Ok. I see where you're going. and, correct, Moses describes God as a physical being. I don't know when that changed or why. But, there isn't anything in the New Testament saying anything remotely like a physical being approached Mary and had sex with her - willing or not. So, unless you take the Bible literally, which I do not - not even Evangelicals take the whole Bible literally. They pick and choose which parts are literal and which are figurative - without any rhyme or reason. So, unless you take the entire Bible literally, there's no reason to assume Mary was raped by a physical being. If Mary and Jesus existed and were elevated to deity status later, most likely, she and Joseph had some ... "petting" sessions which led to his semen leaking into her vagina and that's how she became pregnant. If you take the Bible literally and Mary really was impregnated by a God, I contend that it was more like Vala's pregnancy in Stargate.
I never understood why God didn't send Jesus to redeem humanity a hell of a lot sooner than He did. I was always under the impression growing up that Jesus was part of God's plan from the beginning. I guess that makes sense; if God is omniscient and eternal, one can safely assume He can see the entirety of the universe's past, present and future existence from a unique vantage point. So why does God's plan seem so half-assed and improvised? He allowed human beings free will, and they chose to sin. All right, so maybe He didn't want human beings to be automatons. Plus, God knows He is going to send Jesus to allow humanity a chance to redeem itself...eventually. But why wait however many thousands of years? Why deny generations upon generations the chance to know and love Jesus? Why kill 99.9999% of humanity in the Flood if it was clear that action would have no effect on humanity's sinful nature? Why go through the pointlessness of requiring animal sacrifices until the arbitrary point in history that Jesus came on the scene? It makes no sense. It's almost as if early Christians retconned the Old Testament to justify their relatively new belief system. I don't think God and Jesus are the same. Not even close. They're not even related. Christianity is the TNG to Judaism's TOS. Technically a reboot, but linked to the original by a few tenuous connections.
I have several problems with this. First, you're using an argument from absence of proof here, and that's always tricky. Occam's Razor: When you approach a woman and tell her that she is pregnant even though she didn't know it, she usually will assume that this means she was physically impregnated against her will, e.g. while drugged. She would not jump to the conclusion that an immaterial spirit had impregnated her. So if our basis is the absence of any other hints, we should assume physical impregnation rather than something else that isn't ever mentioned. Secondly, that is indeed exactly what Mary assumes (she responds, in quite coarse Greek, "but I am not --ing anyone right now") , so we know that this was at least a reasonable implication of what the angel said to her. Third, the angel itself is described as an overwhelming physical presence, and the whole point of the entire story is that God can become physically corporate and does so in Jesus, whose physical presence begins precisely with said impregnation. So it is not as if the idea of God in the book as a whole is immaterial; on the contrary, it emphatically is not. And finally and most importantly, the pregnancy is certainly physical, as is the birth, and impregnating a woman without her consent is an enormous violation, whether you call it rape (because it is a transgression of a sexual and bodily nature) or arguably not (because there might not have been vaginal penetration specifically).
I'm not certain what any of that has to do with my point. If God was in physical form, then the fact that he was a God (at least to her) it was most emphatically rape. If God was not in physical form, and she just "became" pregnant, then she, again, did not consent.
YHWH is a copycat, q.v. Leda and the Swan. Repurposing the bird as a dove might have gotten Him around copyright laws, but He's not fooling me.
Agreed. It wasn't until I started studying the theology of the reformers that it "clicked" in my head. The Bible isn't all there is to know about the Triune Godhead. The Bible is what He needs us to know about Himself. We won't understand all there is to know about God, well, ever. A finite mind can not fathom the fullness (pleroma) of an infinite, eternal Triune Godhead. And you would be right. The Apostle Paul even said as much in his epistle to Titus. In common terms, Jesus was never "Plan B." At some point, before Genesis 1:1, the Father and the Son agreed, as one being, on the course of all of redemptive history. I'll also take the hit. God either causes or allows everything, yes everything, to happen. Period. If there is any other conclusion, He is not Sovereign. Satan couldn't touch Job until God allowed it (Job 1:1-12). Legion couldn't leave the man with the unclean spirit(s) until Christ gave it/them permission to do so (Mark 5:1-20).
