Hi Kent, I see you are doing a bit of floating through cyberspace this evening too. The children are in bed here; I'm net-mailing on one computer and she's on the "kid's" computer doing the same thing. We even send email to each other, though we are in the same house, once in a while.. (what does this say about investment potential of internet stocks, if we are any kind of a valid random sample of the general population?)
Regarding Shalom, I believe that is his real name. In fact, I'm sure it is, because I'm sure he told me so, but I'm not up to the task of reading through all 700+ posts on this thread to find that message. There are people on the SI site who definitely DO use pseudonymns. A fiction writer I "talked" with said he uses one because he doesn't want his friends to know his real political views! j garcia might be a pseudonymn, because Jerry Garcia is the name of a dead band leader. The one who sometimes posts as "Sugar Magnolia" is really Christine Grace Bartley, of the Let's Talk About Our Feelings! thread. And that rude guy, "John Galt" hasn't answered whether that is his real name. (John Galt, as you may know, was a fictional character in Ayn Rand's book, Atlas Shrugged, which she wrote around the time that our good ol' Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was hanging out with her and her gang... I don't know if reading Rand's works would give any clues as to what Greenspan is going to do with the interest rates, though.)
Kent, I'm sure you are telling the truth, regarding what you know about the people involved in putting together that "Jesus Seminar". I've heard of it before, though. Today, while we were in the car, I asked my wife what she knew of the "Jesus Seminar" and its works. (I have a lot of respect for her knowledge-base.) She said it is a group of extreme left wing religious scholars who have periodically met with the purpose of re-writing the Bible, especially the New Testament, to suit their own purposes (whatever those are) and that the "5th" Gospel is probably the so-called Gospel of Thomas, which is not considered authentic except by the left-wingers who want to use it against their counterparts in the religious fracas that has been going on for a long time.
Without checking into it myself, I wouldn't dispute what you say about their credentials, nor what my wife says, nor what Shalom says. Innocent until proven guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt, and all that. But I believe the scholars involved in the Jesus Seminar are the kinds of "eminent scholars", sadly, that Jesus warned us to beware of their teachings.
You are on the right path, and you can be at peace about your progress, Kent, if you believe in the God of creation, as you refer to God. You are, poetically speaking, running a marathon race, seeking knowledge of God. You don't need scholars or us, to arrive at the right conclusions. The biggest clue is in the name j garcia gave this thread, "Ask God". But he can't be forced, wheedled or manipulated, is something we need to keep reminding ourselves.
... you are running a marathon search for knowledge of the truth with a capital T, and you need to pace yourself and save the sprinting for the final few yards. You are in the early miles of the 26 mile race.
In church today, a physicist whom I like to talk with (because he also is involved in stocks and options) commented to me, upon seeing a copy of Josh McDowell's book, Evidence That Demands a Verdict, that he recommended it not just for people who were searching and didn't yet believe, but for Christians also, so they could better understand the canonization of the Scriptures we know as the Bible. My wife has that book and I guess I'll have to dust it off and read it. Thought it was just for those who were running their personal marathons of search for truth.
Why don't you get a copy of McDowell's book, too, and maybe we can discuss it, because it will be as new to me as it is to you. (Should have listened to my wife's recommendation of it many years ago - but for some reason, I wasn't impressed, until a man, and a physicist, no less, recommended it.) I'm sure it will be easier for me to understand than the physicist's normal occupational fare of books dealing with matter, anti-matter, quantum physics, virtual matter, chaos theory, fractal mathematics, etc.
Josh McDowell is on the level.
Well, Kent, though more can be said and all has not been responded to, this is long enough, especially since you said you may not be visiting this thread anymore. I hope you do visit again, though, and that you do some more searching until you complete the race and arrive at full knowledge of the truth. Keep on asking God and he will lead you straight and sustain you to the end.
John |
