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Lead Stories: Monday, December 1, 2008

Josh Cox:
Forgotten Number Four
(Elite Athlete Blog - Entry #7)

Posted April 17th, 2008 at 12:00 PM by Josh Cox

Section: News & Results, Marathons, Elite Athlete Blogs, Josh Cox

Welcome to the official blog of U.S. marathon runner Josh Cox. Every other Wednesday visit http://joshcox.thefinalsprint.com for Cox’s latest blog entry and for more information, also please visit: www.joshcox.com

“Friendships born on the field of athletic strife are the real gold of competition. Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.”
–Jesse Owens, 4 time Track and Field Gold Medalist at the 1936 Olympic Games

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.”
–C. S. Lewis

“You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.”
–Charlotte the spider in EB White’s “Charlotte’s Web”

I get loads of email from strangers. When you write blogs, have Myspaces, Facebooks and a contact button on your website, it comes with the territory. My latest “Miracles” installment solicited a Santa sized bag of digital mail. For every public comment I receive, another five appear in the inbox. If a common theme arises I address it in the comments of the blog – years of blogging tells me this is the best course of action. This way the popular, pertinent issues get addressed. If I’m busy this doesn’t always happen. So before diving into this entry I’ll let the mail senders know I’ll be answering their questions and keeping the comment section of the last blog alive and kicking.
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Josh Cox: Miracles . . . A Runner’s Case for Theism (Elite Athlete Blog - Entry #6)

Posted April 3rd, 2008 at 12:45 PM by Josh Cox

Section: Elite Athlete Blogs, Josh Cox

“If people think God is interesting, the onus is on them to show that there is anything there to talk about. Otherwise they should just shut up about it.” -Richard Dawkins, Evolutionary Biologist, Oxford scholar, author of “The God Delusion”

“Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”
-CS Lewis, author, teacher, former atheist, and Oxford Scholar

“It is, of course, true that your success would be open to a variety of interpretations-perhaps such a miracle says nothing about the existence of God but demonstrates that clairvoyance is an actual power of the human mind and that you possess it in spades.” -Sam Harris, atheist evangelist and author, explaining away the miraculous

“Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature, and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable.” --Albert Einstein, German-born theoretical physicist

I wasn’t planning on writing this. Honest. I pondered the idea during my long run with Dan [Browne] last week, again during my 15 miler over the weekend and a final time as I responded to nearly half of the 17 emails asking what I believed and why I believed it – but not even those served as this blog’s impetus. Nope. The tipping point came when I stumbled across the poem I wrote for my dad’s funeral nearly two years ago. I didn’t read it all; I couldn’t read it all – didn’t want to. Tears, therapeutic as they may be, don’t lend themselves to productivity; and because I am busier than a one legged man in a butt kicking contest I figured I would spare my wife the Dick Vermeil impression.
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