Why is it that the funny stuff always breaks out when I’m away from the interwebs? The always looney DaveScot takes issue with the claim that the virgin birth of Jesus is biologically unlikely, and cobbles up a bizarre scenario to allow it. Why, I don’t know; is ID dependent on the chromosomal status of Jesus Christ, or something?
Anyway, DaveScot proposes that 1) meiosis was incomplete in one of Mary’s ova, producing an egg that contained 2N chromosomes; 2) this egg also bore a mutation that causes XX individuals to develop as phenotypically male; and 3) something then activated this egg to develop. Then he crows,
What I want to know now is whether ignorance or dishonesty explains why you’d quote someone who claims the virgin birth of Christ defies everything we know about mammalian reproduction.
His scenario has a number of problems. It won’t work. I don’t even need to touch on his mangling of the concept of diploidy, which Allen MacNeil dispenses with in the comments.
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The resultant embryo would have a very high incidence of homozygosity. By suppressing the second meiotic division, he has generated an egg where all the pairs of chromosomes are the result of replication of a single DNA strand (less occurrence of recombination, which does ameliorate the problem.) This would unmask lethal recessives in Mary’s genotype. I suppose you could argue that Mary was picked by God for her amazingly complete lack of any deleterious alleles…
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A second critical problem, though, is that the genes inherited from your mother and father have different patterns of imprinting. Genes in mammalian gametes are modified in different ways in males and females in order to suppress certain genes; all of Jesus’ genes would have a female imprinting pattern, and none with a male pattern, producing an imbalance in gene expression that is typically lethal. This can be overcome by experimental manipulations that mimic male imprinting by knocking out some of the genes, but it’s still problematic. Experiments that tinker with patterns of imprinting still start with zygotes containing nuclei from two different parents to avoid problem #1.
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The end result of all this finagling is that Jesus was the highly improbable multiple mutant outcome of a cytological error, no divinity involved. That’s fine with me (does DaveScot really think that providing a natural explanation for a myth refutes my position?), but I don’t think it fits the expectations of the religious, and I sure don’t see how one absurdly unlikely chance occurrence would support the ID position in any way.
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Watching DaveScot flail around with his barely-high-school understanding of meiosis and development is entertaining, but really, all it accomplishes is to diminish his credibility yet further, and it was already prostrate on the floor. I guess he felt the need to start digging to get it lower still.
Not content with exposing his ignorance of reproductive biology, DaveScot just had to end with a demonstration of his mastery of physics, as well.
So you see, Paul, matter and energy that we know about are only a small fraction of what makes the universe go ’round, so to speak. Who’s to say at this point in time that this huge amount of unknown “stuff” is incapable of organization that produces intelligence? Could God be lurking in the dark energy of the universe?
I wonder what Sean Carroll would think of this hypothesis that dark matter and dark energy constitute a giant intelligent entity that does genetic experiments on human females?
This is all just God of the Gaps guesswork, in which gods are tucked away in the empty spaces in our knowledge. In this case, those empty spaces are magnified by the inclusion of DaveScot’s personal ignorance…making his god a truly great god.
Of the four gospels, only Matthew gives unequivocal support to the idea of virgin birth. A couple verses in Luke point that way, but not indisputably; if one read Luke without having read Matthew, I doubt such a crazy concept would enter one’s mind. Furthermore, all of the events Matthew describes about Jesus’s early life appear to be constructed to make the story of Jesus parallel that of Moses. (Slaughter of innocents, flight into Egypt, etc.)
It is hardly worth belaboring the point that St. Matthew went out of his way to establish that Jesus was a direct descendant of David (bungling his genealogy along the way), while at the same time incorporating a “sired directly by God” story which at face value would make the Davidic descent of Jesus entirely irrelevant. The evangelist had two contradictory stories, both of them appealing to his audience, and decided to include both.
A comic-book writer with continuity that lousy would get fired.
I wonder if Isaac Asimov’s estate could be persuaded to publish Asimov’s Guide to the Bible online with some Baen Books-like license. It’s a wonderful, humanist reference book which if I am not much mistaken is out of print and earning nobody any money.
As the old genetics joke goes, the “H.” in “Jesus H. Christ” stands for “Haploid”.
So let me get this right – they’re allowed multiple rare mutations to explain the birth of Christ, but we’re not allowed them to explain the bacterial flagellum?
