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I am religious and believe in free will

70 (27.6%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

113 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (24%)

Total Members Voted: 249

[martinuzz]

Jesus can't be a clone or he would have been banned by EU regulations on admission of clones

[TD1]

This is also the case. As everyone knows, EU law can in no way be contrary to the values or ethics of its peoples or, indeed, individual persons.

But the Law is Absolute.

In reconciling these statements, we must hold two facts as self apparent.

One: EU Law is For the People and Absolute
and therefore
Two: Jesus is not a clone.

[Egan_BW]

Needa get that Y chromosome from somewhere, eh?

Where did it come from? God just doing some coding from scratch for, some reason? I suppose that's possible with omnipotent power, but it's unnecessarily complicated when the messiah can simply be female instead. How does an omnipotent being decide on how complex its solutions should be, when it's capable of anything from the least complex possible solution to an infinitely complex solution and every point along that axis requires the same amount of effort, being 0?

[TD1]

'The messiah can simply be female instead.'
By today's values? Certainly. By the reasoning underlying the Bible and contemporary society? No.

The Messiah is a prophesied Son of David, scion of a great patriarchal line descended even unto Adam.

Adam who, we know, was made in God's image - a male image. Woman came second and with alterations.

The son of God would most naturally be male by the internal logic of the Bible.

[martinuzz]

People were easily tricked back then

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsVAYFSEBrA

[Egan_BW]

Well, it's exactly as easy to convince people that you're god while in a female body as it would be to code a y chromosome from scratch, being zero effort in both cases.

[Rolan7]

Your argument that

'If He did, wouldn't it be something special that made Jesus stand out?'

doesn't really hold water because God can do whatever the feck he likes. Also you seem to be forgetting the magic powers Jesus had, which probably count as 'something special.' 

So.... yea, it's not the most reasonable reading of Jesus' life (by scripture or historical reality), but if it's an article of faith for ye then run with it mate.

Literally no part of my argument relied on faith.  I explained how I reached my conclusion from the facts as presented in the stories.  Perhaps you have faith that Jesus is cis?

Mormonism invented entire new stories which contradict and greatly expand on Jesus's story, and rely entirely on faith.  Much like this:

'Mary said to the angel, ‘How can this be, since I am a virgin?’ The angel said to her, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.'

It seems that God's power 'overshadowed' her, the Holy Spirit did...something within her womb. That wasn't necessarily the formation of a gamete/sperm/whatever, but it seems apparent that some admixture occurred within the body of Mary between divine and mortal. And, as Jesus is a man in every single relevant source, not a 'clone' of Mary - - - it seems likely that some of that was on a genetic level. Needa get that Y chromosome from somewhere, eh?

A more natural reading of your quote would be that Jesus is fully holy and is the Son of God, but has no genetic relation to Mary.  But instead you've decided that sex happened and that Jesus is genetically a demigod.  You had to assert an awful lot to make that happen, while dismissing the fact that Jesus didn't look divine or unusual in any way.  "God can do whatever the feck he likes" is a weak argument that could justify any headcanon you want to believe.

If I wanted Jesus to be a trans man, I could simply say "God can do whatever the feck he likes".  But nobody would take me seriously.
If I wanted Jesus to be cis, for some reason, I could say the same thing.

'The messiah can simply be female instead.'
By today's values? Certainly. By the reasoning underlying the Bible and contemporary society? No.

The Messiah is a prophesied Son of David, scion of a great patriarchal line descended even unto Adam.

Adam who, we know, was made in God's image - a male image. Woman came second and with alterations.

The son of God would most naturally be male by the internal logic of the Bible.

This isn't an argument, but I take issue with one assertion.  All mankind is in God's image, not only males or men:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

The Messiah is prophesied to be a Son, sure.  I won't check the Hebrew, you're probably right.  My explanation of Jesus is that he is the mannest man to ever man, having been a man from the beginning of time until the end.

Your conclusion just doesn't follow without some unstated assumptions on your part.

[Magmacube_tr]

Okay guys, can we just stop and all agree that Yahweh sucks ass and smells like prostate cancer?

[Egan_BW]

Probably not.

[Frumple]

Okay guys, can we just stop and all agree that Yahweh sucks ass and smells like prostate cancer?

Hey now, thorough application of omnipresence means yahweh sucks every ass that gets sucked (at a minimum! Some conceptualizations means yahweh sucks even asses that don't actually get sucked in reality) and smells like every cancer, not just prostate cancer. Get it right :V

[Magmacube_tr]

Hey now, thorough application of omnipresence means yahweh...

And you actually trust Yahweh's word on anything? He is not omnipresent. He is not omni-anything. He is just a pathetic wind and storm god who scored big through extensive cult mind control tactics.

I could feasibly take him.

[hector13]

Hey now, thorough application of omnipresence means yahweh...

And you actually trust Yahweh's word on anything? He is not omnipresent. He is not omni-anything. He is just a pathetic wind and storm god who scored big through extensive cult mind control tactics.

I could feasibly take him.

You’re making the assumption that it actually exists, rather than a human construct to try to explain away the unknown.

[Magmacube_tr]

You’re making the assumption that it actually exists, rather than a human construct to try to explain away the unknown.

Of course he doesn't exists. I was going off of your previous tangent.

My point stands though.

[Frumple]

You’re making the assumption that it actually exists, rather than a human construct to try to explain away the unknown.

This is more relevant than you might know; most propositions of omnipresence are largely exgetical (or... something like that, might be mixing up the term), heh. Iirc there's few to no bits of scripture that explicitly claim it, it all falls out from extrapolation of other bits of theology.

There's remarkably famous/influential theological proofs for it, though. It's an amazing thing to see extremely pious medieval christian theologians argue themselves around to what amounts to hardcore materialism, heh.

[McTraveller]

It's fairly simple, to be honest. Basically all the verses that say "God doesn't experience time the way mortals do", coupled with what we now know about space-time, meaning that space and time are different aspects of the same thing, and the fact that YHWH is eternal and immortal (not bound by time), mean that omnipresence is a foregone conclusion; there is no place where God can't be in a human-finite time, which is equivalent to omnipresence.

I think there are more explicit verses, like "there is no place you can go to hide from God" or "there is no place outside the influence of God" or similar.

A related tangent: all these people who claim to be atheists but think we live in a simulation. If we are in a simulation, then any being or construct which is observing and possibly interacting with said simulation is essentially a god.  So I would argue that "simulationists" are de facto theists.  A construct running a simulation would have all the characteristics of god: knowledge of everything that happens or will happen (from the standpoint of the simulated; if you can read the simulation logs, you are omniscient; if you save state of the simulation at any point, you can stop and re-start, effectively doing time travel, you can observe everywhere at once, etc.), ability to spawn or de-spawn entities in the simulation, passing through walls, granting supernatural powers, not necessarily bound by the rules of the simulation itself, etc. There's no practical distinction between "the spiritual world" and "the host environment of the simulation."