Most Christians believe that that was not some biological process, but a true miracle where God himself bestowed this child on Mary. It would be technically correct that this was parthenogenesis, but it is a completely different... mechanism.
Most non-Christians, even if they believe Jesus was a true historical figure, do not believe that his mother was a virgin.
Do you have any sort of statistics to back this up? A survey of some kind? From my own experience, most people who are Christian subscribe to the lifestyle and teachings, but do not accept 100% of the bible as truth.
It's... at least the official doctrine of most Christian churches, yeah, and that's usually held as a particularly important point. Catholics, certainly, and they're rather numerous. It is possible that many, or even most, Christians disagree with tenets of faith that their churches hold to be absolutely vital and indispensable, I suppose.
[EDIT] It's part of the Nicene Creed, even. I think it's fair to say that if most church-goers at most Christian churches told a priest or pastor that they didn't believe that God miracle'd a baby into the Virgin Mary, it would, at the very least, give the priest or pastor a frowny face and/or evoke a "wait... what exactly do you think we're up to, here?" reaction.
I don't have data for the whole world, but at least in the USA, most Christians (and the majority of Americans) believe in the virgin birth of Jesus Christ [0].
Anecdotal, but I've never met or even heard of a Christian who believed in the virgin birth but thought it was the result of a natural process. Are there any examples of that you're aware of?
There was a Discovery channel documentary in the 2000s that tried to give "scientific" explanations for the miracles in Christ's life. Parthenogenesis was the theory they advanced instead of divine conception.
How about the fact that over a billion people are members of the Catholic Church? The membership of which requires believing quite a bit of Biblical literalism.
Tbh that whole argument is always kinda weird: If those people don't believe in the whole thing, why are they members in a church about it? That's pretty much the only statistic you need.
A lot of people are religious/affiliated with a specific religion due to inertia. Church attendance was compulsory for a lot of history. There are not a whole lot of people converting to catholicism/protestantism/judaism from other religions. I only very recently found out the technical differences between lutheranism and methodism, largely details around how/why baptism and taking sacrament from what I can tell, but growing up, we always went to one church and not the other even though nobody could tell me why.
>If those people don't believe in the whole thing, why are they members in a church about it?
Usually they inherit the religion from their parents. They grow up with the church as family so even if they don't believe in the tenets/beliefs they still participate.
> Most Christians believe that that was not some biological process, but a true miracle where God himself bestowed this child on Mary.
Most Christians that have spent the time to consider what it means for God to manifest a miracle fairly explicitly accept that that necessarily involves some physical sequence of events, potentially leveraging underlying capacities which in time and space predate the event which God, being all-knowing and existing outside of time and space, may have created for the express purpose of that specific miracle.
And most of the rest of Christians would probably dismiss the mechanical question as irrelevant for miracles, preferring to ask “why” rather than “how”.
> Most Christians that have spent the time to consider what it means for God to manifest a miracle fairly explicitly accept that that necessarily involves some physical sequence of events
That hasn't been my experience. I don't know about "most" Christians -- I wouldn't dare presume to speak for anyone in the US, for example -- but every Catholic I've spoken with (I live in a majorly Catholic country) believes in the entirely miraculous virgin birth of Jesus.
I think the phrasing "most Christians that have spent the time to consider [...]" is unfortunate; it reads like "every Christian which believes [this thing] believes [this thing]". Or it makes Christians who do believe in the miraculous birth without a prior physical setup to be somehow less thinking Christians.
Do note I'm an atheist myself so I certainly don't believe in miracles, either direct or indirect; I've no dog in this race.
> but every Catholic I've spoken with (I live in a majorly Catholic country) believes in the entirely miraculous virgin birth of Jesus.
Sure. I’m a Catholic and I believe that.
It’s also a non-explanation that doesn't actually rule out any particular physical process occurring as part of the manifestation of the miracle.
Other than things like the routine transubstantiation of the elements of the eucharist, where a defined part of the miracle is the absence of any physical manifestation of it occurring [0], that's pretty typical of miracles.
[0] Why doesn't the bread and wine that miraculously becomes the body and blood of Christ taste like flesh and blood? Well, because it miraculously also retains all the physical properties of bread and wine...
> Why doesn't the bread and wine that miraculously becomes the body and blood of Christ taste like flesh and blood? Well, because it miraculously also retains all the physical properties of bread and wine...
I'm not a Catholic, but I figured that most people interpreted the bread and wine as symbolic.
this is complicated, nuanced and not literal; it is a typical thing for critics to latch on to, so let's be wise-cautious with the exposition here at YNews, please
'this is complicated, nuanced and not literal' - arn't most things though? At least the person you are replying to started their comment with a weasel word - you're the one making the categorical statement about whether it is literal.
