The Most Astounding Fact
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#bring back our girls: immeasurable splendor can be traced to purposeful human action, but in equal measure abhorring is the wickedness borne of humans
Many things have astounded the human species as time progressed; the discovery of fire, the variety of species, the atomic bomb, etc. Many of these we have understood, but there remains few facts of human achievement that have eluded our minds. Like the seven wonders; think for an instance about the The Great Pyramid; some have argued that it couldn't possibly have been built by humans; the build has such precision that our current technology cannot replicate it. It baffles archaeologists, scientists, astronomers and tourists.
Built by Aliens?
· Built over a 10 to 20-year period around 2560 BC.
· The pyramid of Khufu has 2,300,000 blocks each 2 to 50 tons;
· Modern construction can't move a 50 ton block to such heights
· The Pyramids are precisely aligned with the Constellation of Orion.
· Constant interior temperature that equals the average temperature of the earth, 20 Degrees Celsius (68 Degrees Fahrenheit).
· The outer mantle was composed of 144,000 highly polished casing stones, flat to an accuracy of 1/100th of an inch, about 100 inches thick and weighing approx. 15 tons each.
· The casing stones reflected the sun's light and made the pyramid shine like a jewel.
· The original pyramid with its casing stones reflected light so powerful that it would be visible from the moon
· Radio activity inside the pyramid has suggested that it sends a beacon into space
· The cornerstone foundations have ball and socket joints to deal with heat expansion and earthquakes.
· The mortar used is of an unknown origin (Yes, no explanation given). Its chemical composition is known but it can't be reproduced. It is stronger than the stone and still holding up today.
· The most accurately aligned structure in existence and faces true north with only 3/60th of a degree of error.
· The position of the North Pole moves over time and the pyramid was exactly aligned at one time.
· Center of the land mass of the earth. The east/west parallel and the north/south meridian that cross the most land intersect in two places on the earth, one in the ocean and the other at the Great Pyramid.
· The granite coffer in the "King's Chamber" was made out of a block of solid granite. This would have required bronze saws 8-9 ft. long set with teeth of sapphires & 2 ton drill force
· The pyramid had a swivel door, weighing some 20 tons, which was so well balanced that it could be opened by pushing out from the inside with only minimal force, but when closed, was so perfect a fit that it could scarcely be detected and there was not enough crack or crevice around the edges to gain a grasp from the outside.
· Science of the 10^8 & Pi:
o The weight Multiplied by 10^8 gives a reasonable estimate of the earth's mass.
o Twice the perimeter of the bottom of the granite coffer times 10^8 is the sun's mean radius.
o The curvature designed into the faces of the pyramid exactly matches the radius of the earth.
o The relationship between Pi (p) and Phi (F) is expressed in the fundamental proportions of the Great Pyramid.
The most astounding fact:
I googled 'The most astounding fact" and came up with;
"When I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up — many people feel small, 'cause they're small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars."
Astrophysicists Neil deGrasse Tyson: The youtube link to this video has received more than 6 million views.
'We are a part of the source, and the source is within us' sounds like a beaten path to me. I have written numerously about this; the main protagonists being eastern philosophers and religions. Whereas Christianity also propagates the notion of the spirit of God dwelling in us, and Christ living in us through our Christ like lives, Christianity does principally put distinction between God and mere men. The first four of the 'Ten Commandments' clearly forbid the comparison of God to any other and establishes the sovereigntyof monotheism (believe in only one true God). It also clearly warns of an emergence of an era in which people would compare themselves to God and even of 'false Christs'.
So Neil's astrophycists claim should be taken with a bitter, sobering pinch. If asked, I would not hesitate to point the events of one Passover weekend in Jerusalem as The Most Astounding fact of all human existence. On a Thursday night, a string of events unfolded in a manner that shocks the world to date. As had been foretold, and as he Himself had predicted a minimum of four times, a Jewish man was arrested by his own, tried and found guilty of a crime he had not committed. He was then flogged, mocked, spat on, stripped nude and insulted. on the afternoon of Friday, he was nailed to a Roman cross and on the 6th hour the earth was engulfed in darkness for 3 hours; then to the exact hour as had been foretold, at the top of the 9th hour He cried out 'it's finished' and gave up his soul, and as he died, the earth shook as if to mourn his death.
