Sunday, November 13, 2016

Sunday 11/13/16

Religion is the belief of forces outside of Nature; "supernatural."  In essence, religion is a remarkably modern concept as it sounds much more like quantum thinking; it certainly is not Newtonian. Unlike most philosophies--particularly those 18th and 19th Century based--Revelation and divine intervention are absolutely not from the world of cause and effect.

The first Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the caves of Qumran by Bedouin shepherds in 1947. Hundreds of complete scrolls and tens of thousands of textual fragments were eventually found, or recovered at a price. The black market was remarkably transparent; there were anonymous ads in the WSJ offering the scrolls for sale.
Research on the scrolls was conducted by a highly restricted group of scholars, and it proceeded at such a slow pace that complaint and suspicion mounted in the academic community.
Having been given a master set of Scroll microfilm negatives for safekeeping, the Huntington library announced that a photographic record of "the greatest archeological find in history" was now available to anyone interested, by inter-library loan.
The Scroll texts are believed to be the remnants of the library of an extremist Jewish sect contemporaneous with Christ -- older by a thousand years than any other scriptural manuscripts. They include books of sect rules and prayers and most Old Testament stories.
Many see a continuity back and forth between the people of the scrolls and Christ
In a 1993 BBC documentary, Davies said that when faced with documents predating Christ by some 100 years, telling of a "Teacher of Righteousness" persecuted by a "Wicked Priest," and prophesying a Messiah who is persecuted, exiled and "pierced" or "piercing," it's hard not to regard the Qumran scrolls, as "a script, or a series of scripts, waiting there for somebody to come and fulfill it."
This is a sort of materialistic dismissal of Christ as socially inevitable, although it is doubtful that the same guy would accept the Old Testament prophesies as similar cause and effect.

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