Saw this on TV this morning, cannot find an online site.
This pisses me off, am I wrong?
Sometime last summer, there was a mock trial conducted in the US Senate chamber, in the question over whether Jesus was REALLY resurrected from the dead after 3 days. It was not held by the Senate membership, in fact I never did hear who the sponsor was.
Low and behold, a panel of 3 retired judges found he “probably WAS resurrected”. Imagine my surprise at the verdict. Talk about your predetermined outcomes.
I don’t object to the debate (even if it’s fixed), I object to the location. How dare the US government lend it offices to such blatantly religious purposes. You or I can’t just rent out the Senate chamber as a platform for OUR views, whether we dress it up as a debate or not.
Actually, I’ve been interested in having such a mock trial here on the SDMB. I’m curious what the legal view of the “evidence” would be. Seems to me that the vast majority of it is hearsay, and therefore would be inaddmissable in a mock trial.
Or to make it even more fun, we should make a serious comparison of the evidence for the Resurrection vs. the evidence for Santa Claus actually climbing down people’s chimneys.
Well, it was enough to convince Simon Greenleaf, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the admissibility of legal evidence.
Greenleaf is the legendary legal authority and co-founder of Harvard’s law school who wrote the classic text A Treatise on the Law of Evidence, which is revered to this day. He was also an outspoken atheist, but after being challenged to examine the evidence in the light of the standards for legal evidence, he eventually capitulated and professed faith in the Resurrection.
Y’know, that’s a rather serious accusation. Can you substantiate it? Since you claim to know that the outcome was predetermined, can you tell us who these judges are and how they were selected? I don’t know which program you’re referring to, but I would like to know how you arrived at that conclusion.
What TV show/channel did you see this news squib on, YG? Was it just a “mentioned in passing” thing, as an Easter-tide news filler, or was it a whole report or puff piece?
[patting Googlebeast a trifle nervously]
[down, boy, easy, boy]
I detect a strong scent of Urban Legend emanating from that story, myself. I suspect that the ACLU, People for the American Way, and a bunch of other groups would have protested if the Senate chamber (or by the way, any State Senate in the numerous states that have them) were to be used for this purpose.
In point of fact, the evidence available seems to be overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that He was – but the degree to which that evidence is to be accepted as valid is something that everybody needs to weigh for themselves. )I suspect strongly that He intended it that way.) Let me say that with the standards used for evaluating the Gospels by those concerned to “prove” or “disprove” them, one could prove that Charlemagne was fictitious or that Gandalf the Grey did historically coordinate the war against Sauron, as your taste in (in)credulity permits.
Admittedly, the segment I saw was only about 10 minutes. But, in 10 minutes, there were sound bites from 2 of the 3 judges, apparently done BEFORE the dabate (“I’m excited to be here for this historic…”, etc.), expressing their own religious faith.
The attorney arguing AGAINST resurrection was Bruce Fein, who is a well known conservative constitutional lawyer. His evidence was delivered in what I can only characterize as apologetic tones. I’ve heard him argue before, and while I disagree with many of his conclusions, he is a very effective debater. I saw no evidence of that here. Of course, whoever edited the segment I saw may also edited OUT items that might have convinced me otherwise.
BUT, I don’t care about the validity of the debate, I care about allowing the US Senate chamber to be used as a venue for espousing religious views.
I found this page while looking up Simon Greenleaf. Very interesting – from what little I saw of the actual event, it was very much a reenactment of these same arguements.
Polycarp,
This is not an urban legend. As noted above, I saw a videotape in which I could identify attorney Bruce Fein as one of th opposing counsel.
Okay, so it was held in the Judiciary Committee’s offices, in a hearing room, in the Senate Office Building, not “in the U.S. Senate chamber”, which is in the Capitol building.
The phrase “the Senate Chamber” was repeated more than once; by the TV host introducing what was essentiall a video feature piece, and within the piece by one of the participants. Clearly, THEY think the site of the hearing lends credibility to the outcome.
And Senate Chamber or Judicuary Committee hearing room, I’m still pissed.
yojimboguy, sorry for the hijack. If you want, I’ll take this to a separate thread.