And we don’t even need them…
In Philip Pullman’s “Dark Materials” trilogy, intelligence IS due to dark matter. Also, gods, demons, angels and the like condense out of dark matter.
Could God be lurking in the dark energy of the universe?
Yes, God is always evading capture, one step ahead of the scientists, outwitting those crazy atheists. Curses, foiled again!
(I’m guessing he also has an insanely maniacal laugh which we can’t hear because he lives in a black hole from which no sound can escape.)
If God is a lurker, is Jesus lurking too? Or is Jesus off doing his own thing? Inquiring minds want to know. Please, DaveScot, tell us. You have all the answers. Speak.
Understanding the material basis of reproduction kind of undermines not only the virgin birth myth, but any alleged theological significance of maleness and femaleness in general. Even if Jesus resulted from some kind of apomictic event, there is still the probabilistic issue of recombination that you indicate to confound the notion of a “chosen one”. It all becomes rather silly.
If one were committed to finding a material basis for “virgin” birth, wouldn’t it be more parsimonious to simply presume that a bit of heavy petting is the explanation?
Besides, isn’t the translation of “virgin” itself questionable with a more literal translation being simply “young woman”?
“Under these conditions it is no wonder, that the movement of atheists (Gottlosenbewegung), which declares religion to be just a deliberate illusion, invented by power-seeking priests, and which has for the pious belief in a higher power nothing but words of mockery, eagerly makes use of progressive scientific knowledge and in a presumed unity with it, expands in an ever faster pace its disintegrating action on all nations of the earth and on all social levels. I do not need to explain in any more detail that after its victory not only all the most precious treasures of our culture would vanish, but – which is even worse – also any prospects at a better future.”
–Max Planck
How does DS even see this as a defensive argument? Even if this type of reproduction in humans was vaguely possible, it would mean that Jesus only had a female parent. There is no male to be descended from in this argument. Therefore, god must be human and female. Awesome.
I hope he runs with this, it should be fun to watch.
And he STILL han’t actually answered the question: “Where did Yeshua ben Joseph’s Y chromosome come from?”
You missed the key point: no god was involved. Period. Jesus is descended from the line of Mary only.
Also, what DaveScot is arguing is that Jesus did not have a Y chromosome. He had a disorder in sexual differentiation.
Considering how prevalent virgin birth or pregnancies while the husband was off at war were in the ancient Near East and how you hardly ever see this happening any longer there must have been a reason that this mutation was lost. Now we know why. (/sarcasm)
The really irritating thing about DaveScot’s final point there is that Shakespeare already said it far more eloquently than any IDiot could ever aspire to: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Doesn’t make it any truer, but at least Shakespeare had some aesthetic value behind the line.
So, DaveScot is essentially arguing that Jesus was not the son of God. After all, if he’s seriously proposing a naturalistic avenue for virgin birth (however improbable or poorly understood), then that makes God sort of irrelevant, doesn’t it?
These guys are trying so hard to show up us uppity atheists that they’re happily shooting holes in their own faith.
PZ, you problem appears to be the fact that you’ve spent way too much time studying biology, and having done so, now want to pit your cumulative knowledge against the prodigious intellectual might of DS. You can see here that Davey became an expert in biology in his spare time, reading Scientific American:
Wait, so Jesus was really a transgendered girl? That’s going to make an awful lot of conservatives very unhappy.
In very minor defense, I don’t think it was until halfway through grad school or so that I really understood that the sex cells were haploid after the first meiotic division, entire numbers of genes notwithstanding. Then again, I didn’t go base all of religion on my misunderstanding, either.
That’s even more stupid than just saying (and believing) “it was a miracle”
Um…. Isn’t the whole virgin birth thing more likely to be a mistranslation between Hebrew and Greek? See here:
http://www.atheistfoundation.org.au/virgin.htm
Wait, so Jesus was really a transgendered girl?
But don’t you see? It explains so much…
Jesus wasn’t divine. That’s clearly a mistranslation…
He was, rather Divine.
I agree with Hugo: This sounds even sillier than just claiming it was a miracle that cannot be explained …
Religious fruitcakes.
Puts a new spin on The Da Vinci Code, doesn’t it?
Only the foulest spawn of Satan would even dare to imply that Jesus was the result of premarital hanky-panky!
