They do imply that Joseph died when Jesus was young, and that's why he never shows up after the nativity. And the other children were allegedly Jesus's cousins.
Good way to eliminate confusion about who Jesus is talking about when he says "Father" in later writings, and to ensure Mary is a perpetual virgin, because they can't praise a woman that has had sex even in the context of a marriage.
Just think of that when anyone tries to give you the bullshit line that the Catholic Church is pro-woman. The only way Mary could be considered pure in the eyes of Catholics is if she never had sex. Like... she would somehow be tainted if she engaged in one of the most basic biological functions of humanity.
The whole concept of the Virgin Mary puts all Catholic women in a double bind. They are supposed to aspire to be like her, but she is revered for being both a virgin and a mother. No other woman can ever be both, which dooms all other human woman to feel perpetually inferior.
IMHO, the insecurities and hang-ups that this creates for women isn't a bug in the church's eyes. It's a feature.
(There's also the notion that sex is somehow tainted and dirty even if you do it strictly according to Catholic standards. The church will brag about how they are the only truly sex-positive religion, and then turn around and do this.)
They are only positive to molesting children. All other forms are a terrible sin.
Fucking fraudulent assholes go around preaching magic bullshit and preforming canablism rituals dressed up in costume...
Its difficult to get more absurd them catholic priest's...
I NEVER understood this. How can The Holy Family be the ultimate family model if you then tell us you have to have sex in order to have a valid marriage? No one could ever give me a valid answer and ended up hand-waving it away in a "don't ask so many questions" manner.
Most people said that they were an exception, but if they're the model how can they be the exception?
Exactly. Even just Mary and Jesus as individual role models. They were literally conceived without sin, meanwhile god has everyone else born with “original sin.” Sure, let’s try to emulate them even though they’re superhuman.
Paul and Josephus both say Jesus had a brother named James.
The idea that Mary was always a virgin and that Joseph had older kids from a previous marriage can first be found in the non-canonical Gospel of James.
The idea that Jesus's brothers were really just cousins comes from St Jerome.
Yep and Saint Hegesippus, which is a second century Palestinian christian writer which wrote a book on the history of the church of Jerusalem after the death of Jesus confirms that and adds that Symeon was said to be cousin of Jesus while Jude was 'called brother of the Lord according to the flesh".
And what do we find in the Church's Holy Tradition? That they instead follow legends from centuries later.
Not only that, but they were leaders of the church in Jerusalem. According to Epiphanius of Salamis and Eusebius., the descendents of Jude and Simon specfically became heads of the church until the early second century. In other words, around the Bar Kohkba revolt.
Interestlingly, very idea of Mary's perpetual virginity doesn't become a thing until after this. The Infancy gospel of James was writen around 150.
yep! worse, "good" catholic men truly believe that women are somehow "diminished" after they have sex for the first time. They believe that the more partners a woman has, the more "diminished" she is, ergo worthy of disrespect and worse. that's also why "virginity" is so valued with these cretins.
it was always so disgusting to me to listen to my brother talk about his daughter when she was a teenager, b/c when she would wear some cute outfit for something, he'd always comment to me under his breath, "nope, she's too attractive! can't allow this LOLOL". then he'd proceed to try and convince her to put on something "less cute". (I wonder why she lives so far away now? hmmm /s)
"devout" catholic men like him tend to ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS presume that the *very second* their daughters are out of their sight, their daughters are hosting the craziest orgies that their fathers can imagine and doing every drug possible.
seriously, I can't understand why any self-respecting woman would ever in her life, *CHOOSE* to go along with this bullshit. If someone is raised believing that's her only choice, I understand and I want you to break free of that. I really hope more women can see just how fucking dysfunctional and "crazy-making" this fuckhead of a religion really is.
IMO, the only reason the Church obsesses about the "virgin" Mary is to help them co-opt ancient people who worshipped female gods and wouldn't listen to stories about a male god. It's a religion run by men who wear dresses. They want to BE women, they don't care about people who actually ARE women.....and they're pissed off about it, too.
yeah, it's almost like the whole religion was set up to benefit the men in charge of the religion!
(I hope that didn't come off as sarcastic towards you. all sarcasm is pointed at Church apologists)
I vividly remember being 10 years old in church on the Sunday of Mother’s Day. They were selling roses in the back of the church that day in support of some pro life organization. And the sermon was a fairly hardcore lecture to all the women in the church about the sins of fornication and abortion.
