5.2, part 1: Satan's pre-Christian virgin birth stories

This two-part series discusses pre-Christian religious stories from the Greeks, Romans, and Zoroastrians about unions between gods & mortals, miraculous virgin births, and offspring that were both human and god. It also covers the explanation from early Church Fathers Justin Martyr and Tertullian on how the pagans knew about these phenomena centuries before the time of Jesus: "Satanic pre-plagiarization."

By Todd Allen Gates, author of "Dialogue with a Christian Proselytizer."

This video series is also posted on the Rational Response Squad site, where there's no word/character limitation on the Comments section: see http://www.rationalresponders.com/pre_christian_virgin_birth_stories_and_the_...

An overview of whole series:

1 of 7: a brief description of videos 2 through 7.

2 of 7: a description of the Socratic Method.

3 of 7: the ground premises that the skeptic needs to establish with the Christian in order (a) for the Socratic Method to work, and (b) to focus on the issue at hand, which is "Are there valid reasons for me to believe that the Judeo-Christian Bible is the Word of God?"

4 of 7: the skeptic and the Christian read through scriptures and stories from non-Christian religions. Both agree that the following three characteristics are strong clues that a religion was not created by an Omniscient Wisdom, but just made up by people: (1) a cluelessness about the true layout of the universe, (2) senseless prejudices, (3) the borrowing of ideas & stories from pre-existing religions.

5 of 7: the skeptic and the Christian read through the Judeo-Christian Bible, and examine it by the same critical light just held up to non-Christian religions.

Science, Religion, and "truth" vs. "Truth": An explanation of how science and religion are opposites of each other when it comes to how permanent each considers its own knowledge to be--why religion spells its truths with a Capital T, and why science uses the lowercase t. This discussion is a continuation of a topic brought up in Video 5, but as my notes for this tangent issue grew longer and longer, I decided to give this 3-part series a separate title.

5.1 -- 5.4: Further details on the origins of the Judeo-Christian bible--how many of its ideas & stories can be found in religions that pre-date the bible by centuries.

5.1 explains why many of the baffling details within the tale of Noah & the Ark make sense once the story is read as a monotheistic version (in which God is said to be Omniscient, Omnipotent, and Benevolent) of a story that was originally polytheistic (in which the gods were none of the above).

5.2 discusses the pre-Christian religious stories from the Greeks, Romans, and Zoroastrians about unions between gods & mortals, miraculous virgin births, and offspring that were both human and god. It also covers the "Satanic pre-plagiarization" explanations from early Church Fathers Justin Martyr and Tertullian on how the pagans knew about these phenomena centuries before the time of Jesus.

5.3: Richard Dawkins refers to the Christian premises behind the belief that Jesus/God sacrificed Himself to appease Himself as "barking mad." This video looks at each of those premises--Divine Anger, the need for sacrifice, the use of a scapegoat--from the perspective of comparative mythology. A subtitle for this video would be "Richard Dawkins meets Joseph Campbell."

5.4: the evolution of the afterlife. Stage One - the 37 out of 39 Old Testament books that don't mention, or deny, an afterlife. Stage Two - the 2 Old Testament books that say there IS an afterlife. Stage Three - The New Testament, in which the afterlife becomes one of Christianity's main selling points.

6 of 7: a discussion of an abbreviated form of using the Socratic Method with proselytizers.

7 of 7: a discussion of why my approach focuses on skepticism of so-called revealed religions rather than skepticism of a Creator.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• virgin
• birth
• Jesus
• Zeus
• Perseus
• Tertullian
• Poseidon
• plagiarism
• anticipation
• diabolical
• mimicry
• Christ
• ToddAllenGates

[MercuryRis]

For a god to impregante a human female he would have to have sperm, and that's a DNA pattern, a chromosome, and that DNA would have to indicate 2 parents unless it was a cloning. in the Ancient world women did this all the time, saying a god impregnated them, so their husbands or fathers wouldnt kill them.

[ToddAllenGates]

@MercuryRis

> For a god to impregante a human female he would have to have sperm, and that's a DNA pattern, a chromosome, and that DNA would have to indicate 2 parents unless it was a cloning.

But when it comes to magical gods, *anything* is possible!

> the Ancient world women did this all the time, saying a god impregnated them

Even back then, it seems unlikely that many men would fall for such a line ... but I guess it was worth a try.

[zbambam5]

Satan was a very busy being back in the day. Pre-plagiarizing all that over all those thousands of years. He must be a Time Lord.

[mgbon2]

But you have to admit, it's pretty funny that you bring up shotgun wedding, and it's actually in the bible. I couldn't have planned that better!

And yeah, I guess it's just 'too bad' some things aren't in there, it being the word of god and all.

[Hufflewaffle]

@ToddAllenGates Thanks. Everything sounds better in Campbell's words.

Unfortunately it seems the Christian thinkers of today (the popular ones at least) don't have the courage to acknowledge these issues let alone deal with them.

[ToddAllenGates]

3 of 3:

"The difficulty faced today by Christian thinkers in this regard follows from their doctrine of Jesus as the unique historical incarnation of God; and in Judaism, likewise there is the no less troublesome doctrine of a universal God whose eye is on but one Chosen People of all in his created world. The fruit of such ethnocentric historicism is poor spiritual fare today."

[ToddAllenGates]

2 of 3:

"And it was in those times beneficial to the order of the group that its young should be trained to respond positively to their own system of tribal signals and negatively to all others ... [This system was] good enough for our fathers, in the tight little worlds of the knowledge of their days, when each little civilization was a thing more or less to itself ...

[ToddAllenGates]

@Hufflewaffle

1 of 3:

> Historical or even religious exclusivity does nothing for anyone except provide a basis for political claims.

I like Joseph Campbell's summary of this subject in "Myths to Live By" (p. 254):

"In earlier times, when the relevant social unit was the tribe ... it was possible for the local mythology [to see itself] either as the one, the true and sanctified, or at least as the noblest and supreme.

[Hufflewaffle]

@Hufflewaffle Historical or even religious exclusivity does nothing for anyone except provide a basis for political claims.

[Hufflewaffle]

The virgin birth is a symbol of the birth of the spirit. The virgin's heart is held as sacred. The heart is the symbol of compassion. Heroes are born from virgins because their deeds are what define them, not their physical being. The christian myth is simply a narrative depicting the journey of the hero from fall to redemption. It expresses the psyche of human beings from the separation of birth to the acknowledgement of, association with, and final sacrifice to, all life.

[donlaxner]

In a letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams on April 11th, 1823.

"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." Thomas Jefferson

[ToddAllenGates]

@KajiCarson

> Very interesting video. 5 stars!

Thank you!