Hey Blake…re the Asimov book…
http://www.amazon.com/Asimovs-Guide-Bible-Testaments-2Vols/dp/051734582X
Isn’t the whole of ID premised on the idea that if something is really unlikely to have happened through natural causes, it must have been a miracle? So what does DaveScot think he’s achieving for ID by arguing in favour of a really unlikely natural chain of events over a miracle?
Shaggy Maniac:
Tony Jackson:
Sort of. Isaiah 7:14, in Septuagintic Greek, includes the word “parthenos,” which can mean both “virgin” and “young woman” depending on the authority you consult. In Rome, it was used as a title of Minerva, the virgin goddess, and was commonly translated into Latin as “virgo.”
“Parthenos” was used as a translation of the Hebrew “almah” (feminine of “elem,” “pubescent youth”), which meant “a young unmarried woman still under the protection of her family,” without any explicit implication about her sexual status. But typically, such a young woman would in fact be a virgin.
The correspondence isn’t exact, but the balance of the evidence leans towards the “virginal” definition.
Davescott’s explaination of Jesus’ virgin birth is way down there on the level of gross stupidity with Richard Milton’s disbelief over whether or not a herd of Belgian Iguanodons could be killed by a landslide, and not affect the annual rate of sedimentation of .2 millimeters, or that the last mammoths were killed by falling pieces of the Ice Dome as the Great Flood began.
This is about the most confused thing I’ve ever heard. ID advocates spend so much energy trying to insist on a super-natural origin for life, but refuse to call it God because that wouldn’t be scientific, and then this one goes on to assert that the central miraculous mythological event of Christianity really did happen, but that it wasn’t a super-natural miracle at all, it really had a natural cause…?
I’ve never seen anyone with a less clear picture of what it is they are exactly arguing for.
I’ve always thought it’s a shame for those theists who insist on clutching at scientific straws to bolster their faith that the Messiah wasn’t female – while it wouldn’t exactly make a virgin birth likely, it wouldn’t be quite so hard for anyone who knew a little about biology to suspend their disbelief…
Unless God was thinking ‘Hah – anyone can do mammalian cloning. These foolish mortals will manage it in a couple of millenia. No, this will really confuse them.’
Could God be lurking in the dark energy of the universe?
If I understand the physics involved correctly*, the amount of dark energy in the universe is increasing as the universe’s expansion accelerates, ultimately turning all matter/energy in the universe into dark energy. So we’re ALL going to be gods some day. BWAHAHAHA!
*Questionable assumption.
I have certified IQ somewhere north of 150.
Somewhere north? Where exactly is that IQ lurking, DaveScot? 151? 152? 153? [gasp!]
DaveScot, you like politics, you should become a civil servant. Why, you could be President someday!
140 Top Civil Servants; Professors and Research Scientists.
130 Physicians and Surgeons; Lawyers; Engineers (Civil and Mechanical)
120 School Teachers; Pharmacists; Accountants; Nurses; Stenographers; Managers.
110 Foremen; Clerks; Telephone Operators; Salesmen; Policemen; Electricians.
100+ Machine Operators; Shopkeepers; Butchers; Welders; Sheet Metal Workers.
100- Warehousemen; Carpenters; Cooks and Bakers; Small Farmers; Truck and Van Drivers.
90 Laborers; Gardeners; Upholsterers; Farmhands; Miners; Factory Packers and Sorters.
http://www.audiblox.com/iq_scores.htm
I think this is great. DaveScot goes out of his way to rationalize the virgin birth of Mr. Jesus but seems to miss the point that if he actually makes the story rationally acceptable then there’s not much of a miracle going on.
It’s like the Mozes and the Red sea, some theologians try to make the story more palatable by explaining it probably wasn’t the red sea but some swampy area that was known to be easier to cross with a bit of wind driving the water away from the highest ground. That sure sounds reasonable, but again, not much of a miracle going on.
As Penn&Teller already explained once; DaveScot, you’re peeing on your own feet dude.
Hi, I Am Jesus:
According to the story my mother told me, Dad (Joseph, not the other ONE) repeatedly told the elders of Nazareth , “I did not have sex with that woman” ,nevertheless he was forced to get married . Until the day of my …or was his? dead he stood for his word, so there you go, it must be true that I was born out a virgin.. unless my Mom was really a… a…. arggggggghhhhhh
I just can’t wait for D’Tard to wade into scenarios where Jesus’ resurrection is also explainable via natural phenomena.