I am more and more convinced that God does not punish people in the conventional sense of the word. I admit freely that the Bible uses the term (or synonymns, depending on the translation; we won't quibble about that), but I see that as an anthropomorphism: God's behaviour is explained to people in human terms because that is what they understand, but such anthropomorphisms should not be taken to mean that human behaviour adequately describes God's behaviour. Here's an illustration of what I mean: I am training a young person in how to do something. I tell him very carefully, over and over, "If you do it that way, you will get hurt, perhaps even very badly. Don't ever do it that way." But he persists in thinking that he knows more than this doddering old fool from another century, and does it his own way. And it ends up the only way it could end up: he gets hurt. Is that hurt a punishment? Not in any way. He was warned, he was told what would happen if he didn't obey the instructions of someone who, despite his opinion, actually knows more than he does, and he chose to ignore all that. Does my telling him ahead of time what is going to happen mean that I "punished" him for not doing what I wanted him to do? Of course not. I see relatively few cases, in the Bible or in life, of "punishments" that are not merely the consequences of the choices involved. And in those cases where what happens obviously is not just the natural consequence of personal choice, I still do not really see them as "punishments". To come back to the illustration of my trainee, if he persists in doing things in a way that I consider dangerous and I finally have to say, "Okay, you can't do that operation any more. I'm taking you off that, because you are a danger to yourself and others," I still don't really see that as a "punishment". Sure, in one sense it is, but certainly not in the sense of "I am going to hurt you because you didn't do things my way" (which is how most anti-theists see divine punishment -- and, I am convinced, how an awful lot of theists of all flavours see it as well). I have "played around" with this hypothesis for many years, and done a huge amount of Bible study during that time, and nothing I have seen in the Bible has caused me to invalidate it as a hypothesis for how God works. And it is the only way to reconcile "divine punishment" with the apparently inescapable inference that if God exists and if he is the creator of mankind, then he must be perfectly good. When I originally started toying with the hypothesis that God does not actually punish people, it was not because I "had a bright idea" but because someone else told me that. I admit I was somewhat skeptical at first, which is why I accepted it only in a very tentative way at first, to see if it fit. But over the years, the failure to find anything that contradicted it, and the implications of other considerations that show that if God exists he cannot be the petty, selfish tyrant that so many people imagine him to be (because, as has been stated so often, we have such a great tendency to "create God in our own image"), have caused what was at first a very tentative hypothesis to become a fairly firm conviction.
And he did, exactly as he said. But not until Pharaoh had first made that decision himself, and confirmed it several times. As God knew he would. The Bible never denies God's foreknowledge, and of course he takes that into account in planning his actions. We all do that. When I started this thread, I knew ahead of time what would be some of the reactions. (Unlike God, I didn't know all of them, and some of them that I fully expected I haven't seen yet, though that doesn't mean they won't be there.) But my knowing ahead of time how some posters would react is very different from me causing them to react that way, even though you can argue that if I hadn't started the thread they wouldn't have reacted. There just isn't any good way around the fact that the text clearly shows that Pharaoh made his choice, and confirmed it repeatedly, before God confirmed him in it. God telling Moses ahead of time that would happen doesn't change the narrative: first Pharaoh made his choice, then God confirmed him in it. You can claim the Bible is wrong and it didn't happen that way, but you can't claim that's not what the Bible says. And in any case, the whole point is moot because any attempt to prove that no one can avoid doing what God wants, if God is as the Bible depicts him, simply doesn't fit the narrative. The whole point of the Bible is redemption, and there would be no redemption if man hadn't fallen into sin, which is a clear refusal to follow God's will. So any attempt to pretend that the Bible shows that people always do what God wants simply doesn't flow from the Bible.
