Back 2 School

Comment by winstondelgado — August 17, 2007 @ 5:37 pm

Christopher,
Please explain where I have made an ad homenim attack against you. Was it when I guessed you were a 23 year old male?

Despite posting it twice, I really don’t see what brilliant theological gem is lost amongst all your lawyerly rhetoric. If you really want me to ‘relent and say that you might have missed out on what it is really all about.’ maybe you could try plain language for simple folks such as myself to explain what ‘it is really all about’. What I seem to be getting is that you’re saying everyone is evil, except when they find God through your particular idiomatic formulae of belief, except they’re still evil after that. Luther’s theology was ‘a glorious spire’ and Luther was ‘evil’. Am I getting this right? Furthermore, you argue that Luther’s anti-semitic ravings actually proves his theology right by showing how evil, flawed, and wrong he was, even though his theology said that by believing in that theology, you will inherently be good and bear good fruits. I know you have now twice said ‘You think that justification by faith alone means that Luther thought that he, or we, as the case may be, are made actually righteous by faith.’ So, I asked myself, where would I get a silly idea like that? And I thought, and I thought, and then I remembered! Martin Luther gave me that idea!

An Introduction to St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Luther’s German Bible of 1522 by Martin Luther, 1483-1546

“Faith is not what some people think it is. Their human dream is a delusion. Because they observe that faith is not followed by good works or a better life, they fall into error, even though they speak and hear much about faith. “Faith is not enough,” they say, “You must do good works, you must be pious to be saved.” They think that, when you hear the gospel, you start working, creating by your own strength a thankful heart which says, “I believe.” That is what they think true faith is. But, because this is a human idea, a dream, the heart never learns anything from it, so it does nothing and reform doesn’t come from this `faith,’ either.

Instead, faith is God’s work in us, that changes us and gives new birth from God. (John 1:13). It kills the Old Adam and makes us completely different people. It changes our hearts, our spirits, our thoughts and all our powers. It brings the Holy Spirit with it. Yes, it is a living, creative, active and powerful thing, this faith. Faith cannot help doing good works constantly. It doesn’t stop to ask if good works ought to be done, but before anyone asks, it already has done them and continues to do them without ceasing. Anyone who does not do good works in this manner is an unbeliever. He stumbles around and looks for faith and good works, even though he does not know what faith or good works are. Yet he gossips and chatters about faith and good works with many words.

Faith is a living, bold trust in God’s grace, so certain of God’s favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it. Such confidence and knowledge of God’s grace makes you joyful and bold in your relationship to God and all creatures. The Holy Spirit makes this happen through faith. Because of it, you freely, willingly and joyfully do good to everyone, serve everyone, suffer all kinds of things, love and praise the God who has shown you such grace. Thus, it is just as impossible to separate faith and works as it is to separate heat and light from fire! Therefore, watch out for your own false ideas and guard against good-for-nothing gossips, who think they’re smart enough to define faith and works, but really are the greatest of fools. Ask God to work faith in you, or you will remain forever without faith, no matter what you wish, say or can do

It would seem that Luther is arguing that faith makes you ‘freely, willingly, and joyfully do good to everyone, blah, blah, blah’. Someone better tell Luther that Christopher Neiswonger disagrees with him!

I do understand the idea of evil and original sin. I am very familiar with Catholicism. I don’t agree with it, either. This doesn’t mean that I think that I’m ‘good’. For me, faith is something that I have to struggle with on a daily basis as my guide for what is right and wrong. It’s not a simple choice that’s made once, because if it were, everyone would have made it a long time ago and we would all be living in paradise. I don’t have certainty that everything I do is good. I doubt myself so that I may improve myself. I don’t believe I’m completely helpless, lost, or opposed to God. God has blessed me with the gifts of reason and the Word. The rest is up to me.
So, have I met your latest argument? Are you going to get around to any of mine that you’ve left lying unanswered? I would really like to get back to where this discussion started. Do you believe that Jehovah is something like an invisible giant in the sky as he is described in the Old Testament? Do you really believe that God knocked over a bridge to get our attention? If your answer is positive to either of these questions, then I would like an explanation as to why this god did not intervene in a more obvious way during the Holocaust. Also do you really believe that people should seek a Divine Mandate to justify their actions? If they seek this justification and then are successful in their actions, does this indicate that the Divine Mandate was granted? If so, then please explain what happened on 9/11.

