John Cuthber

Crucifixion is designed to kill you slowly. So it's conceivable that some people lived long enough to be assumed dead. OK, so it's some soldiers job to stick a spear in but why would he bother to do anything but a half hearted job? Perhaps someone even slipped him a few pieces of silver "because they didn't want anyone to disturb the body of the man they worshipped". If I had been the soldier, I might have taken the money- why not? the guy's dead anyway. So it's perfectly possible that they did just scratch the skin. Unfortunately, I realise that faking that box is going to work roughly as well as selling a second hand parachute- only used once. The whole point about Christ is that he didn't die so he's never need a coffin (nor, in due course, an ossuary).

Perhaps, but between now and then there would have to be a lot of consultations that go something like this Well, Mrs Smith, I can offer you two therapies. One is well established and known to be successful. The child you would have would have half its DNA from you and half from a donor. You can (to an extent) select that donor for characteristics that resemble your husband- for example hair and eye colour. Alternatively, we can offer you an experimental therapy. Based on animal tests there;'s a poor chance of success. The child is likely to suffer from any of a number of birth defects and you are likely to have several long-term ill children (not to mention many miscarriages and still-births) before you get a healthy child. however, that child will have the same DNA as you (give or take a few mutations). Perhaps it's just me, but I think that a woman who chooses the second option shouldn't have children.

What's the point of cloning people? We are very nearly genetically identical anyway- that's why we can all interbreed. The cheap; fairly simple, and well-documented process of having children is very very nearly cloning yourself.

I know it because I read a lot. I assume from what you said that you did not know it. Since you didn't know it, and you have just implied that you wouldn't expect to know it, why did you post a reply that is wrong and where you knew that you didn't have any understanding of the issues? Incidentally,I suspect that this sort of thing is more commonly used to measure fat in food these days. http://www.oxford-instruments.com/OxfordInstruments/media/industrial-analysis/magnetic-resonance-pdfs/Using-Nuclear-Magnetic-Resonance-to-Test-Fat-Content-in-Foods.pdf

Not really. They are all very similar. All fats give about 9 Calories per gram.

There are lots of possibilities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor Zinc sulphide doped with copper is one of the commoner ones.

Good point, why would a man who didn't die have an ossuary?

OK, so it's authentic. There were three dead blokes in one family with those names. So what? Did you consider that, perhaps ten minutes, rather than 3, with Google might address the issues you raised? OK, so the guy's work pre-dates Google, but it's not a lot of effort for an experienced forger hoping to make something like 100,000 or a million pounds. EDIT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_alphabet

Well, a few minutes of googling got me "Joseph" and "son of" http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Levantine_-_Jewish_Ossuary_-_Walters_23240_-_Detail_A.jpg

At the risk of dragging up an old aspect of this thread, there was some discussion earlier about vanity publishing and the quality of their peer review process. I have found a paper that explains it. it's not suitable for work; here's an indirect reference. http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/11/20/bogus-journal-accepts-profanity-laced-anti-spam-paper/

Whether I have forged a document or not isn't the point. Someone who had access to the tools of that trade could do so. While Oded Golan was acquitted of forging there was still the fact that he had the tools needed. For legal reasons I will assume that Oded bought the article in good faith from a forger. That just requires that there's a forger out there somewhere. Well, there are lots.

I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't matter. All I have to so is look at other inscriptions on graves and ossuaries of the time and place and work out which ones mean Joseph etc. That's not a great challenge for a collector of antiquities. Then I copy them. I don't need to know the language any more than a photocopier does.

It's complicated. Things like tis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_transport move things in and out of cells etc.

Come off it. We have already agreed that the names were not rare at the time. So, all he needed to do was copy the script for "Jesus" James", "Son of Joseph", and either copy (or make up) "Brother of". Since there are few examples of "brother of" there's no way to say whether or not it looks like the "correct" script for that phrase at that time. You don't need to be a genius to copy text- five year olds regularly manage it. If you spent a day thinking about it, and yet you didn't realise that , you truly wasted that day.

The idea that governments have engineered the creation of a problem as an excuse for some sort of response would be credible if it were not for the fact that the governments are cutting research funding in many or most fields. No government created this problem deliberately. Sure they may exaggerate it or belittle it depending on which way they want to influence things, but you only need to look at weather records to see that something really is happening. Half the politicians were trying to deny the problem existed until recently- essentially the ones funded by oil. That's not social engineering, it's straightforward greed.

Would you say that because you want to believe, or because you think there is valid evidence? In particular, why do you think it is the Jesus, Joseph and James rather than just some other Jesus, Joseph and James? None of those names was rare at the time.

I keep being reminded of this idea http://www.zazzle.co.uk/will_convert_for_evidence_shirt-235354307506827804

Leading in the very real sense of following. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_1956 or signing up to the Kyoto protocol, but never actually ratifying it. http://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/status_of_ratification/items/2613.php

The problem is that the church explicitly refuses to accept independent thinking. So it collects all the people who are unwilling, or unable to think for themselves,- and, since they are all that it has, they make them bishops. The only way to change this would be for religious groups to admit that they are wrong about many things. That's not going to happen.

No, Apparently not. because if they were all copying from the same mistake, you or people like you would have pointed the mistake out by now. Whereas what you actually do is just say "they are wrong"

OK,let's say that the papers typically give an error margin at the 95% confidence interval. And lets say there are a hundred of them. Then the odds of them all being wrong is of the order of 0.05 ^100 According to my calculator, that's zero. it's obviously wrong, but for practical purposes it's near enough.

No, but now you come to mention it this is http://www.scienceforums.net/index.php?app=forums&module=extras&section=boardrules and it says Preaching and "soap-boxing" (making topics or posts without inviting, or even rejecting, open discussion) are not allowed. This is a discussion forum, not your personal lecture hall. Discuss points, don't just repeat them.and saying that you refuse to back up your assertion is refusal to discuss the issue.

It doesn't work that way.you can't just slander a group of people and refuse to back it up.

The OT isn't going to tell you a lot about the history of Christ since it was written before he (allegedly) existed. The NT is pretty much definitely Christian. So what we are looking for is testimony from someone reliable who saw the resurrected Christ, after his crucifixion, but who isn't a Christian. That's probably not going to happen. Of course it's possible that someone saw Him when He should have been dead and came to the conclusion that they somehow botched the execution. If they did, would they be likely to record it- probably not, for two reasons. They probably couldn't write and they would have got grief for pointing out that the authorities messed up. If such a record had been made then it would have been unusual in that both "sides" would have wanted it destroyed. It undermined the roots of Christianity so their followers wouldn't want it known about. and the authorities wouldn't want it documented that they messed up. Not very long afterwards when Christianity took off both those "sides" would have been the same bunch of people.

Good point, but do you realise that experiments are often done on a small scale? So, while there isn't an "experiment" to see the effect of the added CO2 (arguably there is- what's missing isn't the experiment, but the control) there are may experiments that do other things like measure the absorption spectrum of CO2, Experiments found out what the isotopic signature of the CO2 in the atmosphere is. I guess you could frame the tallying up of the tax / duty revenues charged on oil in order to calculate the amount we have added to the atmosphere as a measurement. It's not just a mathematical model. Nobody sat down with a blank sheet of paper and tried to dead reckon the behaviour of the atmosphere. All the science they use is based on observation, measurement and experiment.