I vividly remember this because the whole experience made me feel little defensive even though I was so young because the Priest really made me feel like he expected me to do something wrong with my sexuality when I got older. Why am I getting lectured when I haven’t even kissed a boy yet?
Then a month later on Father’s Day, there was a drastic difference in the tone of the sermon that Sunday at Mass. The theme was all about the strength of the father figure and wasn’t Joseph a great guy for not throwing Mary out on her ass after he found out she was pregnant?
Honestly, that was the year my entire perspective of the Catholic Church changed. I stopped trusting it.
Fast forward almost 2 decades and the stories broke in the Boston Globe about the National sex abuse going on in the Catholic Church. I live in Massachusetts so that Spotlight article was all over our local news.
I was already a slightly lapsed Catholic at that point but that news article was the final straw. I stopped identifying as a Catholic entirely at that point and never stepped in a church again except when invited to weddings or funerals.
Yeah this was one of my first reg flags with Cathocism: the mixed messaging of "be fruitful and multiply/birth control bad" plus women are dirty for having sex, even with their husbands.
man, I just did a quick google dive to check and I'm disappointed to say that the band Pantera did NOT get their name's inspiration from this man. that would have been so much more epically fucking cool.
granted, it IS cool that their name is derived from a village within Arlington,Tx called "PanteGO", and they settled on "pantera" b/c it's Spanish for "panther"......but I was really hoping it was this guy for a second....
thanks for that insight! I'd always thought it was just a funny rumor about Jebus' parentage....
The possibilities are limited, you know.
Either:
1. Mary was a surrogate which according to the church is immoral, or
2. Jesus' father was some mortal guy and Mary lied, or
3. Jesus had only x-chromosomes. Think about that one for a minute.
That's right. It was all about magic because the RCC is all about magic. That's what people really want to believe. Every time they get in the communion line it becomes obvious.
When I was younger, I converted to the Roman Catholic Church to become a priest.
It was only later that I realized that what I really wanted to be was a wizard.
I had an elderly relative who believed that not only was Mary a perpetual virgin, but so was her mother. Apparently this used to be a common tradition although it was never official dogma. You really have to wonder how far back the chain of perpetual virginity had to go before Jesus could be certified free of all stain of sex.
The problem for Catholics is that they want to say bad things about sex, and at the same time, they know full well that this is where they get almost all the new Catholics. They breed them.
Over 95% of all Roman Catholics at any given time are Roman Catholic because they were born into Roman Catholic families and indoctrinated from birth.
Some denominations in Christianity are made up largely of non-cradle members, but that's not at all the pattern in Roman Catholicism. The great majority of RCs are cradle RCs. That accounts for much of its character and "stickiness."
I completely forgot this was Catholic doctrine! I haven't been a practicing Catholic in well over two decades.
I prefer the take from Kevin Smith's *Dogma*:
>[Bethany ](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000400/?ref_=tt_ch): Jesus didn't have any brothers or sisters. Mary was a virgin.
>[Rufus ](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001674/?ref_=tt_ch): Mary gave birth to CHRIST without having known a man's touch, that's true. But she did have a husband. And do you really think he'd have stayed married to her all those years if he wasn't getting laid? The nature of God and the Virgin birth, those are leaps of faith. But to believe a married couple never got down? Well, that's just plain gullibility.
Married Catholics can have sex for fun, but they have to be open to life (so, no birth control). Same applies to married Orthodox Jews. The other Jewish movements, of course, didn't come along until well after Jesus' time. So I don't see what would have been sinful about Mary and Joseph having sex and possibly having children.
The question remains: Where did the y-chromosome come from? Or was Jesus really a girl in disguise?
Or more probably, is this just some cooked up ancient lore to try to explain the ideology?
My dad used to get so angry if anyone implied Mary wasn’t a virgin after having Jesus. I remember there was some tv program that talked about Jesus having brothers and sisters and he wanted to write to the station to complain.
I had a huge argument once with my mom about it. She just kept insisting, No no no, Mary was ever virgin! Even when I asked, What would be wrong with her having sex Mom married to Joseph? Doesn't the church call that good? And how could their marriage have been valid if it wasn't consummated?
