Me:
Sample the Dog:
Two different things: I’m referring to entire denominations, with their systematically laid out requirements for belief. You’re referring to a few people. There’s a difference.
Every mainstream Christian denomination out there requires you to believe in the basics that I’ve laid out. If you can think of one that doesn’t, I’d be interested in hearing about it.
OK. I had the timeframe for Moses off by quite a bit, so that makes more sense. And of course we have no idea if Moses every actually existed in the first place.
Start here.
Your assertion that belief in the virgin birth is a requirement of all mainstream denominations is simply false.
I agree.
Christians believe that Jesus was something other than just another ordinary human being: that he was/is the Son of God in a unique way. I believe that God could have made Mary pregnant without the help of human sperm. I also believe that God could have involved human sperm in the conception of his divine Son, and that anyone who believes the latter is not thereby disqualified from being considered a Christian. The Incarnation is a mystery either way.
This thread has gone off on several tangents, hasn’t it?
Denominationally, DDG is correct. AFAIK, only the Quakers and a few other determined non-Creedalist groups do not officially subscribe to it. In point of fact, as a matter of personal doctrine and theology, I’d venture to guess that close to half of those self-identifying as Christians either do not believe in it, or hold it in a “not proven” status – something that sounds like myth but might possibly have happened, and whether or not it did makes no difference to their belief.
A thread specifically on that topic might be of interest; I’d be interested in seeing DDG’s contention of the necessity of it dealt with in more detail. (Plus, it’ll give those who enjoy driving through religion threads to crack jokes opportunity to do the “that’s what the H. stands for” one ;))
I’m sorry, I just can’t buy the assertion that belief in the virgin birth is mandatory doctrine for all mainstream Christian denominations until someone shows me the money.
If someone can post references to the stated platforms that indicate this doctrine is considered indispensable by the mainstream denominations, I’ll retract.
But the clergy and parishoners I know who reject the virgin birth aren’t, by and large, hiding in the shadows fearing excommunication.
And as just one example, so far I can’t find any reference to this belief as a fundamental tenet of the United Methodist Church. In fact, their Basic Affirmations make no mention of the virgin birth. Rather, they use language such as: “Scripture witnesses to the redeeming love of God in Jesus’ life and teachings, his atoning death, his resurrection, his sovereign presence in history, his triumph over the powers of evil and death, and his promised return.”
Nothing about conception by a virgin.
Not all Christians believe that the being responsible for creating our physical bodies is the one who is trying to save us.
A common belief in early Gnostic Christianity was that the ‘ultimate’ god did not have anything to do with the material world. In the Valentinian cosmology, this god had several extensions that were of him but were not complete in and of themselves - something like angels. One of them (Sofia) became separated from the Big God, got lonely, and decided to create some company. This creation, referred to as the Demiurge, was the Old Testament God, and was lacking a soul as it was created by an imperfect being. It created the material world, humanity, and all the various lesser ‘gods’ worshipped by humans. Sofia realized her mistake and snuck into her creation’s creation as a serpent, and essentially gave the humans souls. The Demiurge then does his best to give the humans false beliefs and tries to prevent them from returning to their source by obscuring the truth. Then the brother/mate of Sofia, Jesus, shows up several thousand years later to teach humans how to leave the material world (which is fundamentally evil) and return to the ‘Real’ god.
This makes a lot more sense to me than the later versions of Christianity. Ever wonder why God is such a mean jerk in the Old Testament and turns into Mr. Nice Guy in the New? Because they aren’t the same being. Wonder how Satan was able to offer Jesus dominion over the physical world when it’s supposed to belong to God? That’s because ‘Satan’ was really the Demiurge. Wonder why God didn’t want man to have knowledge of good and evil? Because the Demiurge did not want humans to have souls becaue he didn’t have one. Most Gnostic sects held that humans were spiritually superior to the creator of the world, as we have a part of God in us and he doesn’t. Jesus didn’t come to sacrifice himself, that is spin put on the story later to promote the idea that human suffering is somehow noble, when it in fact makes it harder for us to ascend spiritually.
Anyway, fits in with evolution better too. The Demiurge could have used evolution to create soulless humans, and then his creator came and gave us souls. Jesus wants to save us, not becuase he created us, but because it is wrong for beings with souls to be trapped in an evil material world.
Moses was adopted by the pharaoh’s daughter and raised in the royal palace. I must have missed that part of the Old Testament where Moses is descrbied as illiterate. What was the chapter and verse?
How can you know what processes the Powers that Be who create used? Couldn’t evolution have been one of them? If you believe in an omnipotent power, than of course they can make use of processes we can barely begin to grasp, much less veiw completely. I was raised Christian, but can no longer practice the religion because of encounters I’ve had with corrupt ministers of more than one denomination. When I was a practicing Christian, I veiwed evolution as God’s tool, which he used to shape over time. Evolution doesn’t disprove the existence of Divinity to many, it proves it. The idea behind it is, “Something had to guide those processes. There are too many fortuitous ones to be completely random.”