The fact that Dembski lets all this inanity go on in his and ID’s name tells you all you’ll ever need to know about the sincerity of his and ID’s claims.
Davey became an expert in biology in his spare time, reading Scientific American
And is obviously illiterate as well then, since most of what I know comes from similar sources and I think they guy is a complete idiot. lol Makes one wonder about the quality of the “software” he designs.. Maybe he just copies that from a repository of unatributed code on the assumption its “God’s” code or something?
Makes me wonder.. If my parents had been creationists, would I have turned out as stupid as this guy? After all, I also started with science magazines and went into computers. Maybe it was due to wanting to “make games” and finding in my frustration that even the simplest processes and AI needed to run them couldn’t hold the smoke “from a candle” to non-designed real world environments and creatures.
@Blaine:
Thanks for the pointer — apparently, Asimov’s Guide to the Bible is not as out-of-print as I had imagined. Isaac must be pleased, watching from up in Heaven now.
The problem with pulling Isaiah 7:14 into the virgin/young woman discussion is that like so many of Matthew’s references to Old Testament passages, he attempts to recast an OT verse as a Messianic prophecy fulfilled by Jesus, but misses the mark entirely. In the seventh chapter of Isaiah, the nation of Judah was in dire straits (wasn’t it always?) with the threatening kingdoms of the hour gathering their might. The prophet Isaiah went to King Ahaz and told him what he, the King, had to do. Isaiah even offered a divine sign as proof that, as a prophet, he knew what he was talking about. “A young woman shall conceive,” he told the King, “and bear a son, and call his name Immanuel.” And before Immanuel was old enough to tell good from evil, the threat would collapse.
As it so happens, Isaiah never said that an “Immanuel” was born. A little later in the book, however, he has a vision in which God directs him to name his own son Maher-shalal-hash-baz. (Think of the ribbing the poor child would receive come kindergarten, unless all the other children were similarly cursed with prophetically-commanded names!) When one translates the names “Immanuel” and “Maher-shalal-etc.”, one finds that the meanings are equivalent. One promises good will for Judah, and the other promises a speedy end to the threatening kingdoms to the north, but the symbolism is the same. It is eminently reasonable to conclude that Isaiah’s own wife is the “young woman” he mentioned to Ahaz, and that the predicted Immanuel is none other than his own son.
How could it be otherwise? Could Isaiah offer as a sign, “Seven hundred years from now, a child will be born and called Immanuel–”
At which point, Ahaz would interrupt, “Seven hundred years? Judah is in deadly peril now! Get this windbag ‘prophet’ out of my sight.”
Despite this, countless people have read (or been told to read) Isaiah 7:14 as a prophecy of Christ. I will never understand the emotional or intellectual appeal of this. Does no one read on to Isaiah 8?
I’m not sure why Bro. Bartleby thinks Max’s Planck’s views on religion are at all germane to the discussion, but let it be noted that Planck also rejected modern quantum mechanics, calling Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics ‘disgusting’. Since I spend most of my professional life doing matrix mechanics, I must say Planck’s opinion’s of matters outside his area of expertise (pre-1920 physics) doesn’t disturb me unduly.
In their efforts to confuse the natural with the supernatural, they are now confusing the supernatural with the natural. I think they’re very… confused.
I like that he says in one of the comments:
Which is true, so long as you don’t count Minos, Hercules, Helen of Troy, Buddha, Rama, Anakin Skywalker, Attis, Mithras, and a thousand others, because they’re just myths, and Jesus’ claim to being sired by a god is clearly true.
At least in the quote above he just calls himself “financially independent”. Elsewhere he describes himself as a “self-made millionaire”. Sounds grand, right? The reality is that all he had to do was sit of his ass at Dell in the late 90s watching his stock options going through the roof.
Wow.
Okay, this reminds me of the “Amino acids may have developed in clay! Well, there it is!” stuff that was going around the church youth camps when I was in high school, which got picked up as a vindication of the “man out of clay” God pottery. Aside from the similarity of the use of the word clay (which as it turned out could have been any number of goops), it didn’t go anywhere. (Bigfoot is always just out of focus at the corner of the photo, so to speak.)
