Sells,

" we are involved in a discussion about how God is present to us." well, no, it seems you are involved in preaching about how God is present to you. If others have been led by experience to other beliefs you dismiss them as "easy and cheap".

That's why I came in on the discussion - you can believe what you like, but to insist that only your beliefs are valid, that others are living in error, can't be proved and is unnecessarily offensive. Your remarks about being not interested in other religions implies that your faith may be based in ignorance.

It's interesting that you say people with other beliefs have something to be afraid of, and are dodging the issue because to me it seems that you might be afraid to face the variety and uncertainty of life and have wrapped yourself up in the security of a dogmatic faith. The irony there is that that kind of thinking often seems to end up being profoundly exclusive and anti-Christian.

Following on what Solomon said above, I get the impression that religious fundamentalists are treating their religious texts as if they were idols. Think about it. Who are these fundamentalist, or anyone else for that matter, to tell us what God's will is. The world in wonderfully unpredictable and unknowable in practice - in the lived experience. Fundamentalist of all stripes seem to cling desperately to their books as a way to hide and reject the world, and dare I say, the wonder of God [to use their language]...

BOAZ_David,

Regarding your statement…"How will this be," Mary asked the angel, "since I am a virgin?"

As far as I know, not one Greek text of Luke 1:34 contains the word ‘parthenos’ (virgin). All agree that the verse reads: “How shall this be seeing I know (ginosko) not a man?"

Also your…”The context of Isaiah, was not intending to emphasise the 'clinical condition' of the young woman, but its safe to say it would be assuming she was not 'fooling around'. The point being the child was to be called 'Mighty God' among other names. Hardly fuel for illegitemate birth with a human father.”…

I don’t know why you’ve referred to two different passages of Isaiah here but the “mighty god” reference comes from Isaiah 9:6-7

The Hebrew words of this passage read “And his name is called ‘wonderful in counsel is god the mighty, the everlasting father, the ruler of peace’… Even if the words refer to the child himself, Psalm 82:6 and John 10:34 confirm that those to whom the word of god came were themselves regarded as ‘gods’.

The really significant part of this passage comes at the end of verse 7 when it says: “the zeal of the ‘Lord of Hosts’ will perform this.”

The preceding “god the mighty (el gibbor)” is actually distinguished from, and can bear no comparison with “the Lord of Hosts (YHVH Tzvaoth)”, regarded by the Jews as the sacred and unutterable name of God.

As to Matthew 1:20, I’ll just refer to the birth of Jeremiah the prophet. It demonstrates how the prophets considered all men to be formed in the womb by god. …”Before I formed thee in the womb, I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.” Jer 1:5

Whew…

As someone who tends to agree substantially with what Sells wrote in the article, I hesitate to enter the debate because I find it hard to grasp the motivation for the intense opposition. While there is some value in taking an overview of various religions and belief systems, making comparisons and drawing contrasts, to find the truth we seek means eventually taking a path. The view of the beautiful one-world from space is fine, but we don’t live and grow up there. In the end each person needs to take a stand on a particular patch of ground, within a particular story, right here and now on earth.

I suppose we can only take the paths-and-patches metaphor so far. Suffice to say that by advocating concentration on particularities Sells is not expressing ill-feeling towards other religions and civilisations. To reach the universal we must proceed through the particular. God can only be present to me in my particular body, my particular relationships, my particular place on earth. To develop my human potential I need to place myself within a particular story and then confront the accounts of that story that may seem unacceptable in the light of today’s knowledge and experience.

My Muslim, Buddhist and Taoist friends are still my good friends and as entitled to tread their paths as I am my Christian path. While I have interesting discussions with them about their religions and mine, in the end my own spiritual growth comes through my experience in my own religion. And I’m sure it is the same for them.

I have been following the discussion on 'virgin birth'and it seems to me that "Vinnie" has added a marked degree of sanity into the discussion. She has obviously studied the subject matter diligently but the impressive thing has been her refusal to get involved in dogmatic or doctrinal discussion but has stuck to what I would call rigourous scholarship.
I looked up her refernces and found them to be accurate and without the overlay of Christian dogma and doctrine. One can then relate to Jesus as a fellow human being without the accretion of pagan concepts attributed to him as a means of making him acceptable to those whose mental constructs were of a different nature than that of the Hebrews. In other words Jesus "Christ" had to conform to popular beliefs eg Mithraism from categories with which they were familiar Paganism.
Papias 60-130CE reports matter-of-factly that "Matthew collected the oracles [literally; words] in THE HEBREW LANGUAGE (Emphasis mine) and each interpreted them as best he can. Papias realised that some ancient translations of Matthew's gospel were none too accutate and this is why he says 'each translated them as best he could. Matthew wrote to the circumsised to convince them that a dead man fulfilled messianic expectations and to change Isaiah 7-14 from "this young woman is pregnant" to "virgin would conceive" is incomprehensible. To do so would make him the laughing stock of those he was trying to convince - and rightfully so.
Vinnie displays a profound knowledge of the Hebrew language and we would all learn a lesson to make sure of our facts, particularly when referring to the Tanakh so that we do not reveal our ignorance as exampled by the references to 'el gibbor' and "YHVH Tzvaoth".
Vinnie has done us all a favour so keep up the good work and don't accept second rate scholarship from those who are more inclined to hold on fast to falsehood rather than "search out the truth and the truth will make you free".
Regards SAS

I join SAS in praise of Vinnie she has obviously done her homework and these areas are outside of my speciality. However I would like to comment on the slur that SAS places on dogmatic discussion as not being sound scholarship. The early church found itself in the position of laying down the truth about Jesus in opposition to the many heresies that were collecting around him. But aside from correcting heresy it had to formulate what it thought about Jesus. To do so it had to work with the completed canon of the Old and New Testaments so as to sum up the church’s belief. This is where doctrine came into existence. I know the word dogma has bad connotations in our day but it is necessary and legitimate to speak of church dogmatics (the title of Karl Barth’s systematic theology) Far from being a dishonest and closed overlay upon an original understanding of Israel and of Jesus it is a necessary development that attempts to encapsulate our belief about Jesus. It is noteworthy that saying one of the creeds is a feature of much Christian worship and rightly so.