Well, there you go. It seems that we both agree that what the Bible says about God's power is unacceptable, when taken as stated on the surface level. I conclude that the text's morality should be rejected; you conclude that it must express a different morality, but metaphorically. But I am interested in the fact that all of your stated reasons for interpreting those unacceptable parts as metaphor come from your understanding of power relationships in the real world; as opposed to naming any part of the Bible that would hint at such a metaphorical intention. In any case, what remains even in that metaphorical reading is a disinterest in the issue of Mary's consent. In my reading, she simply does not consent; in your reading, she must have consented (because you apparently agree that anything else would make the story unjust), but you assume that the opportunity to say so explicitly in the text has been sacrificed for the advantages of a metaphor: one which explains something that is hard to understand by depicting an easily understood, but unjust, power relationship. This still leaves us with a narration whose morality allows for the depiction of a forced pregnancy as an unproblematic issue. The cost of this becomes obvious when we interrogate the same metaphor about the issues it wants to omit. Your real life example involves a mentor/student relationship. If we are to seriously relate that back to the issue of whether the mentor or the student should be the one to decide whether the student should be impregnated by the mentor, the image immediately turns horrid. That was not at all your intention, of course; but that is the point: the story of Mary as presented has no intention to consider the issue of her consent in the first place. It never even enters the (possibly partially metaphorical) picture.
An extremely valid question, IMO. One I wondered about myself for a long time. But then I realized that if you measure in terms of the passing of years, there was a whole lot more time before Christ than afterward (unless the world continues for a very long time -- which is of course a distinct possibility, despite the persistent predictions of so many Christians). But if you measure in terms of how many people lived before Christ and how many lived afterward, that changes the perspective very much. Contrary to what some people have claimed, it is not true that there are more people alive on Earth today than all those who have lived up until now, but nevertheless it is extremely likely that a lot more people have lived on Earth in the last 2000 years than in all the millennia before that, when the population was so much smaller. Absolutely agree with you on that. And that is consistent with the Bible as well: within hours after Adam and Eve chose sin, in Genesis 3, God was already promising redemption. It doesn't to me. Makes sense. Why not? What difference, ultimately, does it make? People lived in fellowship with God long before Christ, people had faith long before Christ, people were delivered from their sin long before Christ. The only real difference was that they didn't understand as much about how God could do that. The price for sin was paid, and sin was vanquished. When it happens makes no difference to God (since he has this "unique vantage point" on time, as you so aptly put it), and doesn't really make much of a difference to people, either. As far as I can see, the relationship I have with God is pretty much identical to the relationship that others had with him, long before the time of Jesus. Have they been denied that chance? If you believe in eternity, then 0% of your total life in here and now, and 100% is in eternity. (I'll let the mathematicians do the proof on that.) Which means they came to know and love God during their life on Earth, and will have the opportunity to know and love Jesus (who is God, so all that really means is "discover an unsuspected aspect of how God manifests himself and what he did") for all eternity. What's the big deal? Why kill 100% of humanity? After all, everyone dies. From a Biblical perspective, "death" is merely the passage into eternity. What counts the most is how we approach that eternity, not when we die. As far as I can see, God's general approach seems to be: as long as there are a few witnesses to the truth in a population, that population can continue, no matter how awful they are. It is only when it comes to the point where there is basically no one at all left to proclaim the truth that God says, "Okay, the best thing now is to move that entire population on to the next phase, rather than let generation after generation live and die (anyway) without ever having the chance to hear the truth." Au contraire (as we say over here), it makes perfect sense. The animal sacrifices were very useful illustrations of spiritual principles. Some people understood those principles; a lot did not. Exactly what happens after Christ, too. So what's the big deal? Almost, but not quite. The New Testament writers, and Jesus himself, demonstrated repeatedly that Christian theology was in fact implied in the Old Testament, time and time again, very clearly. Paul even points out that justification by faith, which is by grace, was there long before the law of Moses, since the text clearly says that Abraham was justified by faith. Your reasoning does not justify your conclusion. You have a perfect right to your opinion, but you have failed to demonstrate its validity.
