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natural laws? That means very different thing to different people. Can you rephrase that?
Jon
When do you know to take the bible literally? You say the creation stories aren't to be taken literally. Can you prove your god created anything?
It takes a lot of study to know which parts are to be taken literally. I remember being taught in elementary that when the number forty was used in the Bible, it was used to denote, "a really long time" so when Jesus fasted for forty days and forty nights with no drink or food, or when Israel wandered the dessert for forty years, these aren't to be taken literally. It was simply part of the literary genre used by story tellers at the time they were written.
Remember the figures of speech we learned in school? Yup, the ancients knew how to use them as well.
So are you saying none of the bible is to be taken literally? Is it all figures of speech? Jon, is faith the only way to prove your god is real?
I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying the authors of te Bible had at their disposal literary devices which drive home certain points. They simply used those to convey actual truths.
Faith as being the only way? Far from it. Reason, logic, study of history (I'm still undergoing this) is how I know my God is real. I have faith in Him, sure. But in the same way you have faith that your good friend won't disappoint you.
I'm a little bit confused. Your trying to say the bible to not be taken literally, and to take literally sometimes. You can't have it both ways, either the bible is to be taken literally or not to be taken literally. Can you use faith to prove your god is real? What history are you talking about? I don't need faith in my friends to know that they will disappoint me at sometime in the future. But, I can live with them disappointing me.
Jon the Catholic,
The problem with that is start regarding the parts other than Yeshua's parables as not being literal then you can discount all of the stories as metaphors. They then become whatever you want them to be. That renders the entire Bible as nothing but a fairy tale, which is how I see it.
Remember, the main point of the stories is to illustrate the application of the Ten Commandments, found in Exodus 34:10-28. Verse 10 is the basis for all of the miracles.
Gender inequality between men and women begin with the adam and eve story, and goes mostly downhill from there in just about all versions of the bible.
edit: it appears this posting got orphaned to the wrong reply post. At least how it looks on my end to some quirk in the forum software.
Jon the Catholic: "I think the standard in ancient Rome would've been "at least 12 years old" and for Jewish law, "13 years and one day".
Well, from our current moral point of view, Joseph was a pedophile... So moral changes throughout the years, even in the same country or culture... Interesting... So, we should conclude there are no universal and unchangeable morals coming from any ancient book, shouldn't we?
@ devout, see where you end up when death comes. Second, women had no power, what else would they choose?, Third, women of christian faith today still adorn their husbands as all knowing.....seems you have no argument? Those christian women are also under persecution of the church. tell me, what has changed?
Simply Agnostic's knowledge of Christian teaching [twisting Bible text to fit a positive moral story] is to be respected but the teaching itself is more doubtful and unhelpful.
"...AS for homosexuality I will declare that according to the Epistle of romans that it is a sin a grave violation against ones body.Read chapter 1 and following. Haven`t we seen this play out in Aids which when it first came on the scene was strictly a mans problem to deal with here. Then it spread as time went on to the heterosexual community."
The spread of aids among humans early on may well have been through anal sex (and also oral sex). However, that is distinct from homosexuality as not all homosexuals indulged in those practices, while many heterosexuals did. Those practices were much more prevalent proportionally among homosexuals than among heterosexuals and that is reflected in the statistics. The Bible didn't foretell that, science did, for those who were paying attention. All sorts of groups can be particularly susceptible to a given threat. Afro-Caribbeans in the UK are especially prone to hypertension..
From:
http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Blackhealth/Pages/intropage.aspx
If you're African or African Caribbean and you live in the UK, you're more likely than people from other cultures to have certain health conditions, including high blood pressure (hypertension), diabetes and prostate cancer.
Unquote.
but that wasn't predicted in the Bible. Heterosexuals and homosexuals can equally be criticised for practiceing anal and oral sex, but it is only to be expected that a larger proportion of homosexuals would fall victim to aids. It isn't homosexuality that is wrong or abnormal but Christian teaching twists the Bible to suggest it is. The practice of anal sex is what is morally questionable, but again it is science that helps humanity establish the verity in that, not the misguided prejudice of a giant cult (Christianity).
From Wiki:
Receptive anal sex is much riskier for getting HIV. ... However, it's possible for either partner to get HIV through anal sex from certain body fluids—blood, semen (cum), pre-seminal fluid (pre-cum), or rectal fluids—of a person who has HIV. Using condoms or medicines to protect against transmission can decrease this risk.
And:
Though the risk of HIV transmission through oral sex is low, several factors may increase that risk, including sores in the mouth or vagina or on the penis, bleeding gums, oral contact with menstrual blood, and the presence of other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).
When aids came on the scene it was primarily a homosexual problem, gay men went down to the Caribbean and participated in all kinds of sex drinking one anothers urine having anal sex etc it then spread to here in the states and eventually the straight community.
Aids is a heterosexual disease. Aids comes from HIV, HIV comes from SIV. SIV mutated into HIV due Africans eating bushmeat(monkeys).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDS
That is the worst explanation of how AIDS emerged I have ever read.
HIV came from central Africa, not the Carribean. It wasn't and isn't a homosexual problem it is a society problem.
