Critical Thinking

Please continue. You're an excellent witness to the modern freethinker.

Retarding the Apostle Paul's guilt feelings, see my separate thread on Paul's guilt feelings, in which I quote a relevant Bible passage.

Now, could someone please address the scientific, medical question of whether it would have been possible for Jesus to talk on the cross?

So at the agreement of Layman with those last thoughts it can open up his questions on the guilt of Paul.

What kind of man could kill in the most horrible of means, hundreds of men women and children (xians) and not feel guilty, even with his supposed forgiveness from God, even death row inmates say they still feel guilty from what they did despite the forgiveness they got when converted. It is human to feel that way. But let's proceed as if it didn't apply.

There could be 2 kinds of people who would murder etc as Paul did and not feel guilty.
1. A sociopath
2. A person forgive by Jesus
(or both)

Let’s assume Paul was an ok guy that was just misguided for a while and killed like OJ just until the conversion. Conversion: A fast way of figuring out how to avoid guilt.

Now he is forgiven and feel’s no guilt. In order to maintain his guilt free nature, he must insure that his new found theology is correct and no better way than to do that than by developing the final issues of freedom from sin (guilt) and starting a new following of a religion named Christianity.

If it works for everyone else, then it must be right. Besides he feels a lot better now than he did at the conviction that he was a stone cold Serial Murder. Awwww life is good in the church if you have a lot of guilt to unload.

Where do you get the information that Paul killed hundreds of women and children?

And you are just demonstrating the problem of ignoring the study of history and culture when evaluating the Bible. You are being very guilty of reading back your own physchological views into a culture far different from ours. Even if you had any valid physchology behind your views, which I am skeptical of, there is no reason to believe that they would apply to Paul's life and times. His mindset is completely alien to ours.

Paul was not, in his mind or by his times, a murderer. He was, actually, doing God's will. The authorities encouraged him and approved of his work. He was convinced he was right. There was no guilt in harming, or even killing, blasphemers. It was his duty.

What would have been jarring for Paul, would be to admit that the people he had been killing were RIGHT! And even the realization that Paul had killed innocents would probably not be nearly so great as the fact that he now believed that he has been opposing God all along! He was not released from his sins by converting. Far from it. He had to face the fact that they were sins and that he had been opposing God.

And Paul continues to demand a very high moral standard from his converts. No where does he approve of lax treatment of sin.

We arn't told of the number he brutally murdered. The number of people one kills is irrelevant to the argument, guilt follows 1 death as it would 100 or 1 million, except at 1 million you get to claim leadership of a country.

>>>His mindset is completely alien to ours.

So the you think the feeling of guilt has changed over the years… I didn’t address the methods or reasons of killing, I addressed the emotions created when one kills, the same emotions you cling to that are detailed in the Bible, you do relate to the Bible don’t you through your emotions… forgiveness, hate, anger, pity. Did all these change over the years because of a mind set and culture differences?

Guilt is Guilt and Christians have a loop hole out of it. That is why they are the number one killer of people in the world since the dawn of time.

I don't know that the feelings of guilt have changed, but I wasn't discussing that. I was pointing out that Paul would not have felt guilt for what he had done in the first place. He would only have experienced guilt after his conversion. Because then we would realize that he had been persecuting innocents and opposing God.

Well Layman, that is what I was discussing, if you have failed to be able to answer the argument you have once again conceded that you are wrong and the Bible and reason fails to support your thought and that we Freethinkers win yet again.

Again, if you want to change topics because you can't debate the point, start a NEW TOPIC... Dummy!

Kate Long: Now, could someone please address the scientific, medical question of whether it would have been possible for Jesus to talk on the cross?

SecWebLurker: Actually, no one can really address this question with anything more than speculation because we know VERY little about crucifixion. The only anthropological evidence we have is a single skeleton from the first century. We have no idea as to whether or not the majority of the people had their hands and feet tied (as was originally done in Egypt), as opposed to having them pierced. We don't know what the standard hand-position was or any of that.

If Jesus was crucified in the manner depicted by religious art, with his arms perpendicular to his torso, then the bit about Jesus not being able to speak due to water in the lungs which would result in asphyxiation, is not accurate. There's a good article on crucifixion in Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls by James H. Charlesworth and Joe Zias which discusses the fact that the breathing process is not obstructed given this latter positioning:

"Recent research by an American physician, F. Zugibe, challenged the earlier studies of Le Bec and Barbet. Dr. Zugibe agreed that while death by asphyxiation is the probable cause of death when the victim is suspended by his hands, it is no longer tenable when the arms are positioned perpendicular to the torso. To test this hypothesis, Dr. Zugibe suspended student volunteers with special foot and hand supports from a conventional T-shaped cross and monitored their physiological response. According to Dr. Zugibe, the critical issue involved here is the angle of the victim's arms to the upright. If the arms were outstretched, there was no evidence whatsoever of breathing difficulty despite their suspension, which ranged from five to forty-five minutes." (p. 281-282)

With minimal breathing problems throughout the interim on the cross the victim shouldn't have too much trouble speaking. The priest on the news program needs to get up to speed. Certainly no one should be making dogmatic statements about what crucifixion entailed with so little data to go on.

SecWebLurker

I guess there is a lot of unknowns that would make it hard to know today... How high would his head have been from the ground level of the crowd, was a strong wind blowing like it does on hills, was the crowd noisy with crying and moaning, the Roman dice game going on, if there was too many distracting sounds, did Jesus have to yell all these things really loud requiring too much effort of a man hanging on a stick. We may never know.

http://www.shroud.com/pdfs/n52part3.pdf

gives testimony from Dachau victims of similar tortures. They couldn't breath after an hour or so.

SWL is right. We don't even know what position Jesus was executed in, and that makes all the difference.

Michael