Thursday, April 2, 2015

MOST AMERICANS NOW SAY JESUS ACTUALLY A SINNER


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Actor Jim Caviezel portraying Jesus in "The Passion of the Christ."
Actor Jim Caviezel portraying Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ.”
Despite more than nine out of 10 Americans agreeing Jesus was a historical figure, what they believe about Him diverges widely, according to a newly released survey from the Barna Research Group, a nonprofit organization that has been analyzing cultural trends related to religious belief since 1984.
The survey of more than 4,000 U.S. adults online and by phone suggests Americans are conflicted about the central figure of Christianity and have failed to successfully pass on their faith to succeeding generations.
That Jesus once walked the Earth as a man was accepted by 92 percent of respondents, with even 87 percent of Millennials (those born between 1984 and 2002) agreeing. This overwhelming belief in Jesus’ historicity is reflected in the success of popular movies and television shows such as “Son of God,” “The Passion of the Christ,” “The Bible” and “A.D.: The Bible Continues.”
But when the divinity of Jesus is asserted, only 56 percent of Americans agreed. Among Elders – those born before 1946 – 62 percent said Jesus was God, but among Millennials, the number dropped to 48 percent. Those rejecting Jesus as God said He was a just another spiritual figure, comparable to Muhammad or Buddha.
With the question of divinity in play, it is perhaps no surprise a majority – 52 percent – of Americans said Jesus was a sinner like other people while living on Earth. The sinlessness of Jesus has always been a central tenet of Christian theology as His unique qualification to be an effective sacrifice for the sins of others.
The Apostle Paul wrote, “For He (God) made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:21). The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews echoed the same point, “For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).
Once again, Millennials showed the greatest departure from orthodoxy with 56 percent saying Jesus sinned.
“There isn’t much argument about whether Jesus Christ actually was a historical person, but nearly everything else about His life generates enormous, and sometimes rancorous, debate,” said David Kinnaman, president of Barna Group and director of the national study.
Despite the influence of secularism in education, politics, entertainment and public morals in America, a majority – 62 percent – reported having made a past personal commitment to Jesus that remains important in their life. Among blacks, 80 percent claimed to have made a commitment, while only 60 percent of whites said so. Only 46 percent of Millennials said they had made such a commitment, compared to 59 percent of Gen-Xers, 65 percent of Boomers and 71 percent Elders.
“Much has been made about whether Millennials will get more serious about church and faith as they age, but the fact is younger Americans are not as connected as older generations are to Christ,” said Kinnaman. “Jesus is a friend of sinners, but many Millennials are ‘unfriending’ Him at a time when their lives are being shaped and their trajectories set toward the future.
“This study shows the extent of Christian commitment in the nation – more than 150 million Americans say they have professed faith in Christ,” said Kinnaman. “This impressive number begs the question of how well this commitment is expressed. As much of our previous research shows, Americans’ dedication to Jesus is, in most cases, a mile wide and an inch deep.”
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Is this ET? Mystery of strange radio bursts from space

Is this ET? Mystery of strange radio bursts from space

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Mysterious radio wave flashes from far outside the galaxy are proving tough for astronomers to explain. Is it pulsars? A spy satellite? Or an alien message?
BURSTS of radio waves flashing across the sky seem to follow a mathematical pattern. If the pattern is real, either some strange celestial physics is going on, or the bursts are artificial, produced by human – or alien – technology.
Telescopes have been picking up so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs) since 2001. They last just a few milliseconds and erupt with about as much energy as the sun releases in a month. Ten have been detected so far, most recently in 2014, when the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, caught a burst in action for the first time. The others were found by sifting through data after the bursts had arrived at Earth. No one knows what causes them, but the brevity of the bursts means their source has to be small – hundreds of kilometres across at most – so they can't be from ordinary stars. And they seem to come from far outside the galaxy.
The weird part is that they all fit a pattern that doesn't match what we know about cosmic physics.
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To calculate how far the bursts have come, astronomers use a concept called the dispersion measure. Each burst covers a range of radio frequencies, as if the whole FM band were playing the same song. But electrons in space scatter and delay the radiation, so that higher frequency waves make it across space faster than lower frequency waves. The more space the signal crosses, the bigger the difference, or dispersion measure, between the arrival time of high and low frequencies – and the further the signal has travelled.
Michael Hippke of the Institute for Data Analysis in Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany, and John Learned at the University of Hawaii in Manoa found that all 10 bursts' dispersion measures are multiples of a single number: 187.5 (see chart). This neat line-up, if taken at face value, would imply five sources for the bursts all at regularly spaced distances from Earth, billions of light-years away. A more likely explanation, Hippke and Lerned say, is that the FRBs all come from somewhere much closer to home, from a group of objects within the Milky Way that naturally emit shorter-frequency radio waves after higher-frequency ones, with a delay that is a multiple of 187.5 (arxiv.org/abs/1503.05245).
They claim there is a 5 in 10,000 probability that the line-up is coincidence. "If the pattern is real," says Learned, "it is very, very hard to explain."
Cosmic objects might, by some natural but unknown process, produce dispersions in regular steps. Small, dense remnant stars called pulsars are known to emit bursts of radio waves, though not in regular arrangements or with as much power as FRBs. But maybe superdense stars are mathematical oddities because of underlying physics we don't understand.
It's also possible that the telescopes are picking up evidence of human technology, like an unmapped spy satellite, masquerading as signals from deep space.
The most tantalising possibility is that the source of the bursts might be a who, not a what. If none of the natural explanations pan out, their paper concludes, "An artificial source (human or non-human) must be considered."
"Beacon from extraterrestrials" has always been on the list of weird possible origins for these bursts. "These have been intriguing as an engineered signal, or evidence of extraterrestrial technology, since the first was discovered," says Jill Tarter, former director of the SETI Institute in California. "I'm intrigued. Stay tuned."
Astronomers have long speculated that a mathematically clever message – broadcasts encoded with pi, or flashes that count out prime numbers, as sent by aliens in the film Contact – could give away aliens' existence. Perhaps extraterrestrial civilisations are flagging us down with basic multiplication.

Power source

But a fast radio burst is definitely not the easiest message aliens could send. As Maura McLaughlin of West Virginia University, who was part of the first FRB discovery points out, it takes a lot of energy to make a signal that spreads across lots of frequencies, instead of just a narrow one like a radio station. And if the bursts come from outside the galaxy, they would have to be incredibly energetic to get this far.
If the bursts actually come from inside the Milky Way, they need not be so energetic (just like a nearby flashlight can light up the ground but a distant light does not). Either way, though, it would require a lot of power. In fact, the aliens would have to be from what SETI scientists call a Kardashev Type II civilisation(see "Keeping up with the Kardashevs").
But maybe there's no pattern at all, let alone one that aliens embedded. There are only 10 bursts, and they fit into just five groups. "It's very easy to find patterns when you have small-number statistics," says McLaughlin. "On the other hand, I don't think you can argue with the statistics, so it is odd."
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Issue 3015 of New Scientist magazine

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