*cackles*
Priceless.
Religious individuals regard a story about a demon impregnating a woman as mythical (and are much more inclined to believe she just isn't a virgin), but the EXACT SAME STORY in their own faith involving God is perfectly believable. Un hunh.
For the sake of argument, parthenogenesis in humans IS possible. The odds of it happening are infinitesimally small, but hey, you figure the number of human beings to occupy this planet over the last hundred thousand years and sure, perhaps it could happen once.
On the other hand, I have another hypothesis. Mary made the mistake of sleeping in the same bed as her husband-to-be, or they had a little lie-down in a field one fine morning. Her mother told her she couldn't get pregnant so long as she wasn't penetrated, but neglected to mention that there is nothing stopping dry humping from resulting in pregnancy other than timing (since the hymen isn't a barrier). So sure, she was TECHNICALLY still a virgin, but it was good old Joe and not God that knocked her up. But hey, it was probably a lot easier to fess to being impregnated by a divine entity than sex out of wedlock to her fundamentalist family (good grief, knowing some fundamentalist Christians/Muslims/Jews that explanation might still fly in some places today). Clearly, we can never know... but the simplest explanation is that Mary committed a very common human sin and LIED to save her some embarrassment. And *poof* the mythos behind Christianity was born, since some moron somewhere in history obviously decided that Christ's humanist teachings didn't bear enough merit on their own and needed some jazzing up.
Honestly.
So yeah - when you tell us to ignore rational explanations like that guy in favour of supernatural explanations with no actual proof whatsoever, you sound just as loony to us as he does to you.
the lack of any corroboration from the Romans means that perhaps the story of Jesus is just as much symbolic as the old testament stuff.
To be fair, the Romans crucified a LOT of people. We can hardly expect them to have realized that one of the thousands of people they offed was going to become the crux of an entire influential religious movement two thousand years later and document him in a convenient and retrievable fashion. Really, the least believable part of the Roamn connection is the whole cave/stone/disappearing corpse thing. The Romans BURNED their dead. The Christians only began burying them in tombs several decades later as a means of differentiating themselves.