There’s plenty of other things I would love to ask you, but if you just got to these few items I would be immensely satisfied.
-WD

Dissecting the Discussion

Christopher, I have reread what you wrote and decided you merited a better response than I gave. For the sake of clarity, I reviewed our discussion and this is how I see it.  

I said that ‘God doesn’t smash stuff to make a point’ 
You said, ‘God does smash stuff to make a point’. Then you gave a paraphrase of what you think God is saying to us. 
I responded that ‘Your paraphrase of God sounds like the self-justified rantings of an abusive alcoholic parent. Sorry, but the idea that God is hovering right over us waiting to smash our buildings and bridges if we don’t behave is simply childish. God Almighty has nothing to do with the poor structural engineering of a bridge in Minneapolis.’ 
You then ducked out of that thread and started this one, where you put quotation marks around the phrase ‘God is an abusive parent you’re just too childish to understand thing’ and then attributed it to me. You then quoted Satan’s dialogue from a ten year old movie and argued with that as if it were me. You made statements like , ‘We take the Scriptures seriously as a source of information about God and the way He does things, and for you, this makes us childish.’I need to pause here for a moment to point out exactly how much of the hostility you percieve I am emanating is actually coming out of your own psyche. You either have a tremendous persecution complex or are being duplicitous in the extreme. I never said anything about you being childish. That’s one of the things you added in your ‘reinterpretation’ of what I said.  Then you made a bunch of snide remarks about how I didn’t really believe in God and that if I did believe in God, my God was a weak, confused and feminine. You said you believed in the Old Testament God and then you quoted Deuteronomy 8: 1-20. 

I responded. I asked you the first in a series of questions you have left unanswered: You say, ‘Any God that will not act appropriately in response to moral evil is insufficient for our obvious and actual need. A real God must be more sturdy.’ Where was this sturdy God during when six million Jews were offered up to him in the Holocaust (the word itself means a sacrifice completely consumed by fire), or when the planes hit on 9/11? Did God favor the Muslims that day? I contend that during the Holocaust God was in the hearts of people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who tried to do something about it. I contend that God was in the hearts of the firefighters and cops who ran into those towers and God was in the hearts of the soldiers who ran into the inferno to rescue their fellows and God was in the hearts of the passengers who rushed the cockpit.’ 
What say you to this? This is part of the original question we were discussing, after all. 

I supported the above response with the parable of the Good Samaritan. I then spent some time pointing out to you that I wasn’t a pantheist as you insinuated/alleged in your previous post. Then I explained to you that just because something is on your TV or in your newspaper, it doesn’t necessarily mean that God also considers it a ‘major event of the day’. 

I then offended you tremendously by saying that I believed in Jesus while you seemed to believe in ‘an invisible giant that lives in the sky’. You spent a most of your response to this complaining about my use of this phrase. I have come to decide that the reason this upset you so much is that you perhaps do imagine God as an invisible giant that lives in the sky, much as Jehovah is literally depicted in the Old Testament. If this is truly the case, I am very interested to hear the details of your cosmology as they must be very fascinatingly unique. Of course, you may have just been jumping on the one snarky thing I said so that you wouldn’t have to address anything else.  

In the chatter between your response and my response, you made some Pharisee jokes with a troll and I thought that perhaps you had lightened up. So I told you a story. At this point, Christopher, I need to be perfectly clear with you: These are the things that I know about you: what you’ve written on this page. That’s it. I am guessing that you’re a male around 23 years of age, but quite frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised or taken aback if you were an elderly woman. The point I am trying to make here is that I don’t know you and all I know about you is what you tell me, which is why I don’t spend a lot of words in my posts telling you what’s inside your head and heart. You, on the other hand, are very presumptuous on that count, to say nothing of being hilariously off the mark. In your response, you made it clear that you were conceding or admitting nothing. That’s fine, but it means that every point I’ve mentioned here is still hanging over our conversation. If you wonder why I don’t think you’re the most upright and honest person I’ve ever dealt with, then look at how you have dealt with me.  