You are full of it. Gays drinking each other's urine. What a load of shit. Just a wild story that you heard from some anti-gay group
Here, EDUCATE YOURSELF (I have to do everything for you)
https://www.avert.org/professionals/history-hiv-aids/origin
text deleted
@ devout: didnt Cathoilic men have boys as sex objects? starts there brother.
mykcob4,
I don't know where you got the idea that Mary was 14 when Joseph snagged her. According to the Jewish Babylonian Talmud Mary could have been married when she was three years and a day old. It says that David knocked up Bathsheba when she was six years old.
As for Mary being a virgin there were no tokens of her virginity. The custom was for the father to jam a rag up his daughter's vagina the day before she got married and to keep the bloody rag as proof that she was a virgin. There's nothing in the story about Mary's daddy doing that to her.
Based on the Old Testament fairy tale Joseph was most likely a metaphor for Judea and Mary was a metaphor for Samaria. According to the fairy tale they were supposed to get united. Samaria (Mary) had never produced a prophet for Judea (Joseph). Yeshua was that prophet. Later on in the New Testament he was accused of being a Samaritan and he ignored the accusation. He certainly behaved as one. Every time he did anything he climbed the nearest hill. So as a Samaritan prophet he was trying to unify the Jews and Samaritans as prophesied in the Old Testament.
Paul created the Christian bias against women. The Old Testament and Yeshua held women in higher esteem, depending on the era. Of course we are only going by what the committee of writers wrote so who knows for sure what things were really like in early Christianity? Maybe they changed it in the 680s-690s and made women the heavies?
All gods of the period in question had to be of virgin birth. It was a qualification that the early architects of christianity knew had to be ascribed to this jesus cat.
After Constantine ordered them to create the story of their jesus character (Nicene Creed, 325 BCE), the bishops and presbyters of christianity began creating his life from scratch. The virgin birth part was a necessary construct of the story. From that point going forward he is considered a god and making up the myths surrounding his existence was the next (messy) bit of writing that many of the biblical contributors failed to research fully before writing their versions of stories already in existence and wholly unknown to them. This led to a bible full of contradicting stories of events and, knowing none of the contributors were alive during the jesus period Paul constructed from thin air and veiled Hebrew history, this was bound to happen and gave us today a marvelously self-destructing piece of literature. Had the church managed to keep the bible from publication in the modern languages no one would have been the wiser.
After Paul won the coin toss for kicking off the story, the subsequent stories got more and more embellished and the virgin birth was borrowed from so-called pagan religions to ensure jesus was on an equal footing with those other gods, like Dyonesis, and a whole bevy of other gods before him.
The fact that Mary was also a character created for the role of mother to a created jesus character completely negates the point of ridiculing a virgin versus a biological (natural) conception. There's no point in even discussing that.
I'm curious as to your sources on this matter. Are you saying Christians didn't exist before Emperor Constantine?
I agree Pitar wholeheartedly!
There is no bigger narcissist than the Christian god. He impregnates his own daughter so she can give birth to him. A creation of the iron age male mind for sure. No women were involved in manufacturing this Big Fish story.
@chimp3 Trump is almost as bad a narcissist.
Sorry I posted this at the end of the thread; the nesting was getting pretty extreme.
I tried to find a transcript and couldn't; so I watched the first 15 minutes:
That is far from clear.
That is far from clear.
This is false.
How he connected those dots (he doesn't really say) is beyond me!
That is false.
That is gibberish.
Doubles down on the gibberish. Also does not tell us the possible space of #6; do you know why? Because no one know what it is. But that didn't stop him from bullshitting us about the probability now did it?
If that doesn't set off your bullshit alarm, I doubt anything will.
Too funny: that is one of the best arguments I've ever heard for believing that objective morality does NOT exist!
A snake oil salesman, IMO. Just good enough to bolster the faith of those who don't know anything about the subject, and already believe in god. In fact, I'll stick my neck out and suggest that is the intended purpose.
Thanks for watching the video. I appreciate that. But it seems you're dismissing all of Trent's arguments while not giving any reason except, "That's doubtful/false/gibberish."
Is this really how logic works?
The universe began to exist. You say it's far from clear but science have considered the Big Bang theory as the best explanation we have now for the existence of the universe. What's far from clear?
Would you want your god to come out of something that has been fucked? I, like the Christians like my god to come from a cleaner place. Oh and its not only Jesus's mum who was a virgin. So was Buddha's and Krishna's and many other "gods" mum too.
zamorin: Cleaner place? SomeTHING that has been fucked?
yeah, a vagina is considered unclean by Christianity and other religions.
As to the question in the OP...xtianity was designed by males. Males came up with the story that this character had to be a virgin. I posit that this is because of what can be called The Cult of Virginity. Its premise is that a penis is so powerful that when introduced to a woman it fundamentally changes who she is. They wanted their Mary unchanged.
The new trend among catholic people is that, even if mother mary is not a virgin, they still are OK with it. It seems they are thinking logically now. In my country virginity has been given a lot of priority and its considered as purity. So losing virginity is a big deal.
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Why does virginity equal purity? Does having had sex make one dirty (impure)?
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