JubilationTCornpone
The Gospels bear evident marks of forgery.
Furthermore, none of the Gospels give any indication that they witnessed any of the events that they describe, and in fact it is clear that at least some of the events were not witnessed by at least some of the Gospel writers (unless one or more of the Gospels were written by the same person). Since they are simply reporting what they heard, this is hearsay.
I would rather have folks adress the question of putting a governmental “cloak of legitimacy” to religious issues.
If this trial were held in the Willard Hotel, I would wouldn’t have an issue with it at all. Frankly, I wouldn’'t care enough to start a thread over it.
When I mentioned this to the Better Half, and said that I didn’t have any problem with it taking place in an office building, he immediately said, “With your tax money? Wherever they did it, it was nothing more than a huge wasteful pointless PR exercise.”
Well, I said, there are lots of other huge wasteful pointless PR exercises that take place in our Wonderful Government, case in point being the Easter Egg Roll at the White House. (He said, way to change the subject, babe…)
I have never, ever, EVER understood the point of this. The White House kitchen staff spent, literally, days, boiling nearly 11,000 eggs, and for what? Nobody knows.
Not to mention the 25-pound, chocolate sculpture of President Bush’s Scottish terrier, Barney.
But I wouldn’t assume that this all means that the Government is giving an official stamp of approval to Easter celebrations, or to the International Cocoa Council. Or to the Scottish Terrier Breeders’ & Exhibitors’ Association.
That strikes me as a rather weak argument – question begging, really. Even if they were hostile to Christianity, they could STILL consider this to be an historic occasion – especially with an ACLU lawyer as the prosecutor.
Well, maybe you care, and maybe you don’t. Either way, if one is to claim that the outcome was pre-arranged, I think we need stronger evidence than to say “The judges were excited!” or “The ACLU lawyer didn’t do a good job.”
Specifics, please? Let us see how evident these marks are.
We’ve been over this before. Let’s assume that none of them were eyewitnesses. Are you seriously suggesting that only eyewitnesses can accurately report history? Do you have any idea how much recorded history would have to be discarded, using that standard?
As Dr. William Lane Craig once said, such an approach to history is naive and positively medieval.
I’ve mentioned Sir William Ramsey before, the noted historian and world-class archaeologist. He too was convinced that the New Testament documents were fakes, and he set out to specifically disprove the Gospel of Luke. After 30 years of research, he was forced to abandon his quest, and declared “Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy … this author should be place along with the very greatest of historians.” (Sir W. M. Ramsey, The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915), p. 222.)
I think that using our tax dollars to run a “trial” that convienently establishes the “legal truth” of a particular religious belief is not appropriate. Come on, do you really think a bunch of people (whom I think it’s reasonable to conclude were Christian) sponsored by a right-wing Christian organization are going to establish, to a packed house, right around Easter, that Jesus never really rose from the dead?
So their argument is based on:
There were people who said they saw him after he died, and
They were willing to die for their beliefs
Well, whoop-di-doo. If we’re going to take the writings (not even sworn court testimony!) of people hundreds of years dead as valid court testimony, no matter what they’re testifying to, I bet I could establish that witches really did fly on broomsticks and turn into cats. If being willing to die for your beliefs proves their validity, then the Christians, Muslims, Falun Gong, Mormons, and Heaven’s Gater’s must all be correct.
It’s worse than wasteful. I consider it offensive to use government resources to pretend to find some sort of pseudo legal validity (and thus superiority over contradicting claims) to any religious faith or lack thereof; it’s jerkish and self-congratulatory. It’d be just as obnoxious if atheists did it, and just as inappropriate if it used government resources. “Look, our beliefs hold up in court! Hah hah all you people who think different.” And if we have established conclusively that Jesus did really rise, maybe we should be teaching that in the classroom; we teach other court results in the schools as being true…
But of course they didn’t establish that Jesus rose with any legal validity. “It was a staged event” they said, and it was. It’s like having David Copperfield do magic tricks to prove that Jesus turned water into wine.
