This topic should get a "No duh" stamp on it.

Read Genesis sometime. You won't have to go far, I'm pretty sure it's right on the first page (depending on how large the print is). God creates heaven and earth. Then, he creates light and all that, but THEN he creates the firmament to separate "water above from the water below" (aka to separate heaven from the earth). The early Jews  thought that the earth was flat, and that the sky fit over it like a bowl, and beyond the sky was heaven, where God dwelled.

And I appreciate the sarcasm.

I don't disagree with you.

But it does follow that men who believed the sky to be the dwelling of their deity would write about supernatural events related to the sky, even perhaps going so far as to look especially for them, or even to include them in otherwise not sky-related mythology.

The resurrection was when he came back from the dead, not when he floated into the sky. But I get your point.

Both is also an option.

I don't think Ockham's razor applies to magic tricks. Flair goes a long way in instilling a sense of zeal in people, I would think.

Completely disregarding the fact that (assuming Jesus was who he claimed to have been) Jesus' pilgramage to the mortal realm should be totally unnecessary in the first place (an all-powerful god needs to send his son who is also him to be sacrificed so that he can forgive man for breaking rules he made in the first place when he knew beforehand that they would break them?), it would seem that Jesus had a thing for putting on a good show. He was, at the very least, an entertainer.

Nah, they didn't give Jesus beaming technology (it would have violated the Prime Directive).

Sliders stopped being good after they killed off the professor.

But if you are looking for a real reason that a resurrected god would choose to disappear into the sky rather than slide, or beam, or simply just disappear, I would say it was probably due to the fact that he knew who he was dealing with. Part of delivering a message successfully is knowing your audience, and Jesus knew his. Jews who (still) believed the earth to be flat and heaven to be in the sky. He's a busy guy, and he has more important things to do than to sit down and explain to the apostles that the earth is actually round, revolves around the sun, which is actually a star, etc. That would take a while, even ignoring the attempt at explaining that heaven is not a physical place (at least in this universe).

I don't see that as a trouble. It means that anyone can freely believe anything about the supernatural that they want to. I rather like that.

Better than letting it drown, I suppose.

"True" is a tricky word, especially when dealing with supernatural things.

Alright.

I wouldn't call it a refutation, so much as an impatience. It is sort of fun to play Jesus' advocate, though.

There are three heavens, the sky, the universe, and finally the place we refer to as Heaven. Heaven exists beyond the universe. When Jesus ascended, he went into the universe and finally to heaven. He went up, because that is how you get away from the earth. Had he gone left, right, or down, he would have ran into something and also confused the desciples about where he was going.

Exactly!

On a relatively more seriously note, sky heavenlies are synonymous with mythology (yes that makes the Jesus story synonymous with mythology but to any fairly rational reader that should not come as a surprise).

For this part of our Magistery skill is needed, in order to divide and compound the substances aright, so that the art may result in riches, and the balance may not be falsified by unequal weights. The sky we speak of is the sky of our Art, and there must be justly proportioned parts of our air and earth, our true water and our palpable fire.

Basilius Valentinus. (Sixth Key)

This is a metaphysical equation which is actually quite cool when you think about it a while.... alright that's probably not enough information. First the magistery is thought, consciousness. Recall these were the early days of alchemical science, these twelve keys are philosophical predecessors to the scientific method, a mystical attempt to perfect thought itself (and get closer to God thereby).

The Sky is the projective space for the conscious process, the relationship with the colour blue is mystical and represents what was known as the mental plane. air is synonymous with mercury the planet of intellect and knowledge this is the first balance of the scientific method a careful measure of knowledge. The earth is the symbol of... well.... solid earth, this is determinism in a nutshell; tools of measurement (incedently this symbol relates to the phi ratio; the natural expression of physicality), the true water is synonymous with spirit, inspiration, imagination, this is translated into the modern scientific method as hypothesis. The last and important ingredient is the palpable fire; the testing process; this is a symbol of what early thinkers considered the core energy of the world.  movement and change, which always had two ways to go. Fire is synonymous with the original idea of duality because fire transforms one thing into another.

So then mythologically the sky Jesus ascended was the sky of our future consciousness. He transcended our perfection of inner being into the space where it futurely would be were we to make the effort to attain it ourselves.

