Greetings and salutations!

Well it continues to be long periods of time between updates. I have actucally been placing new content, I just haven't told anyone about it. Anyway keep a look out for a new story update coming soon. In the mean time look for the new Fictional Dreams. These are just tempting segments from my imagination for your enjoyment. Also, you will notice more spiritual material being posted, nearly all of this is due to the coming release of Mel Gibson's The Passion, which I encourage you all to see.

On that note, I have something else to post from the Christian History Project. I have studied Plato but strangely had never run across this, and when I finally did it nearly shook me. Imagine such a prophetic portrait from a man who lived 500 years before Christ!

It was the Greek philosopher Plato who, in his foundational work on human government, The Republic, posed a hypothetical question. Suppose, he said, that a perfectly just man came into the world. He must not merely seem just, but be just. However, it's important that he not be viewed as just. If he were, he would be honored and rewarded, "and then we shall not know whether he is just for the sake of justice, or for the sake of honors and rewards."

"Therefore let him be clothed in justice only, and have no other covering.... Let him be the best of men, and let him be thought the worst. Then he will have been put to the proof, and we shall see whether he will be affected by the fear of infamy and its consequences. And let him continue thus to the hour of his death, being just and seeming unjust."

Plato asked what the fate of such a man would be, and he answered his own question: "He will be scourged, racked, bound. He will have his eyes burned out. And at last, after suffering every kind of evil, he will be impaled." (Since crucifixion was already a standard form of execution in Plato's time, some translators actually use the word "crucified.")

In short, Plato already saw the inevitable fate of perfection in our imperfect world. Whether a perfectly just man met that fate in Athens in the fifth century B.C., or in Jerusalem in the first century A.D., or in New York City in the twenty-first century, the outcome was foreordained: torture and death. That is, Plato placed the blame on human nature.

Something to think about....

With Hope,
Joseph