I am making a serious effort to understand here, not the “science,” but the psychology. I remember my sister asserting that someday scientists would “prove” God’s existence, and when I argued that 1) science doesn’t “prove” things the way that she meant, and 2) that would just establish science as an authority over God, it didn’t register. And it doesn’t seem to be registering over at UD that to “scientifically” explain away the so-called Virgin Birth is hardly a triumph over “materialism.”
I think they’re trying to say that science points to, but does not encapsulate, the supernatural. Yet the more they justify the supernatural the more they try to make their “science” encapsulate it. It’s a no-win situation that only serves to reduce what is popularly understood to be a miracle to just another “It only looked like a miracle, but it was a possible, but rare occurrence, but worship him anyway because–just because!” balloon-deflation.
Rather like the “Jesus was in a coma for three days” so-called rationale (I’m not kidding, I heard that one too). My aunt, the Jehovah’s Witness, scored a funny when she said, “And then they put Jesus on the helicopter and took him to the hospital where they revived him the in IRC!” At least she has no patience for this kind of thing.
Kristine, it may just be me, but, it’s my opinion that the need to scientifically “prove” God is akin to trying to find out what makes a baby rabbit cute and appealing to people by vivisecting it with lots of pins and a meatcleaver.
And, what about triploids? Is that the Trinity? ;-)
Hey, I think Kristine’s on to something. Bread of life, bread’s made of flour, flour’s made of endosperm, oh my god, the ancient Bible writers knew all about triploidy!!!! The Bible is scientific!!!!
“The next thing I’d like to debunk in Paul’s latest diatribe is his assertion that matter and energy is all that exists in the universe and science can explain it all without reverting to anything else.”
DS tries to make some BS about dark matter and energy not being matter and energy, and haploid being diploid. It is his usual MO – disregarding all evidence before his eyes when trying to make a point.
Of course, he also makes a mockery out of Dembski’s EF, if he assumes every improbable event must have a natural cause in his effort to not “arbitrarily limit what science can potentially explain”. Guess he forgot to check with his mentor about the design argument.
He sure doesn’t seem to use many of those IQ points he claims he has.
Bartleby:
That Planck used the moral argument doesn’t change the fact that it is false. On the contrary, the use of false arguments strengthens the position that religion is a danger to “any prospects at a better future”.
Kristine,
Don’t write off clay – it’s a hot topic (pun intended) in prebiotic organic molecule assembly. Google clay & prebiotic life or primordial life.
Attempts to arrive at natural explanations for the miraculous events reported in scripture go back to antiquity, but they all have the same problem. There is indeed no credible evidence that supports the notion that Moses parted the Red Sea a la Charles Heston, but there is also no credible evidence that the children of Israel crossed the Reed Sea during a wind stom either. The mere fact that a non-miraculous explanation can be concocted for a scriptural miracle doesn’t make scripture credible historical evidence. We know that there was no virgin birth or resurrection because these occurences are impossibilities, but that doesn’t mean we do know that there actually was a Jesus or that he was ever crucified. These things obviously could have happened, but the evidence is lousy.
By the way, how do we know that Yahweh didn’t have a Y chromosome? Has anybody karyotyped God? And once you start playing this stupid game, how can you rule any suggestion out of order?
“Jesus was the highly improbable multiple mutant outcome of a cytological error”
See? It’s so convoluted and unlikely that God must’ve done it!
Another thing he doesn’t know is his sailing terms. It’s ‘no room to swing a cat’, and refers to the cat o’nine tails with which naughty sailors were flogged in the Royal Navy. He must have been three sheets to the wind when he wrote that, and its another of his theories gone by the board. Of course, he may pursue this to the bitter end but he will be flogging a dead horse…ok, that’s enough of the contrived nautical shit, ed.
I only took biology 1 in high school. As a freshman. During the years in Kansas in which evolution was still forbidden by the ’99 BOE. And I still get meiosis and embryonic development better than DaveScot. What an idiot.
Hmm…If you buy the “meiosis non-dysjunction” explanation, there’s a much easier way to explain Jesus’s lack of a Y chromosome than going for bizarre teratogenic changes: he was a woman, not a man. She intelligently concluded that in her cultural context that her message would never get heard if she presented herself as a woman, daughter of God or not, and so spent her life dressing as and acting like a man. Still not miraculous, except perhaps for God’s making her disciples so miraculously stupid that they didn’t notice despite years of intimate contact, but much simpler than trying to find a mutation or teratogenic event that will allow a 46XX person to become phenotypically male. (The other way around would be MUCH easier. It turns out that female is the “normal” developmental path and males only appear when you add MIF and other hormones to subvert the plan.)