But wait …. wait just a moment, that was not the end of the bizarre happenings….. 
They brought down his body and buried it, and rolled a two ton stone to cover the tomb, and put a 24hr guard around the tomb because they feared the body would be stolen…. But come Sunday morning, again exactly as had been foretold, the stone was found rolled and the tomb empty. The guards had seen nor heard nothing. Now, all the above happenings can somehow be logically thought through; Maybe the darkness could have been a solar eclipse, the earthquake could have been coincidental, and the timings of his arrest, trial and death could have been carefully planned to coincide with the symbolic slaughter of the Easter lamb; but no logical explanation can be given for what happened after that Sunday morning.
Starting with some women, people begun to narrate citing of the same man alive; a resurrected man walking among the living? And especially after predicting that it would be so? Was it really true that Christ rose from the dead? This story was able to persist even under intense censure and become the foundation of the biggest religion on earth; against all odds, a small band of Jesus followers prevailed.
Was Jesus Dead?
The dead do not bleed: Some Skeptical medics have argued referring to the fact that a mixture of blood and water flowed out when Jesus was pierced with a spear. The 'Swoon theory' argues that Jesus lived through the crucifixion and was revived by the cool, damp air in the tomb. It therefore is important that we must first establish that there was, in fact, a corpse. An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association explains why the theory is untenable: 
"Clearly, the weight of historical and medical evidence indicated that Jesus was dead. The spear, thrust between His right ribs, probably perforated not only the right lung, but also the pericardium and heart and thereby ensured His death. The dead do not bleed, ordinarily, but the right auricle of the human heart holds liquid blood after death, and the outer sac hold a serum called hydropericardium."
Grave Robbing?
Many people at that time, and even today have questioned how Jesus' body disappeared from the tomb.The Jewish leaders accused the disciples of stealing the body. But the Romans had assigned a 24-hour trained guard unit (from four to 16 soldiers). Josh McDowell notes that these were not ordinary soldiers.
"– if they fell asleep, left their position, or failed in any way – they were stripped of their own clothes, burned alive in a fire started with their own garments or they are crucified upside down. The Roman Guard unit was committed to discipline and they feared failure in any way."
Yet the stone was moved away and the body of Jesus was missing. If Jesus' body was anywhere to be found, his enemies would have quickly exposed the resurrection as a fraud. McDowell summarizes the strength of this argument:
With an event so well publicized, don't you think that it's reasonable that one historian, one eye witness, one antagonist would record for all time that he had seen Christ's body? … The silence of history is deafening when it comes to the testimony against the resurrection.
So, with no body for evidence, and with a known tomb clearly empty, we are faced with the possibility of accepting the evidence as solid that Jesus' body had somehow disappeared from the tomb.
Wrong Tomb?
The tomb belonged to a member of the Sanhedrin Council, Joseph of Arimathea. In Israel at that time, to be on the council was to be a rock star. Everyone knew who was on the council. Joseph's tomb would have been at a well-known location and easily identifiable, so any thoughts of Jesus being "lost in the graveyard" would need to be dismissed. You know what, whether it was a robbed or wrong tomb, there was no way Jesus' enemies would have allowed the "empty tomb myth" to just persist. It is reasonable to argue that every crevice in that graveyard and beyond must have been searched for the purposes of instantly killing the Jesus movement.
Empty tomb, so what?
You know my friends, the most astounding fact of all human existence; atleast by me, is not the empty tomb; Is it then the circumstances of his death? Yes, those were perplexing, but then there are not totally above the limits of what's conceivable. It is the behavior of the Jesus followers that's mind blowing; they were mourning, hiding & galvanized. The Jesus movement had been effectively nicked in the bud. Up until then, Christianity would never have been, then suddenly their behavior changed, something extraordinary must have happened for they ceased mourning, ceased hiding, and began fearlessly proclaiming Jesus as Christ even against very ruthless persecution. This is a fact of history that has stumped historians, psychologists, and skeptics alike; that these eleven former cowards were suddenly willing to suffer humiliation, torture, and death; all but one of Jesus' disciples were slain as martyrs. Would they have done so much for a lie, knowing they had taken the body?
So what then did really happened?