Rather than take the story of ‘Melanethon’ as the metaphor it so clearly is, you decided to take the tact of arguing literally from Melanethons’ point of view. Then you presented reams of quotes from Luther and the Augsburg Confession, which officially says (among other things)‘Also they teach that this faith is bound to bring forth good
fruits, and that it is necessary to do good works commanded by
God, because of God’s will, but that we should not rely on
those works to merit justification before God.’  
Now, Christopher, look at the first sentence of that statement. ‘This faith is bound to bring forth good fruits’. That is one hell of a presumption to make, and in the centuries since the Augsburg Confession was written, it is abundantly clear that simple faith alone does not cause good fruits. The rest of the passage is not very enthusiastic about ‘charity’, either. However, I don’t feel that I really need to argue with the Augsburg Confession, anyway. You’ve gone running behind the skirts of medieval theologians because you can’t answer the simple questions I’ve raised in response to outrageous statements you’ve made.  

So, after having retreated from the idea that ‘God does smash stuff up to make a point’, and refusing to acknowledge or answer clear counterarguments. (I’m still waiting to hear you defend your idea that ‘everyone should try to justify their actions with a Divine Mandate’) you have decided to tell me what I think, and not surprisingly, you got it wrong.  The reason I told you the story of ‘Melanethon’ is that you seem quite certain of your theology yet when I met you, you were sneering at compassion. When you didn’t know that I knew at least as much as you, you treated me with scorn and contempt (actually, you still do). You behaved with unearned arrogance. You have disrespected me and my loved ones while singing your own praises. I don’t give a fig about medievalist arguments about the nature of this or that any more than I seriously worry about the Platonic Forms. The point was that God wants us to display compassion to each other, not rhetorical panegyrics. I’m not getting that compassion from you, buddy. I’m just getting a lot of caviling over trifles and lawyerly grandstanding. 

Now, let’s see if you do understand what I was talking about-You said,  ‘Now, I think that I have gone to great lengths to explain both historic evangelicalism and that your understanding of it is flawed, but you haven’t even bothered to relent and say that you might have missed out on what it is really all about. It is a rich understanding that hundreds of millions of Christians have embraced with great joy. I think you should at least have the open mindedness to understand the position before casting it aside with spite and derogation.’ 
No. I reject your doctrine, Christopher. Are you going to kill me?

-WD 

 PS-You’re not evil. You’re forgiven.   

III Letter to Christopher Neiswonger

Christopher– 

What an extraordinary letter you wrote! I don’t know how you can call yourself an ‘uneducated Christian’ with a straight face. Just for the sake of clarity and the record, the only place I have ever graduated from was a public high school, and that was a couple of decades ago. While I am not illiterate, unlettered or entirely uneducated, I do not live in an ivory tower. I suspect that while you might not live in one, your off-campus housing is probably not that far from one.

Even though you claim that you are not inferring that I am presenting a doctrine exactly the same as the Pharisees,( ‘Just to be on point Winston, the doctrine you are presenting is exactly, not inferentially, the doctrine of the Pharisees.) you certainly do a lot of inferring.  

We need to remember here that it wasn’t I who brought poor beleaguered Melanchthon into the discussion. You used him as I would think an exemplar of what you do not like. Of a thing you do not love and why you do not love it.      

You see, Christopher, when you actually come out and say ‘as I would think an exemplar of what you do not likeyou are absolutely making an inference. As I thought I had made clear, I wasn’t bringing ‘poor beleaguered Melanchthon into the discussion’, I was giving some context to an obscure tale called ‘Melanethon’. I cannot think that I could have introduced him more innocuously to the dialogue: 

“Philipp Melanchthon was one of the founding theologians of the Lutheran faith. Emmanuel Swedenborg disagreed with Melanchthon’s insistence of Sola Fide, the argument that salvation can be achieved through faith alone regardless of deeds.”