I could use the "proof text" approach and give you a verse or three, but I don't like that approach, because it is so easy to take a verse out of its context. 1 John 4 comes to mind ("God is love" and "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts our fear, because fear involves punishment"), but as I say, I could easily be "picking the verses that happen to say what I want to hear". And in any case, it wasn't because of some particular texts here and there that I came to that conclusion. It was rather the result of two general principles that became clearer and clearer in my mind over the years. The first is simply the goodness of God. I remain convinced that the primary problem of mankind is that we do not really believe God is good. Some will say it very blatantly (it has been stated in this very thread) and some will say so only by implication while pretending to believe the contrary, but is is fundamentally rooted in man's nature to distrust God. If God exists, he must be manipulated by religion ("I'll give you three lambs and two chickens as a sacrifice, if you will bless me by giving my wife a child"), but he must never be trusted to be in charge, because we will get along much better without him. That's what Satan told Adam and Eve in the garden, and that has been the operating principle of humanity ever sense (whether or not you believe there is any truth to the Genesis account of when and where and how that outlook originated). But what changed my life, from religion to a relationship with God, was discovering that God loves me. That God is good. That even when I don't get my way, he still knows better than what I do what is best for me. And the more I discover about God, both from the Bible and from my own personal experience, the more convinced I become of the goodness of God. But I can't reconcile a good God with the pettyness of "I will punish you for using your free will (which I gave you myself...) in a way I don't like." The other principle that caused me to reevaluate my outlook on the way God uses his power was studying what the Bible says about human authority. Many years ago, I worked with a denomination that had quite a few North Americans in it. I don't mind North Americans; I'm originally from over there myself. But North American Christians are very much hung up on "submission to authority". There was one guy in particular, a Canadian, who was the denominational leader here in France for a few years. Submission to authority was his big thing. And I am not a guy who likes being told that "I am the authority that God put in place; you must obey me in everything; it is not your place to try to decide what God wants you to do; what he wants you to do is what I tell you to do" (that was said explicitly). So I started digging through what the Bible actually says about human authority, and discovered some very surpising things. Sure, the Bible does say a fair amount about submission to authority. But it also says a huge amount about how authority should be exercised. Numerous passages made the principle clear: authority exists, not for the advantage of the one who has that authority, but for the advantage of those who are under that authority. IOW, from a Biblical perspective, human authority is not "the right to dominate" but "the capacity to serve". Which is pretty much the opposite of what happens most often in the world. The only solutions people have been able to work out pretty much all involve getting rid of authority as much as possible ("the government that rules the least rules the best"), because "power corrupts". So why would God teach, over and over again, that authority should be used as a force for good, guided by love, and exercised only for the good of those under that authority, if God himself had a different approach to authority? And since the concept that God does use his power for doing what is best for us has been confirmed over and over and over in my mind, and since I see nothing in the Bible (taking figures of speech and cultural differences and such into account) that contradicts that, it has become, as I say, a very firm conviction in my mind. "Your reading" is "your interpretation" because she specifically said, "may it be done to me according to your word". And she rejoices very explicitly afterward. You said that in my mind "she must have consented" and that "I assume that the opportunity to so say explicitly in the text has been sacrificed" but I said no such thing. I say very clearly that it is right there in the text, and that her reaction afterward shows clearly what it means. It is not resigned submission to a power she can't resist, but profound joy that she has had such a privilege. So go ahead and say that we disagree on what it means. That much is obvious. But don't say that the text doesn't say that she consents. Admit that you don't want to read it that way, so you interpret it differently (which is your right; we all do that all the time, in everything, to try to somehow make a consistent whole of all the data with which we are presented), but that if you take the text at face value, she clearly consents.