Mythology has a lot of beautiful patterns like this, I don't know why it's so underappreciated.

This is fairly simple. The wrath it would seem was not about the tower but the greed and hedonism it symbolised in the community.  The fall of Babel was construed into an example by morality preachers of the day, Essentially to say this place fell because God didn't like it. In this case God is somewhat synonymous with what some would prefer to call natural selection and _now_ predictable consequences (though the knowledge and predictability of such things doesn't equate in real terms to an enlightened world which clearly avoids destructive behaviours), greed and excess were obviously not favoured by what appeared to be God, the tower reaching to the 'sky' (in this case the sky is more a representation of physical projective space than mental projective space) was the symbol of Babel reaching for fortune.

 Now, why no wrath for us flying to the moon? Some Native American cultures actually do believe that Western Space exploration is a sign of their country taking the bad road. They are probably right as it seems more space progress has been poured into tactical defense systems (physical projection of fortunes in war) than the original promise of new insight and exploration raising the consciousness of the human community.

Overall, no one needs excite themselves about Gods wrath tearing down those that reach for the physical projective sky at the expense of a more ethical paradigm, with or without God the fact remains that preparing for war generally leads to war, obsession with arms leads to ignorance of love, and the predictable consequences of greed, conquest and excess are never pretty. 

This in not an admission on my behalf, Thano, I come with those beliefs I don't need to admit them into my thinking.

I wouldn't say that and be so sure about it as you are. Babel didn't fall suddenly, it took went through very real ups and downs eventually succumbing to a final destruction. It was attacked from outside a few times and rebuilt, but eventually it was all but destroyed by infighting, dissent and cruelty among it's own rulers and people, it never recovered from that.

However you like it. The middle east is a physically repressed and exploited community anyway, religion notwithstanding, if scripture justifies acts of violence on behalf of their desperation then scripture is related to the violent acts, but what of their desperation? Do we hate Allah to negate the fact that the west does exploit them? What scripture is the west working off to justify exploiting and pillaging the east? That scripture is just as dangerous.

The second heaven (the universe) is created prior to Gen. 1:6. One can assume that the third heaven (where the angels are, where God's throane is) exists prior to Gen. 1:6 as well. So Gen. 1:6-8 simply describes the creation of the first heaven (the sky). So the first heaven is in the sky and therefore within the bounds of the universe. The second heaven is in fact the universe. The third heaven exists somewhere beyond the universe.

As for how long it took Jesus to get there, he can reach the third heaven in the twinkle of an eye.  

That's a fair statement. It doesn't have to not represent God in some way to be that though, is all.

eh no, that's not what I was referring to. You also said 'no wrath of God intervening' You don't have to define it as God's wrath, but..... well lets just say we have been better as a society.

Well no I didn't just mean that scripture, there are dogmas of politics and enterprise which are far under par on the humanist agenda as well. But I agree religion has come into its own lately and is very unpleasantly aligned with the common bad.

 It seems to me the natural law of 'you reap what you sow' is still well in effect in our world. But again, this can simply be referred to as natural selection, it's the fittest that survive, where fit = agreeable, correct, compatible and harmonized. 

Once again, the Christians are revealing their lack of the even most basic knowledge of the history of their own ideas.  You guys never really wonder where this stuff comes from enough to look into it?

In OT Hebrew days, God didn't live in the sky.  He lived on a mountain--first Mount Horeb, then later Mount Sinai.

That business about dividing the firmament above and firmament below is adopted wholesale from the Babylonian creation story.  In that version--which the Hebrews most likely got when they spent several generations in captivity in Babylon--the god Marduk creates the world by dividing the body of the primal chaos beast Tiamat into the earth below and the dome of the sky above.

The idea that God lives in the sky that was around in Jesus's time is a Greek idea.  The Greeks had given up the idea that the gods lived on Mount Olympus and decided instead that they lived in the sky.  Like everybody else, the Greeks thought the sky was a solid dome, the body of the god Ouranous.  In the NT whenever Jesus refers to 'Heaven,' that's a translation of the word 'ouranous' that actually means 'sky.' It was synonymous with 'the throne of god,' but not with  some otherworldly realm of eternal reward, which would have been referred to by a different word.