Folk etymology. Look it up.
God is perfect, and the Y chromosome is a defective X chromosome.
All this biological speculation is fascinating and educational, but it presumes that there actually WAS a ‘real’ Jeebus. That’s an assumption I’m not prepared to make. Or I should say I used to grant that assumption, but now I’m considerably more skeptical and entertain the hypothesis that he may be more mythological than historical.
Besides, I thought the angel did it, but that’s from catechism class fifty years ago, my memory might be a bit shaky *grin*. Does anyone have any thoughts on angels’ chromosomal status?
Then we can move on to whether gawd has a belly button–or a penis assuming he’s male. And since that same long-ago catchism class portrayed Our Creator as the bethroned, white-bearded old man a la’ Zeus, of course he must be.
What effing rubbish religion is. Trying to use science to justify any of it is pathetic.
I’m fascinated at the way that creationists are always so willing to put their ignorance on display. A perfect case in point is the inimitable AFDave over at ATBC, who seems to believe he has brought all of modern science to it knees with his Creator God Hypothesis. He thinks he’s falsified basic concepts in physics, geology, information theory, linguistics, and of course, biology. When asked about his reading on the subject of evolution, he threw out a list of the usual suspects: Dawkins, Gould, Mayr, etc. But when pressed for particulars, he replied unabashedly,
You just can’t make up stuff as dumb as that.
About the virgin birth…
Let’s not forget that not only does DS’s arguement mean Jesus is not the Son of God, either way a virgin birth means he wasn’t the Messiah, because he wasn’t qualified to be the Messiah. The Messiah was to be a direct descendent of King David, and if Joseph wasn’t Jesus’ father…
The Messiah was to be a direct descendent of King David, and if Joseph wasn’t Jesus’ father…
That’s one of those questions that little girls in Bible study point out only to get ignored/a blank look/a stammering answer that it “doesn’t really matter” (only it matters later when it’s Christmas again and you’ve got to be good for Santa). Just one of those things that frustrate little girls and turn them off from religion.
Are David’s descendants from the House of Haploid or Diploid again? I forgot…
Yeah, that’s called *Creationism*. “If evolution happened, then there is no God and atheism is true.” That comes from Christians, gift-wrapped in bows and on a silver platter, with a little donation envelope on the side to give money to the Atheist Alliance International, just in case the theory of evolution is still around in, oh, about 5 to 10 years. Shooting holes in their faith AND in their foot.
Perhaps Dave is in a specially giving spirit because of Christmas, which is when the televisions all do those specials which try to show that the Bible IS a reliable historical document by coming up with farfetched and implausible speculations on how the Christmas Star MAY have been a comet or meteor or atmospheric disturbance or anything but a not-to-be-historically- relied-on miracle.
Hmmm… Dave Scot has just called Jesus a girly man.
What are the penalties for blasphemy in Scot’s preferred cult?
And what light does this shed on Jesus never having married?
Anyone catch Dave Scots other gaff?
“Suppose a microRNA (uRNA?) is generated from a junk (non-coding) sequence and its function is to interact with tRNA from a coding gene before a protein is generated”
http://www.uncommondescent.com/archives/1802#comment-77208
Protein coding tRNA ?
Anyone catch Dave Scots other gaff?
“Suppose a microRNA (uRNA?) is generated from a junk (non-coding) sequence and its function is to interact with tRNA from a coding gene before a protein is generated”
http://www.uncommondescent.com/archives/1802#comment-77208
Protein coding tRNA ?
Barbra Streisand is the Second Coming?
“Jesus was the highly improbable multiple mutant outcome of a cytological error”
Not only was he a mutant – he was the original X-Man!
Excelsior!
This comment from DaveScot is priceless:
Say what???????? Methinks he doth protest too much.
If he’s truly an agnostic, why is he putting so much energy into trying to “prove” something in the Bible? The only explanation I can think of is that way down in his heart of hearts, he’d really like to be a believer, but he’s too embarrassed to admit it and thinks that if he can “prove” it, he can come out of the closet safely.
