Virgin birth of Jesus

[DrZoidberg]

I do question the need to belatedly speculate that Mary was ALSO immaculately conceived, and Mary's mother, and her mother's mother. And her mother's mother's mother.

...especially since there's no obvious, direct scriptural support for the doctrine.

But who cares about the Bible? Whether or not Jesus or Mary was not immaculately conceived are scientific questions. They can only be answered with science.

The problem with the Bible is that it can't be indipendently verified by another source. That makes the Bible worthless as an authority. That should be pretty uncontroversial to modern people. The Bible is an authority on what is written in the Bible. But that is all. It isn't an authority on the real world outside those pages.

So why do you keep referring to it when discussing events that allegedly took place before the Bible was written?

 

[blastula]

Immaculate conception is a theological question, not scientific, which means anybody can make up an answer.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Immaculate conception is a theological question, not scientific, which means anybody can make up an answer.

Mm... no. Not if we're discussing it. What can be asserted without evidence can be rejected without evidence. Making a case with a theological argument is like... not having said anything to begin with. Keeping one's mouth shut is preferable because then one doesn't have to deal with the humiliation of everybody pointing and laughing.

 

[blastula]

Immaculate conception is about sin. How is sin scientific?

 

[DrZoidberg]

Immaculate conception is about sin. How is sin scientific?

We use archeology and anthropology to try to figure out how ancient Isaeli society looked. And then we can draw inferences on how likely the events were. When it comes to miracles we can point to the fact that science has so far never been able to establish a bonafide miracle that couldn't easily be explained by natural phenomena. So right off the bat, if anybody uses a miracle as an argument we can immediately call bullshit on them.

At this point respecting supernatural beliefs is about as childish as holding those beliefs IMHO. At some point we just have to say that enough is enough

 

[blastula]

One more time. How is immaculate conception a scientific question?

 

[DrZoidberg]

One more time. How is immaculate conception a scientific question?

If sex is sinful then they must have been conceived without sex. Whether or not sex is always sinful is a matter of definition. But early Christianity was extremely sex negative. From this we can infer that they probably meant all sex. Which would mean that they were concieved without sex all together.

 

[blastula]

We're talking about different things, so never mind.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Immaculate conception is about sin. How is sin scientific?

Right. "Theological" discussion will never be scientific discussion.

 

[Sarpedon]

But belief in it could be a historical question.

 

[LordKiran]

In 1854 the Roman Catholic Church officially decided to add Mary to the list of people who were immaculately conceived.
Who was the other person on that list?

Oh yeah...now I remember.

It's Jesus - the One whom Mary referred to as her Saviour.

Do people who are free from sin need salvation?

Fucking typical. The man gets put on the list right away but the woman, who actually did the thing first, needs to wait almost two thousand years before someone gets around to adding her.

I don't want to be one of those people who scream about misogyny all the time, but this is a pretty blatant case of misogyny. I would have expected better from a long string of infallible people.


Also, weren't Adam and Eve immaculately conceived as well? There should be four people on that list. Actually, it's five if you include Frank. You probably don't know Frank, but he's this dude who was immaculately conceived - long story, not important to the thread.

Doesn't the RCC consider the Adam and Eve story to be allegorical and not referring to any real people?

 

[DrZoidberg]

Fucking typical. The man gets put on the list right away but the woman, who actually did the thing first, needs to wait almost two thousand years before someone gets around to adding her.

I don't want to be one of those people who scream about misogyny all the time, but this is a pretty blatant case of misogyny. I would have expected better from a long string of infallible people.


Also, weren't Adam and Eve immaculately conceived as well? There should be four people on that list. Actually, it's five if you include Frank. You probably don't know Frank, but he's this dude who was immaculately conceived - long story, not important to the thread.

Doesn't the RCC consider the Adam and Eve story to be allegorical and not referring to any real people?

This is actually something I love about the Catholic church. It's all realpolitik. But open about it. It's all "yeah, this is what the Bible says about it but what I want it to say is.... so therefore we'll do that now". There's a freedom in that.

 

[LordKiran]

Doesn't the RCC consider the Adam and Eve story to be allegorical and not referring to any real people?

This is actually something I love about the Catholic church. It's all realpolitik. But open about it. It's all "yeah, this is what the Bible says about it but what I want it to say is.... so therefore we'll do that now". There's a freedom in that.

In a sense I suppose. Though you would think there would be more constancy in a group which professes to know the universal truths to our existence.

 

[DrZoidberg]

This is actually something I love about the Catholic church. It's all realpolitik. But open about it. It's all "yeah, this is what the Bible says about it but what I want it to say is.... so therefore we'll do that now". There's a freedom in that.

In a sense I suppose. Though you would think there would be more constancy in a group which professes to know the universal truths to our existence.

But they don't. What the Catholics do is agree on compromises. That's a thread that goes through Catholic history. Like, "we're not going to make everybody happy, so what can we live with". When they say they know the universal truths to our existence, what they mean is this is what we've agreed on believing. Which doesn't make any sense. There's just no depth to it. Which of course comes from it's Pagan roots. Who really couldn't care less whether their theology made sense. Pagan theology always had many levels to it, and many of those aspects were mutually exclusive. But that was fine to that system. The Catholic church just took all that onboard wholesale while giving lip service to the idea that their knowledge was universal and eternal truths. It's absurd

Which fits my "theology". I believe that the fundamental truth of life and the world is that it's all absurd. I see life as nothing but a long winded absurdist joke without a punchline. You've just got to laugh at it to make it through life without going crazy. And the Catholic church encapsulates this theology so perfectly. It's truly an absurd organisation. Christian theology makes no sense. I love it.

I'm a big friend of religion. I'm not an anti-religious atheist. I'm a pro-religion atheist.

 

[Lion IRC]

Doesn't the RCC consider the Adam and Eve story to be allegorical and not referring to any real people?

No. According to the bible and the RCC Adam and Eve were real people.

Catholic Answers Apologist Fr Vincent Serpa wrote :
"The Church does teach that Adam and Eve are our first parents and were real people. I would suggest looking up Adam and Eve in the Catechism..."

http://forums.catholic.com/showpost.php?p=9412472&postcount=2

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

This is actually something I love about the Catholic church. It's all realpolitik. But open about it. It's all "yeah, this is what the Bible says about it but what I want it to say is.... so therefore we'll do that now". There's a freedom in that.

In a sense I suppose. Though you would think there would be more constancy in a group which professes to know the universal truths to our existence.

Look at all the fake news today. Can you imagine how exponentially worse it was 2000 years ago? People didn't know truth from fantasy when it came to anything beyond a stone's throw.

 

[bilby]

In a sense I suppose. Though you would think there would be more constancy in a group which professes to know the universal truths to our existence.

Look at all the fake news today. Can you imagine how exponentially worse it was 2000 years ago? People didn't know truth from fantasy when it came to anything beyond a stone's throw.

Indeed. Or look at present day societies where education is a rarity, and religion is endemic - read a Nigerian or Ugandan newspaper, and you find that people genuinely believe that witches are cursing them, that strange mutant animals are commonplace in faraway places, and that gods, devils and demons are daily actors in their lives. The whole world was (mostly) like that until the enlightenment. People believe nonsense, because they don't have the intellectual skills to make good sense of anything other than the most immediate things they care about - and oftentimes not even that.