Posted: Apr 24, 2017 4:30 pm
PensivePenny wrote:John Platko wrote:
But what does it mean to say the angel was real and the dream was induced by God?
Are we to believe some creature with wings was flying about? I see no reason to think that's a reasonable explanation of the story. Angels were messengers from God. That's the mode of explanation they had for these ideas that they believed to be significant but they didn't consciously conceive. Today some might credit their unconscious for creating the dream. Some might credit an intuition. There are other modes of explanation but the important part is something, somehow made Joe think, I shouldn't abandon this girl and her child.
The conversation is becoming cumbersome with quotes within quotes. So, I'll respond in small bites from here.
You ask very good questions here... IF the story of the virgin birth (which is what we're discussing) was the one and only story referencing the supernatural. It isn't. The bible is 90% supernatural, if not more. Even under the most liberal interpretation AND assuming that the story is based in truth (a big IF) one has to respect that it was written as "supernatural" because the authors couldn't explain what they were writing about in ways they themselves could understand.
I think that's true. They couldn't understand the story as they knew it.
It all seemed like magic. So we have authors who are our ONLY link to what truly happened who DO believe in spirits and magic, who write about what they see with that bias. One difference between you and I is that I consider the source of information, on its own, to be so grossly tainted as to be invalidated in virtually every manner. Why give more weight to its value than a comic book story?
For me personally, I think originally, because the story was pounded very graphically into my brain when I was a young child. Even though much of the story is not really appropriate for a young child. Is it appropriate for a child to be seeing a man bloody, beaten, and crucified on a cross every week? Would parents let their young children watch Road Warrior every week on Sunday morning - while inducing trance like states? And as I was forced to unravel this, I saw how interesting a story it is.
And everybody in the JC story didn't think magic was afoot. We have JC's own family thinking he was
. Isn't that interesting. I find it very hard to believe that Joe actually thought God was giving him a message in his dream, but who knows? It seems more likely to me that when he got over his 
and thought about the situation he knew what the right thing to do was - but a dream could have been involved. And a dream is a great part of the story. It let's us know that the unconscious is afoot.
At least the comic book is a more culturally relevant source than anything written in any culture so far removed from our own as to lack a meaningful cultural reference.
I don't know about your culture, but my culture won't let that old story go - and that gives it a relevance of its own.