When I told you the story I was giving you the benefit of the doubt and did not actually think you had a fervent opinion about this particular theologian, let alone know who he is. I said this already, but perhaps you need to hear it again without the jokes. I told you that story because it seemed like a very appropriate story to tell you, not because I hate Phillip Melanchthon.  You then make an argument about how all of the documents you have presented are ‘official’. As you say, ‘Your premise was that justification by faith alone was not only untrue but the cause of this or that flaw in the moral sentiments of a people. I was careful to quote official documents, creeds and confessions, not because being official makes them right or wrong but simply because it makes them official, and being official removes the haggard doubt that someone might be representing something other than what the belief in question is actually. So it doesn’t really help for you to object against the official-ness of the documentation. Who complains because a document is official? Is being official something that makes a writing inherently suspect? It implies that you would rather have a grab bag of half-baked opinions than some clear thought well argued positions that can actually be considered with a certain level of sincere gravity. Thousands of scholars trained in theology, philosophy and original languages are just better at putting together thoughts that will be carefully measured

Aside from the fact this argument is the most literal example of the logical fallacy of the ‘appeal to authority’ that I have ever personally encountered (and why it merits full quotation to truly appreciate it’s rare beauty), I feel the need to point out to you that by complaining about my questioning of authority you really undercut your accusation of my pharisaical nature. My contention remains that blind certainty of one’s own goodness or rightness is not spiritually healthy and will lead to grievous moral and ethical lapses. To give the Lutherans a break, I will use the Vatican for the simplest possible example to illustrate my point. The current occupant of the Papacy spent many of the years of his career before attaining his high office silencing the child victims of rape by clergy and protecting those rapist priests from prosecution. He has recently reaffirmed the self-justified notion that he speaks infallibly and that his faith his perfect, in the sense that all others are flawed. There are a billion souls that identify themselves as Catholic alive on the Earth right now. That means there’s a lot of people and a lot of very learned theological authorities (admittedly, almost all of them Catholics) who would agree with him. Does this make him (and them) right?  

I am not attacking Lutherans. I haven’t shared my story of witness with you yet, but one of the key moments in that story involves the Lutheran Church, and one of my very best friends is a Lutheran seminarian, and he hasn’t taken any of the hysterical offense that you seem to be displaying. A Divine Mandate is to say that something is God’s Will, and it is not up to men to decide that God endorses their actions. Suicide bombers and pilots believe that they have a Divine Mandate for their actions. Pro-Lifers that shoot doctors believe they have a Divine Mandate. Maniacs who shoot up churches believe they have a Divine Mandate. I could go on, but I must take the time to state that I seriously disagree with your statement that ‘‘Everyone should try to justify their actions with a Divine mandate.’.’ Instead, I would argue that the world would be a better place if nobody tried to justify their actions with a divine mandate, but rather seek to make their actions one which would win the approval of the Divine Mandate:

 Mark 12: 28One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”  29“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.^[e] 30Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’^[f] 31The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’^[g]There is no commandment greater than these.”  32“Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. 33To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”  34When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.

I believe my argument against the specific point I am trying to emphasize to you was solid, but I will restate it. You expressed disappointment that I quoted so little from what you so copiously quoted and somehow equated my argument with avoidance and ‘ad hominem’ attack. I don’t really know what the ad hominem part was, but as you avoided mentioning Luther’s writing regarding the Jews, I’ll assume that’s what you were talking about. Again, I will explain. Here is the final paragraph of what you originally quoted to me:‘

‘Faith is a living, bold trust in God’s grace, so certain of God’s favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it. Such confidence and knowledge of God’s grace makes you joyful and bold in your relationship to God and all creatures. The Holy Spirit makes this happen through faith. Because of it, you freely, willingly and joyfully do good to everyone, serve everyone, suffer all kinds of things, love and praise the God who has shown you such grace. Thus, it is just as impossible to separate faith and works as it is to separate heat and light from fire! Therefore, watch out for your own false ideas and guard against good-for-nothing gossips, who think they’re smart enough to define faith and works, but really are the greatest of fools. Ask God to work faith in you, or you will remain forever without faith, no matter what you wish, say or can do.”  

