Council also decided what was official

in the Bible and was not "official." The decision by Emperor Constantine to create and official version of Christianity involved picking those parts that didn't conflict with the idea of Empire and the power of Rome, and eliminating (or even changing) those parts that seemed "inconvenient" to the authorities.

In the Nicaean Council, Constantine pretty much decided which books, gospels and letters were to be part of the official Bible, and which ones to be left out (which are known as "The Apocrypha.") They even voted if Jesus was going to be "man," a human prophet, or "divine." Seriously.

Some scholars point to the fact that Emperor Constantine mixed elements of other mainstream Roman religions with early Christianity in order to create an official church for Rome, thus getting those pesky, pacifist early Christians under control, and making the official adoption of this new religion more palatable to the mainstream pagan Romans. You would be surprised to know how much they "borrowed" from the cult of Mithra. If you are very religious in your Christian beliefs, you may not want to further look into this, because it will shatter your assumptions quite quickly.

[jesusq]

21. An even better irony would be ...

If Jesus came back and sent the fundies straight to HELL for being self-righteous religious hypocrites, just like the Pharisees 2000 years ago. There is a passage where Jesus says he will do just that. I love that story.

[sweetheart]

25. perhaps he'll come as the lion

and lead a grassroots political opposition to the evil bush empire,
and bring about the downfall of the empire by guerilla warfare.

Hmmmm... Maybe jesus IS back.

[Disturbed]

29. Can anyone imagine...

that Jesus would hang out in the Vatican, where there are millions of dollars or dineros of treasures and wear those silly clothes and hats?

[KT2000]

30. Uninsured man with diabetes

turned away from clinics, in which case he would come and go without anyone noticing.

[AnIndependentTexan]

33. What if Jesus is already here?

Only he is scared of the right-wingers so he is hiding here at Democratic Underground?

[quaoar]

47. What would his user name be?

[Im_Your_Huckleberry]

59. sonny

[Solon]

36. Why would Jesus come back as a Human at all?

He did say "what you do to the least AMONG you, you do unto me." He didn't say OF, just AMONG, so maybe he's a mangy mutt feeding off garbage in the city. Or an abandoned kitten in the street, after all who is the least among us than those who can do least to us?

[ProdigalJunkMail]

42. there is a book called The Last Day

that, in part of it's fantasy, has Jesus return as a cloned female (or at least genetically engineered)...it then goes into the reaction of the various denominations and even has a fictional interview with the new Jesus and the Pope...interesting read...decently written...will not win awards, though...

theProdigal

Here is an amazon link if interested...

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0446605980/ref=sib_rdr_dp/104-5864823-1933523

OnEdit : too early...too many mistakes

[quaoar]

46. Jesus is coming...

...and He's really pissed.

Or, how about:

Jesus is coming. Everyone look busy!

[arwalden]

49. Or, My Favorite: "Jesus Is Dead. He Doesn't Care Anymore."

[Walt Starr]

50. THis IS NOT KAHLISS!!!!

Trekkies will get that one.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

60. if He was concieved by the Holy Spirit..His DNA would be female.Mary's DNA

Mary's DNA