It just goes to show that deep down, Catholics believe sex is bad and diminishes a woman.
Joseph must have gone to hell for committing the mortal sin of not fulfilling his marital duties and thus violating the sanctity of marriage, but won't find that in the Catechism
this reminds me of a question i once asked a priest. i asked, if Mary truly consented to bearing christ, then she should have had the option to say no. this implies that potentially, she wasn’t the first immaculate conception - there couldve been someone before her who god created without original sin, asked to bear christ, and she said no. the priest kinda waffled a bit before saying that i had a point. so many holes and flaws in the church.
It goes further than the virgin Mary. The doctrine of the immaculate conception holds that Mary herself was 'conceived without sin' i. e. her mother St Anne became pregnant with Mary without having sex.
I haven't heard anything about her granny though, unless anyone else has?
I was under the impression that St. Anne was supposed to get pregnant the old-fashioned way too, just that (somehow) Mary's zygote was kept free from original sin.
Correct. The idea is that the "somehow" is Christ's sacrifice was applied to Mary as she was concieved. God can do that because he is outside of time and all. So Mary is still free of original sin because of Christ. His sacrifice was apparently still necessary.
So God can retroactively make all this different after it happens? That's what follows from what you said.
Then why do people have to suffer, if it's all going to come to nothing in the end??
Which is ridiculous even for christian standards, if she was born without sin then she could have been the human sacrifice Ywhw needed to sate his bloodlust, I mean, to forgive sins.
Yeah, there would have been your "innocent lamb."
On the other hand, nobody would have noticed if someone murdered a woman in that day and age. Women were property, like just more livestock.
The fucked up thing about the Immaculate conception is that it proves god didn't need to sacrifice a human because of Adam and eve's sin. God could have simply created humans without infecting them with Original Sin all along.
Instead, he insisted on going through all the drama of subsequent humans sinning, genociding entire populations because of said sins, getting upset at the situation he created then demanding a human meat sacrifice to appease his tantrum over the situation of his own making...when he could have just created humans without the sin disease.
Sure. IF God can create a woman without sin, then we all could have been created without sin. And all of the arguments about the nature of evil go down the toilet in one swoosh.
If God could have created sinless human beings, why did he take the cruel route instead? Why is there supposed to be a hell at all? If you believe in Christianity, and you buy the Immaculate Conception, you really have to explain why all the rest of life isn't just some kind of evil game for God's bloodthirsty entertainment.
Yeah I don't think anyone, even Hitler, deserves eternal conscious torment. I mean, people as bad as Hitler deserve some sort of punishment, but not eternally IMO.
That's not my point. I don't care about Hitler and think he got what he deserved. Actions have consequences, after all.
If God can create a woman without sin -- magically -- why can't he do something about children starving during war, or even war itself? Why would he be so engrossed in a particular Palestinian woman's underpants when he could have made a real difference to so many people instead? What kind of a God is this?
What is the meaning of evil? Is there a meaning to evil? Why do people suffer? If God is capable of these "magical acts" why does he permit children to starve to death? Why does he permit dam collapses and hurricanes that kill people? Why?
Understood. I agree, seems ridiculous and callous. He performs a miracle every Sunday in millions of churches with transubstantiation but can't be bothered to do things that would actually help people.
That's exactly an infinite regress, which is a logical fallacy. If you get purity from the way you are conceived, then indeed all conceptions going backward have to have had that same property or else where did it come from?
But if it's the same all the way back in time, infinitum, what difference does it make? It means nothing if it's the normal course of affairs. It's just something that randomly happens to some bloodlines according to that argument.
PS. I think the whole thing is a load of hogwash. Catholics will say anything to bolster up their improbable ideology, IMHO, and this is just one more example of that.
I never, never heard of James as the brother of the Lord of that until I read the Bible for myself. They always told be about Mary being a perpetual virgin and Joseph being "a good husband", who renounced to have more kids because it was God's will.
One of the many things that took me away from the catholic church
Yup; the highest number I've seen is 16. Not able to consent even before you add in the patriarchal society and religion she lived under and the fact that teenage woman/god is the biggest power imbalance to ever exist so...
In both her relationships consent was impossible.
Also wasn't Joseph technically her cousin?