In any case, trying to “prove” anything about God is a gross failure of faith (if not an outright insult to it). It’s also a major cop-out, because if you’re wasting all your energy on that crap, you have an “excuse” to conveniently ignore the things in the Bible that are explicitly stated and intended to be taken literally, such as the Golden Rule, the Sermon on the Mount, the Greatest Commandment, the obligation to care for the “least of these,” etc.
No, wait a minute. Those things are also spelled out in some form in all the other major religions. We have to concentrate on what makes Christianity different (=superior).
There are already way too many self-proclaimed “Christians” running around out there giving the rest of us a bad name with their stupidity. The last thing we need is an “agnostic” buying into their delusions and making things worse.
Just two bitchy brass farthings’ worth from a lifelong Christian who wonders how the Kreationist Kooks and other IDiots managed to get their brains washed away with their sins when they were baptized…….
p.s. I’m no biologist, but even I know that X’s and Y’s are only part of the picture. You still need two sets of autosomes (which don’t even get mentioned until comment #45)!
[also posted at Dispatches from the Culture Wars]
Bro. Gerard,
Perhaps you will enjoy Werner’s opinions of matters outside his area of expertise.
Werner Heisenberg was once asked by Pauli if he believed in a personal God. This was his reply: “Can you, or anyone else, reach the central order of things, or events, whose existence seems beyond doubt, as directly as you can reach the soul of another human being? I am using the term ‘soul’ quite deliberately so as not to be misunderstood. If you would put the question like that, the answer is yes.”
I like his answer. For me it is germane to the discussion, for does it matter if the virgin birth story is fact or myth? If one “gets it” then either holds great meaning. When I understand myth as more than mere fiction, then I can understand Joseph Campbell when he sees the virgin birth as symbolic, calling it “the birth of spiritual [hu]man out of animal [hu]man,” and “the birth of compassion.”
Shalom,
Bro. Bartleby
“calling it ‘the birth of spiritual [hu]man out of animal [hu]man,’ and ‘the birth of compassion.'”
So no human was compassionate or spiritual before 2000 bc, or if you want to be figurative, before that myth was created and written down?
Um, two thousand years ago. 2000 bc would be a couple thousand years too early.
Hey, you may be onto something here :-). That’s the Immaculate Conception! By that doctrine, Mary was born without sin. Now we know what that means: no lethal recessives.
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
What’s so “mere” about fiction?
A good book is a good book.
Then again, a bad book is not such a good book.
Either way, no mere about it.
“So no human was compassionate or spiritual before 2000 bc, or if you want to be figurative, before that myth was created and written down?”
I think you are mixing the value of myth stories with an understanding of historic events. It is not that “no human was compassionate or spiritual before” but that all cultures at one time or another made statements of their faith through stories. The stories that live on are the ones that folks believe have value. This particular story, as Joseph Campbell reads it, is a statement of the birth of compassion. So, I would think a “good myth” challenges us to value it as if it were truth.
In other words, it doesn’t matter if it’s true or false as long as it gives Bartleby the warm fuzzies.
I have never understood the point of the claim of virgin birth. It couldn’t be proved objectively around 0 BCE, unless the mother was irrefutably in isolation for 10 months or so. There are other miracles claimed in the NT; but they supposedly had uninvolved eye-witnesses.
The virgin birth claim has to be accepted on the word of the mother (& father). No doubt many unwed pregnant teenagers would like their parents to believe them likewise?
One other “miracle” in the NT that did not have uninvolved eye-witnesses was the light (& sound?) only Saul/Paul experienced on the road to Damascus. And the NT definitely botched up the retellings of that one too.
Warm fuzzies? I’d get them from watching Joseph Campbell step out from behind a marquee for The Sorrow and the Pitty and telling Bartleby, “I hear-I heard what you were saying. You-you know nothing of my work…”
Syncretism, flattery or theft– you decide. Buddha was compassion first. Jesus is the direct-to-video knock off by thieving hacks. But who cares, it’s all genre fiction:
Diane said:
So s/he was flat chested AND bearded? Sounds like severe hormonal imbalance…
That DaveScot shore is smart. And so modest!
We know that there was no virgin birth or resurrection because these occurences are impossibilities
Um, fetus in fetu anyone? [Granted, not typical NSVDs, but still.]
