n/m - belaboring the joke.
Which rapidly raises the question of why he doesn’t just do that for everyone and skip the whole Jesus rigamarole.
You mean get everyone pregnant? 
Not to mention withholding it from most of the world until the white people got there to set things right.
God doesn’t owe you an explanation. He’s inscrutable.
It’s quite the premise, hey? My blood made me do it.
What you are referring to, Immaculate Conception, is an invention of the church back in the 1800’s sometime, whenever the existence of egg cells was discovered. The church said, oh shit, that means Mary’s tainted too, and so they magically made her free from sin at her own birth so that Jesus would not be tainted by OS. Because they said so, so yah, like a magic wand, but wielded by the church, not God. True story. Or true story about the big myth anyway. Immaculate Conception was not even a term until about 150 years ago.
Hey, if it’s good enough for the goose…
God doesn’t owe me an explanation because God doesn’t exist, same as how I don’t expect Gandalf to appear before me and personally explain why he didn’t ask the Eagles for a lift to Minas Tirith. But if the people peddling this God/Christ mythos want me not to entertain myself picking it to pieces it’s on them to patch up their plot holes themselves. If they don’t their shoddy story is fair game for recreational dismantling.
11th Commandment: (to self) Thou shalt not post in violation of Poe’s Law.
Dangit, I got suckered. Well, at least I got to post an unprovoked snipe at the counterargument that with the eagles it was Mordor (and it’s acclaimed archers and flying nazgul) or nothing at all.
Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!
Dude, the N-Word? Seriously? Do you not realize that is wraithist?
Okay, for that pun you deserve a smiting. This is the thread to request a smiting, right?
I 've always suspected that religionists are just extremely cautious people. As in I have no clue if there is a god. But why take a chance and go to hell or wherever.Many people cannot /will not come to grips with their lives coming to an end. Sooo. Latch onto something that promises life everlasting.
I look at it as the bookends of life: where did we come from and where are we going? I don’t think that what we believe makes any difference to those unknowable questions, but it can make a difference while we’re here living our lives. Religion can be a companion on the journey, but is that companion is just going to make you feel bad or guilty all the time, who needs it?
Please, I beg you, not Pascal’s Wager . . . anything, but not Pascal’s Wager!
CMC fnord!
Well, you’re the one who brought it up. 
supposedly claimed that religion is supposedly some folks’ way of not taking a chance; but Pascal’s Wager argues that you have to take a chance, and that you should take a chance on religion.
And it makes what I think is a relevant and worthwhile distinction: is it rational to believe irrational things? Pascal was (arguably) saying, “Even if I can’t prove rationally that God exists (or that Christianity is true), I can prove that you ought to believe he does/it is.”
It occurs to me that some religion (or some people’s approach to religion) is sub-rational—it’s a way of closing their eyes and sticking their fingers in their ears to what rationality would say—while some is super-rational—accepting what the senses reveal and the mind figures out while being open to something beyond that.
I recall Pascal’s wager (or its equivalent) as being dogmatically problematic. There was some kind of “teaching” that faith is all-important, such that if you are just going through the motions without feeling the HS or whatever, you will fail to earn a place in glorious heaven. Believe or believe not, there is no middle ground.
Doctrine stuffs the unknown with answers. We move forward by discovering the unknown. If what lies beyond what we understand is already known, why should we bother? A person who knows how to learn will realize that knowledge and understanding gained reveals how vastly much more there is yet to learn. I, personally, prefer to see no horizon to discovery – that there will always be far more to learn than what we already have. A thing out there that bounds the end of all understanding is just a depressing concept.
Not on religion - on Christianity. Now Pascal pretty much equates Christianity with religion, and that is one of the reasons the wager fails.
And he failed miserably in doing so.
Many atheists are open to such things - just show us the evidence. It seems many spiritual people jump from “you can’t prove there is nothing beyond reality” (maybe true) to “aha! there is something beyond reality!” (not at all likely.)
I believing something that isn’t true a form of “ignorance?”
If Joe worships Odin and Jack worships Zeus, and if both cannot be right, is one of them “ignorant?”
I’ve always thought ignorance meant “not knowing something true,” not “believing something untrue.”
But if it does, then, a great majority of religious people are ignorant, because their various faiths contradict each other dramatically.