(December 19, 2013 at 1:16 pm)Doubting Thomas Wrote: How the heck else are you going to get the "Jesus is the son of God" idea across without having Mary impregnated by God?I think it's the "virgin" part that kind of throws it. It may have been used due to a mistranslation of a word meaning "young lady" or "girl" but it might also have been a stroke of inspiration because a virgin would be seen as "pure." God inseminating human women isn't all that rare in mythology, if I am not mistaken, though usually they were more "hands on" about it.
Or perhaps the part that makes it complicated is the "god as man" part. "Messiah" means savior or deliverer, and Jesus could simply have been another of the many messengers of god sent to show that Yahweh hadn't forsaken his people. Perhaps the gospel writers wanted to add something to what had become a pretty tired plot? Why send just another messiah, when god could send... GOD??!?!
I just realized... the first gospel was actually written by George Lucas.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