   What you are saying to me is that this statement should be accepted as truth. Well, we have the benefit of historical hindsight and can actually view a person’s words and ideas within the context of their lives. It would be an ‘ad hominem’ attack in our argument for me to accuse you of being, say, a Pharisee, and rejecting everything you say based on that. To judge a dead man’s words within the context of their life’s writings and deeds is another thing entirely. Luther spent a good deal of his life failing to convert the Jewish people to his religion. Three years before his death he wrote ‘On the Jews and Their Lies’ and ‘On Christ and His Holy Lineage’ which were both powerfully anti-Semitic screeds full of angry, ugly lies that ultimately called for the murder of all Jewish people that went through five printings before he died.    

 Luke 9:51- 51As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem. 52And he sent messengers on ahead, who went into a Samaritan village to get things ready for him; 53but the people there did not welcome him, because he was heading for Jerusalem. 54When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?” 55But Jesus turned and rebuked them, 56and they went to another village. 

This is a different quote from a different Gospel, but it alone should have been enough to tell so learned and wise a scholar as Martin Luther that you don’t kill people for rejecting your message of perfect divine love. Furthermore, this should also serve to illustrate that Luther did not live out his own theology in a very fundamental way and that his self-justifications were only that and that he had no Divine Mandate. Does this mean all his works are bad or all his teachings are mistaken? No. But it does invalidate the idea that faith alone makes you good. 

You are correct, the axiom that ‘it is absurd to think that simply believing one is good makes one good’ is mine. I take full responsibility for it, and therefore I should explain myself. I will begin by stating that I’ve never met someone who actually believed they themselves were evil, but many people who have fervently believed that they were good even when there was scant evidence for the good they had done to anyone in their lives. In my own life every time I have most grievously erred I was absolutely certain of my own rightness, correctness, and goodness in my actions at the time. Every time I have watched a friend or family member make a terrible mistake they too were unshakable in the certainty of their own righteousness. When one reads the letters and diaries of unrepentant murderers and tyrants, they are testaments to those individuals’ certainty of the righteousness of their actions.  

Jesus did not encourage people to accept the learned teachers of the law unquestioningly. Jesus wanted us to think for ourselves so that we may understand and live the Word. In this, Jesus was concerned with how we showed mercy to each other, to those who transgress against our own selves, not just to those who transgress the Law. Luke 12: 54-59 supports these assertions:    

54He said to the crowd: “When you see a cloud rising in the west, immediately you say, ‘It’s going to rain,’ and it does. 55And when the south wind blows, you say, ‘It’s going to be hot,’ and it is. 56Hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky. How is it that you don’t know how to interpret this present time?  57“Why don’t you judge for yourselves what is right? 58As you are going with your adversary to the magistrate, try hard to be reconciled to him on the way, or he may drag you off to the judge, and the judge turn you over to the officer, and the officer throw you into prison. 59I tell you, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny.

Finally, since I had neglected to provide you with the doctrine you accuse me of propagating, you thoughtfully provided one for me in the form of this false juxtaposition of ideas: 

Love, Law, Works. Obedience. Salvation is a debt God owes us. (Pharisees)

Faith, Grace, Mercy. Forgiveness. Salvation is a gift God gives us. (Christians)

I suppose since I’m denying both of the options you’ve presented me with, I’ll give you the one I actually chose:

Matthew 5:17“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. 

‘We are forgiven, but we must work for our reward.’ (What I hear Jesus saying)

 -Winston Delgado

Letter to Christopher Neiswonger

I posted a few comments here, and that resulted in the above gentleman writing this response to something I said. The below is my response to his response. 

Christopher,
Let me begin by apologizing for misidentifying you. The way your masthead appears on my screen I read your name as ‘Neiswonger, Douglas’. Obviously the error was mine. Secondly, I did not engage in any name-calling. I laid out a garment and you are the one who decided it was cut to your fit. I didn’t tell you to put it on. Thirdly, do not misquote me. I wrote; ‘Your paraphrase of God sounds like the self-justified rantings of an abusive alcoholic parent.’ You put the following in quotations: “god is an abusive parent you’re just too childish to understand thing”. This is not what I wrote and is significantly different in tone and meaning. I did not say that God is an abusive parent and I didn’t say that you are too childish to understand God. Obviously, your misquotation is how you internalized my comment and there’s nothing I can do about that except to encourage you to read more closely. Seeing as how I mistook your name, we can all take a lesson in that. 