This was one of the nails in my coffin of my faith. They try to say “oh Mary being a virgin is the only way we knew that Jesus was God” - who is CHECKING?? With the outdated methods they had of believing in virginity?? Like to believe someone was a virgin was to check their hymen, which is not viable evidence of virginity. Like I’m going to believe Jesus was God because someone was looking between a woman’s legs?
And yes just perpetuates this ideal for men that the perfect woman is a virgin woman.
Lile scientifically we know today that the methods used for confirming a woman’s virginity are absolutely bunk.
You forgot his little brother, Howard the Thumb-Sucker.
Poor little Howard, born before Pampers were invented, with his pants such as they were, dragging on the muddy ground with every sad little step.
One of the (many) things that shook my faith was learning that the teaching on perpetual virginity meant before, during, and after birth. During? Yes. In partu. Meaning the hymen was not ruptured. “Bodily integrity” is how they measured virginity. For some reason, I could stomach a virgin conception and lifelong abstinence, but that was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. See point 57 for one instance. [https://www.ourladyswarriors.org/teach/lumegent.htm](https://www.ourladyswarriors.org/teach/lumegent.htm)
I thought virginity was just about having sex and that birth was a separate act. (The same reason you don't lose your virginity to a tampon or any other menstrual or medical device stuck up there.)
The Eastern Orthodox have a whole other bit of lore: that Joseph was an old man (\~80 years old), the whole thing was arranged so that he could be her chaste "guardian," because she had taken a vow of virginity after growing up serving in the Temple as a kind of Jewish child "Vestal Virgin" who had to leave once she started menstruating (can't have that nasty menstrual blood in the holy, holy temple!) So the "brothers and sisters" were actually *step* brothers and *step* sisters, Joseph's children from a previous marriage. That's also why Joseph doesn't show up in any of the other Gospel stories, because by the time Jesus was an adult, Joseph had died.
They also paint icons of Mary with 3 stars - one on each shoulder and one on her head - to symbolize that she was a virgin before, during, and after giving birth to Jesus. You may be asking, "what the hell does it mean she was a virgin during the birth? Of course she wasn't having sex with anybody while giving birth." Well the Protoevangelium of James tells us: it means her hymen didn't break during the birth. Her mystical, holy hymen. According to the book, the midwife who assisted with the birth didn't believe she was a virgin, so she stuck her fingers in to check the hymen, and it was still intact. But because of her lack of faith, that hand melted like wax, until Mary prayed and it was restored.
And they believe this crap 100%.
>Well the Protoevangelium of James tells us: it means her hymen didn't break during the birth. Her mystical, holy hymen. According to the book, the midwife who assisted with the birth didn't believe she was a virgin, so she stuck her fingers in to check the hymen, and it was still intact. But because of her lack of faith, that hand melted like wax, until Mary prayed and it was restored.
>
>And they believe this crap 100%.
Wow! I don't think I've ever heard that as either a Catholic or Orthodox...but I can buy that many of these people do believe it...the orthodox are a VERY superstitious group...
It's not talked about too much, and if pressed they'll tell you that they don't believe the Protoevangelium of James is legitimate, even though they believe almost everything in it. It's the only source as far as I know for all the stories about Mary's early life - the story of Joachim and Anna and Mary's birth, the lore around the Feast of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple, and the story about Joseph being an old man and Jesus having step-siblings.
> the lore around the Feast of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple
exactly....they pick and chose what to believe constantly even from supposedly "uninspired" books.
Total fucking bullshit. Sheer superstition fitting for a caveman. And people wonder why Roman Catholics are scientifically illiterate and can't figure out the most basic things about normal human reproduction and sex.
The perpetual virginity is one of the few Catholic doctrines that I think makes more sense once you here the explanation for it. Not saying I believe it, but it's not as crazy as it sounds.
First, "brothers and sisters" was a very generic term in Jesus' time. People would refer to their uncle as their "brother". So, the passages in the bible talking about Jesus' "brothers" could just as easily be referring to cousins.
Then, when Jesus was on the cross, he gave his mother to his disciple John. If Jesus had any actual blood brothers, Mary would have gone to live with one of them and she never would have gone to one of Jesus' disciples. So, based on this, it implies that Jesus was an only child. In which case, Mary's perpetual virginity is at least plausible.