Whoever comes to this problem has sooner or later to confront a fact that cannot be explained away … This fact is that a profound conviction came to the little group of people. Peter told a crowd in Caesarea what really happened;
"We apostles are witnesses of all he did throughout Israel and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by crucifying him, but God raised him to life three days later … We were those who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.
Acts 10:39-41
He and the other disciples were so convinced Jesus was alive. Historian Paul Johnson, in 'A History of the Jews' wrote,
"What mattered was not the circumstances of his death but the fact that he was widely and obstinately believed, by an expanding circle of people, to have risen again."
Each eyewitness account reports that Jesus suddenly appeared bodily to his followers, the women first. Johnson wondered why conspirators would make women central to its plot. In the first century, women had virtually no rights, personhood, or status. If the plot were to succeed, Johnson reasoned, the conspirators would have portrayed men, not women, as the first to see Jesus alive. And yet we hear that women touched him, spoke with him, and were the first to find the empty tomb.Later, according to the eyewitness accounts, all the disciples saw Jesus on more than ten separate occasions. They wrote that he showed them his hands and feet and told them to touch him. And he reportedly ate with them and later appeared alive to more than 500 followers on one occasion.
Legal scholar John Warwick Montgomery stated,
"In 56 A.D. [the Apostle Paul wrote that over 500 people had seen the risen Jesus and that most of them were still alive. (1 Corinthians 15:6ff.) It passes the bounds of credibility that the early Christians could have manufactured such a tale and then preached it among those who might easily have refuted it simply by producing the body of Jesus."
If the resurrection had not occurred, why would the Apostle Paul give such a list of supposed eyewitnesses? He would immediately lose all credibility with his Corinthian readers by lying so blatantly. Jesus' disciples behaved in a manner consistent with a genuine belief that their leader was alive.No one has adequately explained why the disciples would have been willing to die for a known lie. But even if they all conspired to lie about Jesus' resurrection, how could they have kept the conspiracy going for decades without at least one of them selling out for money or position? Those who lie for personal gain do not stick together very long, especially when hardship decreases the benefits. Chuck Colson, implicated in the Watergate scandal pointed out the difficulty of several people maintaining a lie for an extended period of time.
Early in the morning of June 17, 1972, several burglars were arrested inside the office of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), located in the Watergate building in Washington, D.C. This was no ordinary robbery: The prowlers were connected to President Richard Nixon's re-election campaign, and they had been caught while attempting to wiretap phones and steal secret documents. While historians are not sure whether Nixon knew about the Watergate espionage operation before it happened, he took steps to cover it up afterwards, raising "hush money" for the burglars, trying to stop the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from investigating the crime, destroying evidence and firing uncooperative staff members. In August 1974, after his role in the Watergate conspiracy had finally come to light, the president resigned. The Watergate scandal changed American politics forever, leading many Americans to question their leadership and think more critically about the presidency.
"I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, and then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren't true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world – and they couldn't keep a lie for three weeks. You're telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible."
Were The Disciples Hallucinating?
People still think they see a fat, gray-haired Elvis darting into Dunkin Donuts. And then there are those who believe they spent last night with aliens in the mother ship being subjected to unspeakable testing. Sometimes certain people can "see" things they want to, things that aren't really there. And that's why some have claimed that the disciples were so distraught over the crucifixion that their desire to see Jesus alive caused mass hallucination. Plausible? Psychologist Gary Collins, remarked about the possibility that hallucinations were behind the disciples' radically changed behavior;
"Hallucinations are individual occurrences. By their very nature, only one person can see a given hallucination at a time. They certainly aren't something which can be seen by a group of people."
Hallucination is not even a remote possibility, according to psychologist Thomas J. Thorburn.
"It is absolutely inconceivable that … five hundred persons, of average soundness of mind … should experience all kinds of sensuous impressions – visual, auditory, tactual – and that all these … experiences should rest entirely upon … hallucination."
Furthermore, in the psychology of hallucinations, the person would need to be in a frame of mind where they so wished to see that person that their mind contrives it. Two major leaders of the early church, James and Paul, both state forcefully that they encountered a resurrected Jesus, neither expecting, or hoping for the pleasure. The apostle Paul, in fact, led the earliest persecutions of Christians, and his conversion remains inexplicable except for his own testimony that Jesus appeared to him, resurrected. The hallucination theory, then, appears to be another dead end. What else could explain away the resurrection?
