Can You Be a Christian and Not Believe in Supernatural Origins?
Was Jesus a Virgin?
1. I believe in God the Father, Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth:
2. And in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord:
3. Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary:
4. He suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified and was buried: He descended into hell:
5. On the third day he rose again in fulfillment of the scriptures:
6. He ascended into heaven, and was seated at the right hand of the Father,
7. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his Kingdom will have no end.
8. I believe in the Holy Ghost:
9. I believe in the holy catholic church: the communion of saints:
10. The forgiveness of sins:
1l. The resurrection of the body:
12. And the life everlasting. Amen.
The Apostles Creed
Oddly I had to change the Apostles Creed above as I could not find a version on google that was identical to how I remembered it. I asked my very devout former Catholic nun mother for her version. It was very close to mine but there was some tweaking on a few words and phrases. Does that matter? Perhaps.
It seems to me that every major religion has an element of mysticism and supernatural origins to it, whether it involved the union of God or gods or angels with humans or whether it involved otherworldly influences of the spirit realm. When I was growing up, however, a consensus was emerging regarding a materialistic natural world in which only that which could be measured was worthy of our attention. What happened when we dreamed or when we died was of no importance as it simply represented the sporadic firing of neurons. Physical death was the end with a void of blackness following it. We were seperated and on our own. Even our conscious experience on this worldly plane was demoted to a random act of nature.
Many children would snicker and make jokes about the Mary’s virgin birth of Jesus, with a few girls I knew who became pregnant claiming that it was God’s child and one even telling me that she was a virgin (I am quite sure in her case that she was not). It became a shorthand way of saying that there were difficult circumstances regarding the paternity of their child.
Less comment was given regarding Jesus rising from the dead and staying for 40 days to preach to his apostles before ascending into heaven. To me however defeating death created a great deal of religious superstition. Buddha is believed by faithful adherents to have ascended into Nirvana breaking the cycle of life death and reincarnation. In Thailand I have seen a few examples of petrified monks, who supposedly died while meditating whose bodies are not decomposing. They are wearing sunglasses though.
My open question is, can you call yourself a Christian and not believe in the supernatural origins story of Jesus? To me it implies that you might not believe in a creator outside of ourselves, i.e. in God or some type of divine intervention. Perhaps not everything that counts can be counted, as Albert Einstein is reputed to have said.
That brings me to Richard Dawkins, who now counts himself as a cultural Christian. He joins a growing list of popular podcasters that seem to be casting aside more Atheistic leanings. Here is one of his more well known quotes.
I don’t entirely disagree with him. I think Atheism emerged in part as a cultural backlash to some of the more controversial verses of the Bible, of which there are many in the Old Testament. Of course for Christian scholars the New Covenant with Jesus might have negated that:
34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. 35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
John 13:34-35
In short after Jesus came to save the world everything changed. Perhaps. Or it went deeper underground to emerge again when the time was right.
As an open question do you believe in supernatural origins in general? Can you believe in Jesus and the message without also believing in God or some power beyond our control or understanding? Also would that have made Jesus a virgin?
I’ve been asking that question since I was a young child. There is no information given and it is assumed that since Yeshua was without sin himself that he did not thus marry or procreate. Is that a sin?
Satanists might hold that the sin is not to do it. It’s strange times we are living in
There is a semantic trick in the word supernatural.
It's pretty old. No one seems to question that it is a trick, but I think it is.
First, it is simply defined that only natural things exist. Natural means "from nature" and nature is composed only of things that are tangible, visible, have a volume and mass. All this is hidden, deeply buried in the assumption.
Then comes the trick: the people who adhere to that hidden definition can simply attach the adjectives "not natural" or "supernatural" to anything whose existence they dislike. Magically, this preference becomes a logical truth, and logical truths are natural, by definition.
All of this is irrational because the definition is wrong. At the very least, they had to expand the definition when they accepted the existence of electricity, magnetism, the invisible "force" of gravity (not a problem for Newton because he was a Theologian), and the atomic models to explain chemical bonding and molecular composition, without which they couldn't have invented genetics and genomics, which today most people believe to be absolutely true by the obvious miracle of cultural osmosis.
And they will have to keep expanding the definition. Which inevitable leads to a Personal God. If nothing else, our language forces every thought to go in that direction, which is terrifying for many.
I think most people, me included, make this mistake often, without realizing. It's the consequence of mental poisoning. I doubt anyone can overcome this problem without supernatural intervention, hehehehe.
By the way, supernatural is Latin for metaphysical or metaphysikos. And many scientists are known to abhor metaphysics.
Now that I think about this, it's weird that the things people fear the most are giants with clay feet: nuclear warfare, infections in general, genetic modification, fetal malformations, viral diseases, quarantines, concentration camps, explosive chips that can control your brain. All of these things would be dismissed as supernatural nonsense if they were delivered in a religious language. But the old myths of world destruction and divine punishment with disease and tyranny are now explained as normal, natural phenomena, and you are allowed to believe it by weirdos like Dawkins and Harris, and you are expected to be terrified by natural things, because the new shamans feast on your fear.
You are allowed to deny sin, but you are not allowed to question officially mandated physical scares.
Jesus died and came back to life to bring salvation from all this man-made abuse, and he made this salvation available to anyone who asks for it. Notice how the true atheists always deny salvation from abuse by any other means but self-deification and self-idolatry. The lesser atheists are ashamed of their own self-importance.
Christ can to redeem mankind. He had already created everything that exists, what possible benefit could be derived from his procreating again? Secondly, what kind of man would marry and have children knowing that he would be killed very young and leave behind a defenceless and impoverished family, and would those children inherit his sinless nature and then also fall into sin like his first creation had? Thirdly, he had no physical resources to support a family...he only owned the clothes he wore. There are more practical reasons why he remained a virgin, but I think my point is made.