I mean, I'm not sure that _many_ would argue that. Most people would either take the view that Jesus had a human father, or that a miracle was involved. If nothing else, if he'd come about by this pathway, he'd be XX, which you'd think would have merited a mention in the Bible.
(It isn't totally unknown for XX people to be phenotypically male, and it'd fit with him having no kids, but really this seems like a needlessly complicated backstory for Jesus.)
No one argues that the Immaculate Conception is parthenogenesis. It could not possibly have been, because if it had, either Jesus would have been Jesusa, or Mary was hermaphroditic and Jesus her genetic clone. Since we know neither of these explanations is credible, it had to be miracle birth. When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Now with Horace and Isis it's quite different. Isis was a virgin and Horace was a falcon, so I'm really not sure how that worked.
That's clearly not what the original post was suggesting and yet someone went out of their way to change the focus to the political narrative of taking animal dosages.
I blocked almost all wp-login bots just using bot fight mode in Cloudflare few months ago along with some CF page rules to run an interstatial. It seems to losing effectiveness over time though, and since I do have WP-login, I wonder how I can implement something like your idea.
Maybe rename the legit login and put this in its place, but that would cause issues for redirects from the legit login link...
Change your login path to something like /custom-admin. Then create a page rule to captcha any attempt to access /wp-login. What traffic other than bots is going to go to the old login page? You can change the login link to go to the new page.
At the end of the day, they can still sell their house and have 1M. I can sell my house and have 150K. There is definitely more to it than just being wealthier on paper.
It depends where you live. If you live in the US, you can sell your house, have 1M, move to a low cost housing part of the country, buy a house for 150k and have 850k leftover for retirement.
I live in Singapore. If I have a 1M house, I can sell it, have 1M. Now I have two choices. I can either choose to be homeless, or I can buy another house for another 1M and be stuck in the same position as I was in in the first place. That 1M is really just "on paper" if you live in a country where housing is equally expensive everywhere.
That may be the case, but this article is about Americans. If we're opening up to the world, then just as well you actually have three options: move to a different country.
Which is also an option for Americans? Middle class city Americans are rich compared to middle class rural Americans, and the later are rich compared to other places in other countries still. Shrug.
Sure, I agree with that and that's my point. You can have your basic 1M house, but your 1M house sells for 1M at the end of the day. My 150K house will never be 1M. There's more involved than regional cost of living (such as salary, value of assets, value of work performed in relationship to where you live). You can move anywhere and some jobs will be the same or similar enough in pay, but my job will never pay enough for me to own a 1M house.
In summary, some of these wealthier on paper people you mentioned way back may in fact just be wealthier. They can also live a wealthier lifestyle if they so choose.
I don't think anybody is saying $1.2 is no big deal, only that it's not remotely the same as $20.
$1.2 isn't an unusual amount of assets for a pair of professionals in the US, once you include house and retirement accounts, neither of which can be easily converted into cash for spending.
I don't know of any car that gives Autopilot-like functionality for free. I'm certain BMW doesn't, I'm certain GM's Blue Cruise and Ford's Co-Pilot is a paid add on.
FSD provides functionality that isn't available on any car you can buy.
Didn't the kiwamijapan youtube guy figure out how to do this years ago? Really even then, it's not a new concept. Inmates in prisons turn toilet paper into daggers and I'm sure there are antiquities of sharp objects made from wood and other materials. I don't really understand the significance or newsworthiness of this.
I have this same issue and have been working around it by appending to the URL. I'd like to believe there's a better way, but I don't know what it is. Alternatively, I could just disable caching but that would defeat the point.
I don't like how you presented your argument. You make it sound like trade schools, with real practical skills like plumbing, involve neither learning nor growing.
Similarly, critical thinking should be learned long before college age. If you're learning that during college, you've got a very late start.
Maybe that's not what you meant, but that's pretty much what you've written.
By definition, a trade school is designed to teach people a trade, not what lies outside it. A liberal arts education (which OP was clearly referring to) exists to teach people about a variety of different things.
This might sound like I'm biased against the trades. I'm not! I think they're crucial, and I, along with about half the software engineers I know, often daydream about becoming a fine carpenter.
I'm also not biased against trade schools in particular. They provide an important service and are a pipeline to good union jobs. The criticisms I make at the top of this comment apply equally to students who go to a top music program like Juilliard or the Oberlin conservatory, as those graduates will tell you themselves. They go to learn music, not to broaden their horizons.
