Not sure whether this belongs in Religion or Science or . . . . ?

[patrice]

The word "resurrection" can have a wide variety of meanings, more or less 2nd-hand and more or less relevant to the actual phenomena to which they ONLY refer, but, however much more relevant, those meanings are never identical, never equal to their referential objects, therefore, always at least potentially more or less in error.

There is nothing necessary in the relationship between whatever is going on inside one's head when you use the word "resurrection" and whatever happened over 2000 years ago in Jerusalem, just because you use that word. That doesn't mean that there CAN'T happen to be a match, a close match between the two events, just that it's not a necessary relationship. A word is a word, an object an object, an event an event . . . whatever it is that you think you mean is not necessarily the truth of it and we have no way of evaluating the degree of nor the significance of the difference between the 2 phenomena.

To tell the truth, I don't think someone actually died and then came back to life 3 days later and I hope the rationalists amongst us will forgive me for thinking this conventional scenario quite a bit less wonder -full than a more rational one. Though there are also variations on rational hypotheses around that include the possibility of the man Jesus having a near-death-experience, or going into suspended animation, from which he revived, it seems kind of contrived and tricky to me to cook up support for saying someone died by saying he didn't REALLY die and that this "fact" is justification for any significance attached to whatever happened, other than that it happened.

I also mis-trust the other mumbo-jumbo that has been attached for various purposes to this particular story (about an itinerant and very popular teacher who ran afoul of the church-state of the time for being too free and not picking a side in their plutocracy). To me, the fact that the phenomenal universe manifests more or less powerful patterns (and Jesus has been/is a rather powerful one, though not solely in the manner claimed), patterns that manifest and then de- generate, or are destroyed, and re-manifest according to the same pattern again and again, is enough.

And, yes, there are greater and lesser differences between instances of pattern manifestations and those differences are information too, as are their similarities also, but perhaps our assumptions about the significances/meanings of those differences and of the similarities are more a product of who/what we are/do than they are about the phenomenology itself, the "individual" instances of which, as I said earlier, are not equal to our abstractions about them.

[customerserviceguy]

1. The theme of a dying and rising deity

was widespread throughout the world by the time that Jesus is supposed to have existed. Surely, it would have been incorporated into whatever legends were being woven about this mythical figure.

[patrice]

2. The Corn God. also many other names. It's from a time in which understanding was much more

metaphorical, i.e. not just one thing, more or less arbitrarily, standing for something else, the way language does, but one thing shares essence, is equal to, something else. Which I guess came about from the perspective that they also mostly lived much more closely with that to which they were referring, e.g. they birthed their own children; they worked with & taught those children, they faced the threats of war and violence PERSONALLY, they cared for their own elders, and they buried their own dead, so their references to significance/meanings were less the arbitrary ABSTRACTIONS, usually verbal, that ours have become. They were ACTION/concrete behavioral references to what they had learned about themselves, their own deeds and those of others, from their own experiences and amongst those kinds of references was the fact that amongst them WERE in fact those, like Lord Jesus, who went beyond quid pro quo behaviors, because they were motivated by something else, something that I hypothesize, the seed of which, like corn, was within them individually, but was itself an emergent property of their collective behaviors, something that they had seen change other behaviors by not just doing whatever so-and-so did and some started doing things like really making an effort to get the herbs right for the suffering, and not just throwing their dead on the midden heap anymore, and eventually Art and more and more refined Crafts and . . . .

Have you read Robert Graves The White Goddess? http://books.google.com/books/about/The_White_Goddess.html?id=V7FhQgAACAAJ It's controversial, because it's pretty speculative and hugely dense with Graves' obsession with ancient words and trees, but I'm guessing he has the framework right, what there is of it that is, especially when he talks about "true poetry".

I'm also feeling the need, lately, to dig out my copy of Julian Jaynes The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the BiCameral Mind http://books.google.com/books/about/The_origin_of_consciousness_in_the_break.html?id=gHR-AAAAMAAJ - another controversial hotty, but really stimulating nonetheless.

[Thats my opinion]

3. Perhaps the resurrection narratives

were the early church's way to image the persistence of hope and life under persecution. When all the forces of death had closed in, these Christians testified that in spite of all, God would be defeated. And that meant life would not be defeated. Thus faith in the resurrection was not belief in a doctrine, but hope in the persistence of life.

[laconicsax]

4. Or maybe it was borrowed from other religions of the region. n/t

[patrice]

5. Yes, possible and if it was, there are those who would regard it as a primitive form of understandin

g, which is one trait of mythologies, primitive explanations for empirical knowledge.

[patrice]

6. I like this because it approaches a more phenomenological perspective by stripping away

more arbitrary, less essence -tial, stuff that has happened to cover the original experiences in an aggregate which is anti-thetical to the facts themselves and thus obviates a more direct experience of those empirical facts.