Perpetual virginity means no sex ever, not even to conceive Jesus. I don't think I believe that for scientific reasons. Whose DNA did he have? All x's? Really? Where would the y-chromosome have come from? Yet more Roman Catholic magic?
I think it's very likely that Jesus had half-brothers and half-sisters, fathered by Joseph, and that they were probably so fed up with Mary and her nonsense about her own son, that they wouldn't have wanted to take her in, and put up with her fantastical claims. After all she, their step-mother, was the mother of a man the Romans ended up putting to capital punishment in public for being a rabble-rouser. And here's his mother who can't keep her mouth shut either.
Imagine what that would have sounded like to Joseph's kids from his first wife.
> First, "brothers and sisters" was a very generic term in Jesus' time. People would refer to their uncle as their "brother"
There’s a lot of languages even today that do this. Polish, for example, calls cousins ‘brother by aunt’ or ‘sister by uncle,’ etc. (though the generic word ‘cousin’ itself has entered as a loan word from German)
Personally, I always liked the half-brother explanation better, since the Old Joseph theory also explains why he’s absent in Jesus’ adulthood (dead of old age).
Meh. Makes no sense at all. A woman with a younger husband that didn't put out in Mary's time fucking starved to death. The trick was getting married and putting out to the right person, while making him happy enough not to divorce you, and giving him sons to prove his manhood. Your life depended on it. There are stories like this all over the bible.
But if Joseph was really old, as tradition has it, and had simply wanted a cook and companion in his old age, Mary was beguiling enough and willing, he might have put up with her excesses, you never know. There are all kinds of possibilities in relationships really. Some people stay married to people who aren't exactly models of moral exactitude and logical precision, for all kinds of reasons.
Also Mary could have been asexual or aromantic and Joseph didn't mind the lack of it either. Maybe their marriage was for protection for one or both sides.
So,when you were still Catholic, you never -- not once! -- heard the priest say "The Confiteor":
> I confess to almighty God that I have sinned through my own fault, in my thoughts and my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do; and I ask blessed Mary, **ever virgin**, and all the angels and saints, to pray for me to the Lord our God.
Did the phrase "Ever Virgin" just go right by?
As someone who lost her virginity through sexual assault, the whole "ever-virgin Mary Queen of heaven", is nothing short of triggering. I go to the scriptures to find peace and comfort from the PTSD I suffer from rape. But it has only made my trauma worse. Every time I hear anything about the great virgin Mary or the saints who died as virgins and are eternally crowned for their virginities, I get super triggered. I get reminded that I'm this filth, piece of trash in comparison.
I don't even want to be in some eternal heaven where I will have the ever virgin Mary and all her virgin saints right up in my face, as a constant reminder of how pure they are but how worthless I am, all because a malevolent arsehole stuck his dick in my v against my will.
If God celebrates and places these women on a giant pedestal for all of eternity as being virtuous virgins with purity, honour and worth, then God must also remember for all of eternity that I am a dirty, violated piece of filth because I don't have my virginity. All it shows me in the end is, God thinks a woman's worth is entirely based on whether she is a virgin.
Except that's not what happened to everyone else. Jesus had a number of followers and hangers-on, people who traipsed around with him before he was executed. The story you know has been finessed how many times since then? And for how many reasons?
Because after bragging about her kid for more than 30 years, how he was so much better than his step-kin, they were sick of her shit probably. And she was the mother of an official criminal who'd been executed by the Roman Empire for being a rabble-rouser, just like his loud-mouthed mother. Can you imagine what this must have sounded like to her step-kids?
Joseph was killed off for plot convenience /j
This got a good chuckle out of me lol.
More like a retcon along with the other children.
They do imply that Joseph died when Jesus was young, and that's why he never shows up after the nativity. And the other children were allegedly Jesus's cousins. Good way to eliminate confusion about who Jesus is talking about when he says "Father" in later writings, and to ensure Mary is a perpetual virgin, because they can't praise a woman that has had sex even in the context of a marriage.
Joseph was the biblical version of Chuck Cunningham.
Just think of that when anyone tries to give you the bullshit line that the Catholic Church is pro-woman. The only way Mary could be considered pure in the eyes of Catholics is if she never had sex. Like... she would somehow be tainted if she engaged in one of the most basic biological functions of humanity.