I have not seen ‘The Devil’s Advocate’, and generally don’t use Hollywood movies as a source for slaking my spiritual thirst. I find them childish. It seems to me that you really don’t want to address anything I said so have instead pulled out a convenient strawman in the persona of the Devil from a ten year old movie and have decided to argue with that and call it me. That’s fine. You sure did show that old devil.  

You say, ‘Any God that will not act appropriately in response to moral evil is insufficient for our obvious and actual need. A real God must be more sturdy.’ Where was this sturdy God when six million Jews were offered up to him in the Holocaust (the word itself means a sacrifice completely consumed by fire), or when the planes hit on 9/11? Did God favor the Muslims that day? I contend that during the Holocaust God was in the hearts of people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who tried to do something about it. I contend that God was in the hearts of the firefighters and cops who ran into those towers and God was in the hearts of the soldiers who ran into the inferno to rescue their fellows and God was in the hearts of the passengers who rushed the cockpit.

I base this fervent belief on the parable of the Good Samaritan. A lawyer in the audience asked Jesus how to attain eternal life. And Jesus said, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself.’ The lawyer agreed and then, trying to find a loophole, asked, ‘who is my neighbor?’ So Jesus tell the story of a man who is beaten and robbed on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. He is passed first by a priest, who sees him and avoids him, probably because to dirty himself with blood would have violated his purity. Then a Levite, a member of the tribe of Israel that has special religious duties to the Temple sees the man and passes him by as well. Then an enemy of the Jews, a Samaritan comes upon the man and comes to his aid and takes him to an inn where he pays for the man’s lodging. Jesus asked the lawyer, ‘Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell among the thieves?’ The lawyer can’t even bring himself to say the Samaritan, but acknowledges that the man who helped was his neighbor. Jesus then says, ‘Go, and do thou likewise. ‘

I’m not certain why I have to explain that the Greek philosophers understood that their deities were metaphors and that they believed in a single God beyond all of them. However, you seem to be accusing me of being a pantheist, so I suppose I must start correcting you by pointing out that your example of pantheism isn’t a particularly good one. But then, most of this paragraph is devoted to nothing more than you deciding my idea of God is that of an effeminate pansy based on your assumptions about my idea of God. However, you do say a couple of interesting things that give some perspective as to your idea of God. 

You refer to ‘my God’ not caring about the ‘major events of the day’, implying that ‘your God’ cares about the ‘major events of the day’. ‘The major event of the day’ we were discussing was a bridge collapse in which thirteen people may have died. Certainly the loss of life is tragic, but over a hundred people died that same day in traffic accidents across the country, to say nothing of the countless tragic occurrences across the planet. Does God consider the bridge collapse a ‘major event of the day’ because it was all over the TV and newspapers?

If we could be at the center of the world on the night Christ was crucified, we would think that it would be outside His tomb, but that’s not what anyone living at that time would have thought. No, at that time the center of the world was in Rome in the person of the Emperor. And if we were there and could speak to this man who was considered by millions to have been god incarnate, we could tell him that on this night, God incarnate was crucified outside of Jerusalem by Pilate. Then we could tell him that in mere centuries his empire would worship this crucified Jew as God and that one day his palace, the Senate, and the entire Forum would be stripped bare to build a tomb, not for the crucified Jew, but his fisherman friend (who that very same night three times denied even knowing his Lord!). Such a tale would be considered quite fantastic indeed by the mightiest and wisest men of that time. Do not think you can be certain as to what God considers ‘a major event’.

You seem to be saying that you believe in an angry invisible giant who lives in the sky. I believe in Jesus. If you think that compassion is weakness, then you can have no strength. If you think that women are weak, then you don’t understand strength. If you think that you can contain God in your mind, then your God is a weak shadow of your own neurotic narcissism. I may look like I stand alone without a shield or sword, but that is a mistake people often make when they meet me. I wear my faith on my sleeve and between my lips I wield a flaming blade I call ‘Sarcasticus’. If he left you singed, be thankful I didn’t try to cut you.  I’ll presume to be honored that you thought my response merited an entire blog posting (as opposed to thinking that you wanted a new venue where your misquote might not be caught out) and return the favor. Thank you for your time in considering my words.
–Winston Delgado