I am looking forward to DS publishing his biological explanation for trans-substantiation: bread and wine are surely of human origin, display a XX genotype and homozygousity at every single locus.
Nope, I’m not interested in Heisenberg’s view of the soul either. Heisenberg was not an admirable individual, for all the brilliance of his work in 1923-1925.
And I’m not Bro. Gerard, except to four other individuals, of whom you are not one.
As someone above pointed out above, the virgin birth is probably little more than a post-hoc prevarication, mentioned in only one of the four canonical Gospels. As perhaps you know, in the New Testament Apocrypha, considerably more scandalous accounts were advanced.
Lethal alleles? You fool! Mary was immaculately conceived, and therefore was free of the taint of original sin. As any creationist will tell you, original sin is the cause of all death, diseases, and harmful mutations in the world (as well as being the reason we are steadily becoming shorter and turning into PYGMIES + DWARFS). Therefore, logically, Mary’s genome contained no lethal recessive alleles. Isn’t it obvious?
Other parts are clearly metaphor and allegory.
This implies Mary, and by extension, Jesus, were both 15 feet tall.
Brilliant. He’s defending Christianity by arguing that Jesus wasn’t the son of God!
Way back at the top of the comments, Blake said:
It’s hardly an original idea with Matthew either. Virgin births are a dime a dozen as far back as the misty beginnings of mythology, and they occur in most of the world’s religions. Most religions call such people “demigods” and/or “heroes” and leave it at that. I’m not sure how literally the ancients took such things; religion in ancient times was often at least as much a civic duty as a matter of private belief.
Jesus Christ as “the only begotten Son of God” is based on a concept borrowed from the Greeks in the late first century c.e. (a.d. if you prefer) and cemented into dogma over the next couple of centuries. There was no such concept in Judaism, Christianity’s “parent.” (It doesn’t exist in Islam, an Abrahamic monotheism which had little exposure to outside influences in its formative years, either. In fact, the Qur’an explicitly rejects it.)
In Greek and Roman mythology, a hero or other similarly great person almost had to have been divinely conceived; otherwise, how could he (and it was almost always “he”) have been so much greater than everyone else? It even spilled over into real life. Alexander the Great was one beneficiary of this notion, and some of the later Roman emperors got heavily into deifying themselves.
With that tradition so firmly rooted and applied to known historical and even contemporary personages, it was almost inevitable that as Christianity spread into the Gentile world and became a primarily Gentile religion, the notion would become part of the common understanding of the person “Jesus Christ.”
But of course the Church couldn’t settle for its central figure being just another one of many miraculous births, so for the next several hundred years it put a lot of effort into suppressing the knowledge that his birth wasn’t unique in the world of religion.
Dogma. Wrangling virgin births out of bad “science.” Explaining the miracles. How many angels can dance on the head of pin. Limbo. 666. Armageddon. Blaming the victims of disaster. What a bleeping waste of time and energy. But for far too many people, it’s a whole lot easier than following their leader’s example and going out into the real world and meeting the needs of real people.
GH says:
You’ll get no argument out of me on that. Now, if only the wingnuts would stop taking the metaphorical stuff literally and the literal stuff metaphorically, the world would be in much better shape.
WoW
such a topic
but
I wonder what intersex people feel about being labled as defective mutants, oh yeah they were labeled at birth and fixed (to fit).
wonder also what the possibles would be, at the curent estimated rate of 1/1000 ‘mutants’ a year
of another claim to such fame
DaveScot: “I have certified IQ somewhere north of 150.”
Somehow this brings to mind those upside-down world maps…
Oddly enough, I was having to explain that (and a couple of other things) about meiosis to someone just last week. They had had trouble following the explanation from their own teacher or course-books. So perhaps it’s quite a common mistake to make and needs to be highlighted more, eg in the texts.
Barbra Streisand is the Second Coming?
No, the second coming is Julie Andrews.
I guess people are going to start saying trash (definitely not me though) like “Virgin Mary is a giant parasitoid because they are known to perform Parthenogenesis. ”
But that doesn’t explain why jesus doesn’t have 6 limps, 2 antennae, exoskeleton and 3 main body section. Also it doesn’t explain why Mary is lacking her giant ovipositor.
DaveScot an agnostic? Right. What he is is a liar. He’s really a fundie.