I appreciate explaining this to such great length. Am I misunderstanding you when I take this as confirmation that your interpretation of God's power mainly does not come from reading the Bible, but from other experiences; and that it is those experiences that have then influenced your reading of the Bible, at least as far as the meaning of God's punishment is concerned, more so than vice versa? You also mention how the Bible depicts human authority. I strongly agree that a lot of the stories about Israel's kings depict the whole idea of even having kings in general and all or almost all specific kings -- even those who approach holiness -- as a really, really bad idea. I appreciate that. There is a pattern in Judeo-Christian religion that does a lot of good, in my opinion, by taking things away from humans that humans aren't very good at. Taking away all gods except for one, and taking away idol worship even for the remaining god, removes lots of religion. "Revenge is mine" removes revenge from human law and judgement, limiting both. "Do not judge", while itself limited in context, removes even more. And most of the stories about monarchs in the Old Testament, including and especially Israel's, provide a really good motivation to do away with monarchy. The problem with this line of argument, of course, is that it can motivate us to do away with God altogether in the end: the less religion, the less revenge, the less power we accept, the better? Great, so then let's remove the remaining idol, however abstract it has become; let's remove the refuge for the concept of revenge, since we do not trust revenge; let's remove the last remaining concept of unconditional power, since we do not trust power. So I think you are exactly right when you speak about this as an issue of trust. We do not trust human power. Should we trust God's power because we trust God, or mistrust it because it is power? This would imply a bit of a different interpretation of scenes such as Mary's though: If God's power is the one we should trust in the religious person's mind, then rather than necessitate consent before impregnating Mary, there would be sense in accepting the pregnancy as a definite blessing simply because it comes from God. A happy slave might be happy because their master is good to them. Depending on your point of view, that might even be a good thing. But it does not mean that the slave isn't a slave. I think this would be a more accurate reading of what the text says, as opposed to pretending that Mary gave substantial consent to conceive Jesus. Yes, she does rejoice afterwards; but no, she does not give consent. It simply does not occurr to her, or the angel, or the narrator, that anyone would be interested in that. Every word the angel says to her is indicative, present and future -- these are facts that will come to pass, not an offer for her to accept or refuse. She is disturbed by what the angel says (dietarachthe), and the angel, seeing her frightened (me phobou) then reassures her that what will happen is good rather than bad. What she then says in no way says "I choose this". It says, literally, "Look, I am the slave of the Lord; this shall happen to me by your word." It is God's and the angel's call, not hers. It is both. It is not an unhappy moment, but it very much is submission to a power she can't resist. (And frankly, the profound joy comes considerably later, not in this scene.)
We obviously can't be sure, but estimates seem to sit roughly around 110 billion humans to have ever lived, with around 60 billion since 1AD. So if knowledge of Jesus is neccesary for salvation you're looking at almost half the human population to this point not being included.
To this point... this means that Jesus is the male clone of Mary. Ergo, an argument then could made that Jesus is transgender, though the concept was either non-existent or irrelevant in Biblical times. (Dayton, TLS, and RyanCKR all disagree!)
And Mary, herself immaculately conceived, is already her mother's clone by this logic. Which is easier done, since no Y-chromosome is needed. But whatever these two-thousand-year old texts mean when combined with a modern understanding of genetics isn't my problem -- that's for whoever thinks they're true to sort out.
Man, both Mary's mom and Mary must have had mind-blowing orgasms when they frigged themselves to have spontaneously clone themselves!
1. "Immaculate Conception" of Mary is not a doctrine that's generally accepted by Protestants. 2. "Immaculate Conception" doesn't mean what you think it means. It doesn't mean "virgin birth" or "no Earthly father". Rather, the doctrine of the "Immaculate Conception" means that Mary, by a preemptive act of God's Divine Grace, was born without the "stain of Original Sin".
Yes. It also isn't shared by Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, or the two atheists who were conversing here. You know who does believe in Mary's immaculate conception? The Catholic theologians that taught me as a child.
This is a drug trip trying to justify its next hit. "The finite can hear the infinite if it just listens" That's three spoons' worth of crack at Glastonbury, right fucking there.
Not to change the subject, but...you know, the only thing scarier than non-existence after death is eternal life after death. If Christianity is the true way, I really hope hell is just oblivion. Immortality...now that would be the real hell. I suppose, though, that living in the afterlife with God would always feel like an eternal present. I can't imagine the dead in heaven experience time the same way the living do. But who the hell knows? It's a little disturbing to contemplate.
