North Carolina religious Professor Bert Ehrman

That would all have a minimal impact on problem.

You don’t want to underestimate the impact of increased social involvement. You’re trying to turn the tide, not just treat symptoms. Ennui has a terrible cost. Any society should be measured by how well they treat their disenfranchised and marginalized. In the meantime, continue to invent low cost personal devices for blood analysis, diabetes care, etc. Technology will continue to play a vital role.

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70th anniversary of the NHS over here, my lifelong employer (and now my pension provider). Far from perfect, but you don’t find the same financial angst about getting ill over here, nor the unaccountable turning of health care into an ideological battle that you have over there (nobody thinks liberty depends on gun ownership, either!).

The cautionary tale is that the original NHS selling point was that, providing medicine free to all, you would soon have a healthy population and the costs would go down. Instead, demand is exponential and costs more so. It’s hard to see that modern medicine can be made any more sustainable than modern ebergy consumption.

Part of that has to be down to the “technological marvel” aspect of modern medicine. As Guy says, improving diet and lifestyle are an important key - but there’s no money for big drug companies in that, no money for food companies in selling less, and no great place in our society for, “Eat sparingly, keep off drugs, don’t buy a car, don’t spend your time consuming media when you could be active, don’t alter your body surgically unless essential, etc.”

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Been meaning to get that face-lift… : )
It’s that “eat sparingly” stuff that I can’t stomach… them’s fighting words! As for my car, I need it to haul all my essential toxic Chinese products home! (Apologies…)

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After an oceanful of plastic bottles, it’ll be Lithium pollution (and the stuff beginning to run out, so the cars start burning coal). Fortunately there’s still English ale…

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Patrick,

You are right. Something needs to be done to improve the insurance situation in this country; otherwise, we may have to move to Canada. I am sorry about the cost you must pay. We need a Progressive candidate like Bernie or Howard Dean to begin to make things better. I am afraid of two more years of President Trump’s so-called leadership. I believe he wants to reverse the whole new deal. Even Eisenhower and Nixon were not for doing that. The Republican Party of 1956 was more liberal than the Republicans now. We also need National Dental Insurance. I would be for Senator Mark Warner of Virginia for president; however, I feel he is no Progressive. Was Dr. Swamidass born in the US? As you surely know, only native born Americans can run for president. If Swamidass were born in America and were a liberal Democrat, I would even give him a vote. My family was in politics for generations and I always wanted to run for Congress; however, my health is not good. I have heart disease, diabetes, and liver disease coming from the diabetes. But I agree. We must do something. Perhaps I should move with Nancy to Great Britain. I believe their health care in relation to insurance is good. They will even cover people from another country who is visiting the United Kingdom. I certainly have a lot of relatives there. But I am a loyal American and would rather change our ways. Take care and perhaps we will talk again tomorrow. I would like to hear about those dinos and other things scientific.

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No - only your emergency care is free if you’re American. But we’re so unused to collecting payment for medical services that you’d probably get away with it, to the detriment of the people paying the taxes!

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I still like the sound of emergency care. Thanks for information, Jon.

Yes, I’m running a day behind (at least):

Joshua no doubt is referring to the Jesus Seminar. They got lots of publicity from the general media but nothing but yawns from virtually everyone I knew at AAR/SBL (American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature conferences.) I got to know and had a lot of dealings with Bob Funk [Dr. Robert Funk, who every seminary student will recognize from his Blass-Debrunner-Funk advanced grammar reference book of the Greek New Testament] and I have my own collection of funny stories (both about Dr. Funk and the Jesus Seminar.) I would point out that Bob Funk was a great promoter and the colored marbles they would use in their voting on which scriptures were actually quoting the real Jesus was just one of his strokes of genius—if one evaluates him on the ability to get media attention and attracting funding to his Weststar Institute.

Joshua is right in saying that many Christians were very concerned about the Jesus Seminar (because of all that media emphasis) but it was mostly ignored within the academy. (I’m not saying Dr. Funk was a joke. Far from it! But he knew how to use a “circus” with that Jesus Seminar to achieve his funding goals!)

This is my favorite example of how the Jesus Seminar was a joke: one of the voting members on the Jesus Seminar was film producer Paul Verhoeven, known for silly movies like Starship Troopers and the ridiculous bomb of a movie (which has become a camp classic, from what I’ve heard), Showgirls. Verhoeven didn’t even have an undergrad degree in anything related to the Bible or religious studies! He had no business being on a scholarly committee dealing with the Bible and he was there strictly because (1) he was a well-monied friend of Funk, (2) he helped bring media attention, and (3) he helped amp up the circus atmosphere that seemed to serve Funk’s fundraising so well.

Theologically speaking, Dr. Funk and I were total opposites, but I will admit a certain mutual respect among us. Of course, that is no surprise because we were both focused on Greek NT grammar and good reference-research tools.

