Questions For Christians: Saturday 8/9

First, the usual disclaimer: the purpose of these posts is to pose questions to Christians who come here (or go anywhere, for that matter) with the intent of converting us to Christianity, but also with an open mind about their own faith. You may post your answers here, or answer them privately, at your discretion. My ultimate goal in asking these questions is to have you deconvert from Christianity. If you are not open to at least the possibility of that happening, then I suggest you not respond to these questions, as that will be a waste of your time (and possibly our bandwidth). At the same time, I am open to the possibility of learning a thing or two about Christianity along the way -- but if you answer these questions publicly, with the intention of being a teacher instead of a learner, then please don't bother doing so here. These questions are for your educational benefit.

A couple quick notes: First, I went back through the "Questions..." posts and added the "questions for christians" label to them all, so that people can find them with relative ease. I'll also be taking this weekend to cross-post the series to my own blog at intervals. (Hey, did you know I have a blog of my own? http://www.silentdave.net)

So it is Saturday, and I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to make it a tradition to just post one question on Saturday, something random that occurred to me throughout the week, perhaps, or something that doesn't really fall into any particular category that I intend to do in the near future. Tomorrow it should be business as usual, but today we'll give the Christians a bit of a day off. (The logical choice for that "day off" would perhaps be Sunday, I know, but I'm choosing Saturday. Sunday is when Christians go to church, which is a Christian immersion environment, and will thus have the effect of memetically reinforcing their existing belief framework. Nothing I can do about that, but when they do come home after Church, I want to not-so-gently remind them that, yes, reality is still out here.)

What's special about Saturday in the Christian tradition? Nothing in particular, except that it happens to be the only full calendar day which Jesus purportedly spent dead -- the story is that he died on Friday evening, and was "resurrected" the following Sunday morning. I'll be dealing with that death and "resurrection" soon enough, but first let me ask this:


1. Why do Christians say that Jesus rose from the dead after three days, when it was, in fact, a day and a half?


Kind of a "light and fluffy" question, I know, but hey -- it's Saturday!