From Lie to Legend
Some unconvinced skeptics attribute the resurrection story to a legend that began with one or more persons lying or thinking they saw the resurrected Jesus. Over time, the legend would have grown and been embellished as it was passed around. On the surface this seems like a plausible scenario. But there are three major problems with that theory.
- First, legends simply don't develop while multiple eyewitnesses are alive to refute them. The resurrection news spread too soon and too quickly for it to have been a legend.
- Second, legends develop by oral tradition and don't come with contemporary historical documents that can be verified. Yet the Gospels were written within three decades of the resurrection.
- Third, the legend theory doesn't adequately explain either the fact of the empty tomb or the historically verified conviction of the apostles that Jesus was alive.
Therefore, the legend theory doesn't seem to hold up any better than other attempts to explain away this amazing claim. Furthermore, the resurrection account of Jesus Christ actually altered history, beginning with the Roman Empire. How could a legend make such an enormous historical impact within such a short time period?
Why Did Christianity Win?
It's bewildering that a tiny insignificant movement was able to prevail over the cunning grip of the Jewish establishment, as well as the might of Rome. Why did it win, in the face of all those odds against it? Within twenty years, the claim of these Galilean peasants had disrupted the Jewish church … In less than fifty years it had begun to threaten the peace of the Roman Empire. When we have said everything that can be said … we stand confronted with the greatest mystery of all. Why did it win? By all rights, if there were no resurrection, Christianity should have died out at the cross when the disciples fled for their lives. But the apostles went on to establish a growing Christian movement.Think of the psychological absurdity of picturing a little band of defeated cowards cowering in an upper room one day and a few days later transformed into a company that no persecution could silence – and then attempting to attribute this dramatic change to nothing more convincing than a miserable fabrication … That simply wouldn't make sense.
A Stunned Professor
Dr. Simon Greenleaf helped to put the Harvard Law School on the map. He wrote the three-volume legal masterpiece A Treatise on the Law of Evidence, which has been called the "greatest single authority in the entire literature of legal procedure."The U.S. judicial system today still relies on rules of evidence established by Greenleaf. As an atheist, he thought miracles to be impossible. Three of his law students challenged him to apply his acclaimed rules of evidence to the resurrection account. After much prodding, Greenleaf began an investigation into the evidence. Focusing his brilliant legal mind on the facts of history, Greenleaf attempted to prove the resurrection account was false.Yet the more Greenleaf investigated, the more stunned he was at the powerful evidence Greenleaf was unable to explain several dramatic changes that took place shortly after Jesus died, the most baffling being the behavior of the disciples. It wasn't just one or two disciples who insisted Jesus had risen; it was all of them. Applying his own rules of evidence to the facts, Greenleaf arrived at his verdict. In a shocking reversal of his position, Greenleaf accepted Jesus' resurrection as the best explanation for the events that took place immediately after his crucifixion. To this brilliant legal scholar and former atheist, it would have been impossible for the disciples to persist with their conviction that Jesus had risen if they hadn't actually seen the risen Christ.In his book The Testimony of the Evangelists, Greenleaf documents the evidence that caused him to change his mind. In his conclusion he challenges those who seek the truth about the resurrection to fairly examine the evidence.Greenleaf was so persuaded by the evidence that he became a committed Christian. He believed that any unbiased person who honestly examines the evidence as in a court of law will conclude what he did – that Jesus Christ has truly risen.
But the resurrection of Jesus Christ raises the question: What does the fact that Jesus defeated death have to do with my life? The answer to that question is personal; If Jesus really did rise from the dead, then he alone must know what is on the other side. What did Jesus say about the meaning of life and our future? Like always, I raise questions that I do not have straight answers to. These are questions that you need to ponder about, and only you can arrive at a personal conclusion to…
References:
· The Most Astounding fact: Neil deGrasse Tyson youtube video
· Did the Resurrection Happen….. Really? Josh McDowell & Dave Sterret, 2010
· A History of the Jews: Paul Johnson, 1987
· Tractatus Logico-Theologicus: John Warwick Montgomery, 2002
· Kingdoms in Conflict: Charles 'Chuck' Colson, Former White Housel Counsel, 1988
· Christian Counseling; Gary R Collins, 2007
· The Testimony of the Evangelists Dr. Simon Greenleaf, 1846
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