After the appearance of the first self-replicating molecule the processes are not random - repeat, not random. Mutation is random but the end products of mutation are then filtered by natural selection, which is certainly not random, to get the final result.
David Simmons, you’re looking mirocosmically, I was speaking macrocosmically. As in, how the end of the dinosaurs came about, how the Neandeerthal line ceased. Things of that nature.
Most major denominations profess belief in one or both of the following:
With a little effort, I presume I can chase down statements either professing belief in the Virgin Birth or in the Creeds from most denominations.
Note that this is not to say what individual believers belonging to those denominations may hold as the truth, simply what they have chosen to leave on the books as their official statements of belief.
And now we segue’ this thread with the “What Makes Someone A Christian” one
(http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=303419&goto=newpost) as we aren’t talking about two forms of the same religion but two different religions which use the same vocabulary but distinct definitions. (Gnostic- “God the Father”- the Original All Good Source of Pure Spirit, distinct from the OT Yahweh-Creator of Matter; Traditional- “God the Father”- the Original All Good Creator of Everything, spiritual & material, identical with the OT Yahweh.)
No, your link doesn’t prove what you think it proves. All your link says is that “Most modern liberal theologians have generally rejected the virgin birth” and that X percentage of Americans either do or do not believe in it. But those are individuals–I’m talking about entire denominations.
And indeed, your cite says:
Nahhh, it’s not worth an entire thread. One sentence will suffice: “If Jesus wasn’t the offspring of a certified gen-yoo-wine virgin, then there’s a chance that He wasn’t the offspring of God’s Holy Spirit, and if he wasn’t the offspring of God’s Holy Spirit, then He was just the offspring of Some Guy, and if He was just the offspring of Some Guy, then He wasn’t God, and I can stop capitalizing his name.”
If Jesus wasn’t divine–if he was just another product of the mixing of two sets of human chromosomes, then there’s no theological point to the whole Crucifixion thing. He turns into just plain ol’ Yeshua Ben Joseph, another Nice Guy who got offed by The Powers That Be, and there was no incarnation of God, there was no “God sacrificing Himself in expiation of our sins”, no “God breaking the hold of Death on behalf of His creation”.
The whole religion kinda collapses, if Mary wasn’t offishully a virgin. Turns into yet another SoCal Touchy-Feely Happy Thoughts Be-Nice-To-Everybody think tank.
Ebionism.
Where did you look?
UMC.
Home > About Our Church > What We Believe > Our Doctrinal Heritage > Section 3 - Our Doctrinal Standards and General Rules > The Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church I-IV
The Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church I-I
Do you mean to say that the extinction of the dinosaurs and the disappearance of Neanderthal were guided processes?
Guys?
The O-poster is gone.
Stunned that we did not all simultaneously fall to out knees & instantly convert (it happens that way in the tracts, why not in real life?), he has wandered elsewhere.
Ho-hum.
15 minutes until the next one arrives.
Smoke 'em if you got 'em.
Geez, 2 full pages about whether or not the French language was born of a virgin Italian just to get back to this. At least you can’t accuse me of not reading an entire thread before posting.
I’d like to re-ask the OP’s question, restated slightly:
For Christians who believe that evolution was a process invented by, or begun by, or guided by God: We’re pretty sure that evolution doesn’t work “towards” a specific goal, and we know that there were plenty of false starts and dead-end paths.
What’s up with that? Was He waiting specifically for humans to arrive by chance, or would any reasonably intelligent species that arrived by chance be good enough? How was He guaranteed that such a species would be an inevitable result? Did He guide evolution along, smiting various species along the way so as to achieve a more desired result?
Why did He let dinosaurs reign for so long? Was he hoping that a self-reflective dinosaur would emerge, then hit the Smite button as soon as it was clear the such a critter would never come to be?
I’d love to reconcile reigion with evolution, but this is my sticking point. There seems to be far too much randomness for there to be a guiding hand behind the whole thing.
[Maxwell Smart}
Would you believe it, the very next creationist poster is going to come equipped with five articles from peer reviewed scientific journals. Five articles!
I find that very hard to believe.
Uh, one refereed article and three essays?
No.
How about quotes pasted from two minutes of Googing?
[/Maxwell Smart]
It is a bit much to believe that a Creative Guiding Hand would create a creature with a drive to survive that has to kill something to survive, like the wolf. This would mean that other creatures like caribou or rabbits had to be created for the wolf to kill. And those creatures had to be fast enough to escape killing most of the time or they wouldn’t survive to be food for the wolf. On the other hand they had to lose the race some of the time in order to keep the wolf alive.
And all this in a world that was “made for mankind.” What is all this fleeing and killing, entertainment for us?