Oops. I took another tangent down memory lane. It comes with age.

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Hi everyone (especially @swamidass, @Patrick, @Charles_Miller, @jongarvey and @Guy_Coe):

I have recently been reading Michael J. Alter’s The Resurrection: A Critical Inquiry (2015). Alter writes as a Jewish author who is willing to grant the possibility of miracles; nevertheless, he is a trenchant critic of the evidence for the Resurrection. I would strongly urge Christians to read Alter’s book: it’s a real eye-opener. I guarantee you, it will definitely change the way you look at the evidence for the Resurrection.

I am also very familiar with Habermas’ “minimal facts” approach, and N.T. Wright’s arguments for the historicity of the Resurrection.

I’d just like to make a few quick remarks.

First, N. T. Wright is quite right when he points out that for a first-century Jew, resurrection meant an embodied post-mortem existence, not a spiritual one.

Second, belief in the empty tomb is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for belief in Jesus’ resurrection. If the tomb was empty, Jesus’ body could have been stolen; and even if it wasn’t empty, the apostles could still have had an embodied post-mortem encounter with Jesus: the may have touched Him or eaten with Him.

Third, claims that a majority (or more specifically, 75%) of Biblical scholars believe in the empty tomb are simply false. Habermas (who makes this claim) hasn’t surveyed scholars on this issue. After reading Alter’s book, I have to say that there are real problems with the Gospel accounts of the empty tomb. I could say more, but I would advise people to either read Ehrman’s blog entries on the empty tomb, or read Michael Alter’s book, or for that matter, Peter Kirby’s article, The Historicity of the Empty Tomb Evaluated (2001), which is a pretty fair-minded summary of the evidence for and against.

After weighing up the evidence, I now believe we have no way of knowing whether Jesus’ tomb was found empty or not. Nevertheless, I believe that we can have rational grounds for maintaining that Jesus was resurrected, even without the empty tomb. In other words, I’m an ultra-minimalist: the core fact upon which Christianity is built is that Jesus’ apostles had a post-mortem encounter with Him, which convinced them that He was an embodied human being. My two cents.

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I am a protestant theologian, and I have a question about something I have ready studied. Rahner, a German Catholic Theologian, believes that the resurrection of the dead takes place at death since we step out of time. His Holiness, Pope Benedict, believes only in the resurrection at the traditional resurrection. I now believe as Joseph Ratzinger. When my father passed from this life to be with God in 1985, I believed as Rahner. I am now a believer in the spirit separating from the body until the Second Coming when the body and spirit are reunited i.e, similar to the Catholic belief or that of Baptist Billy Graham. I do not believe in purgatory, however. What are your views in this area? Juergen Moltmann, a German Protestant, believes as Rahner. Also, what did Paul in I Corinthians 15:35-58 mean by a spiritual body? I accept the concept of a glorified physical resurrection. @Patrick: Remember this has nothing to do with our agreement. Agreed?

Agreed. I would never infringe on how you eased your sadness and grief when your father died. If you are comforted by your beliefs, then they are a private and personal matter that should not be interfered with by me or anyone. Making sense of the loss of a loved one is very hard. We all do it in different ways and we should respect others if they have different ways of comforting themselves and their family when loss occurs.

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I think that this is a reasonable conclusion to make after weighing up the evidence. I haven’t weighed up the evidence as much as you have, but I came to a slightly different conclusion. My conclusion is that it really doesn’t matter in how I live my life whether a Jesus (or anyone) rose from a lifeless state after being executed two days before. I have empathy to the man and his family as he was, by all accounts, a decent innocent man and shouldn’t have been killed for crimes that the whole human races past and future supposedly committed. And given that we all agree that this person isn’t here physically now because he supposedly ascended up into the sky where there is less and less oxygen making another death by asphyxiation likely, I really don’t think it matters much one way or the other. Certainly not enough to fight wars over, kill people over, and dislike other people over.

@vjtorley

Being a Unitarian Universalist, I think this sums it up rather nicely!

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“Do you think as more and more archaeological, ancient genome, and other data fills in the gaps in human history, there will be more Ehrman’s?”

No. I think the more data that is gathered and honestly assessed, the more confirmation we have of the Biblical information about early human populations.

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Christianity certainly stands and falls on the resurrection of Jesus. However, its existence and growth depends on transformative experiences of Jesus or in other words encounters with Jesus. Individuals experience Christ in ways similar to how the Apostles did (though not to the same degree). And the christian confession of Chirst’s resurrection would be impossible apart from a experience of the resurrected Christ.
This is a significance of the resurrection that many people miss.Its not all about historical documents and textual criticism.

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Does a post death eternity of torture and torment await those who don’t have these transformative experiences?

Do you believe in eternity?

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Our current understanding of our universe is that it will expand for eternity and its temperature will go asymptotically to absolute zero.

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You mentioned eternity in the context of human beings. I asked the question in the same context. What do you believe?

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