Excuses, excuses

Things I have been doing lately include working on the bulletin for our church (Mt. Olivet Baptist in Acworth, Georgia; if any of y'all are in town Sundays or Wednesday nights and want to stop by, please do); putzing around with my family history (trying to get out a compiled genealogy of my maternal grandfather's descendants for distribution as a Christmas present to my relatives); working on rebuttals to statements Jehovah Witnesses make about the Holy Spirit and the crucifixion. Not that I'm particularly rabid about debunking their myths; it's just that I have a tendency to hold on to the things I've been told all my life. After all, if I accept the theory that the Earth is round when it looks flat in every direction I see, why shouldn't I accept the postulation that two thousand years ago, God allowed Himself to be hung on a crux immissa (the Latin cross) rather than a crux simplex (a stake)? The fact that I'm skeptical about the story of creation as presented in the Hebrew canon doesn't mean that I can't have fun toying around with the Greco-Hebrew myths of the first century. (A.D. or B.C.E., take your pick.) Wikipedia has a good article on the various forms of the cross at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_or_stake_as_gibbet_on_which_Jesus_died . I never realized that the stake was actually used as a torture/execution instrument, so I appreciate the JW's teaching me something.