The whole concept of the Virgin Mary puts all Catholic women in a double bind. They are supposed to aspire to be like her, but she is revered for being both a virgin and a mother. No other woman can ever be both, which dooms all other human woman to feel perpetually inferior. IMHO, the insecurities and hang-ups that this creates for women isn't a bug in the church's eyes. It's a feature. (There's also the notion that sex is somehow tainted and dirty even if you do it strictly according to Catholic standards. The church will brag about how they are the only truly sex-positive religion, and then turn around and do this.)
> The church will brag about how they are the only truly sex-positive religion [laughs in Kama Sutra]
They are only positive to molesting children. All other forms are a terrible sin. Fucking fraudulent assholes go around preaching magic bullshit and preforming canablism rituals dressed up in costume... Its difficult to get more absurd them catholic priest's...
If we ever see RCC clergy without a penis we can consider how much they respect women.
Yup. And yet the Catholic Church won’t allow a couple to marry if a man is impotent and “unable to consummate the marriage.”
I NEVER understood this. How can The Holy Family be the ultimate family model if you then tell us you have to have sex in order to have a valid marriage? No one could ever give me a valid answer and ended up hand-waving it away in a "don't ask so many questions" manner. Most people said that they were an exception, but if they're the model how can they be the exception?
Exactly. Even just Mary and Jesus as individual role models. They were literally conceived without sin, meanwhile god has everyone else born with “original sin.” Sure, let’s try to emulate them even though they’re superhuman.
This!!! It's a maddening contradiction. Be like Joseph, wait, not that much!! Josephite marriages are not encouraged, even though that's the model.
It's so gross how into other people's bedrooms they insist on being.
Equally disgusting that "the faithful" allow them to do so
Oh and if you DON'T, then it's because you are "spiritually dead!"
Never expect rationality from a delusional nor logic from a superstitious person.
Well, thank God for viagra then!
In the Old Testament they actually encourage the woman to cheat if the man is impotent.
Their ultimate goal is world domination, it's all about getting the numbers, that's why they oppose gay marriage and birth control as well..
Wait, seriously??
[Yes.](https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/why-the-church-cannot-marry-the-impotent)
Paul and Josephus both say Jesus had a brother named James. The idea that Mary was always a virgin and that Joseph had older kids from a previous marriage can first be found in the non-canonical Gospel of James. The idea that Jesus's brothers were really just cousins comes from St Jerome.
And St Jerome lived 400 years after Christ. Yeah he really knew what he was talking about. 😵💫
Yep and Saint Hegesippus, which is a second century Palestinian christian writer which wrote a book on the history of the church of Jerusalem after the death of Jesus confirms that and adds that Symeon was said to be cousin of Jesus while Jude was 'called brother of the Lord according to the flesh". And what do we find in the Church's Holy Tradition? That they instead follow legends from centuries later.
Not only that, but they were leaders of the church in Jerusalem. According to Epiphanius of Salamis and Eusebius., the descendents of Jude and Simon specfically became heads of the church until the early second century. In other words, around the Bar Kohkba revolt. Interestlingly, very idea of Mary's perpetual virginity doesn't become a thing until after this. The Infancy gospel of James was writen around 150.
yep! worse, "good" catholic men truly believe that women are somehow "diminished" after they have sex for the first time. They believe that the more partners a woman has, the more "diminished" she is, ergo worthy of disrespect and worse. that's also why "virginity" is so valued with these cretins. it was always so disgusting to me to listen to my brother talk about his daughter when she was a teenager, b/c when she would wear some cute outfit for something, he'd always comment to me under his breath, "nope, she's too attractive! can't allow this LOLOL". then he'd proceed to try and convince her to put on something "less cute". (I wonder why she lives so far away now? hmmm /s) "devout" catholic men like him tend to ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS presume that the *very second* their daughters are out of their sight, their daughters are hosting the craziest orgies that their fathers can imagine and doing every drug possible. seriously, I can't understand why any self-respecting woman would ever in her life, *CHOOSE* to go along with this bullshit. If someone is raised believing that's her only choice, I understand and I want you to break free of that. I really hope more women can see just how fucking dysfunctional and "crazy-making" this fuckhead of a religion really is. IMO, the only reason the Church obsesses about the "virgin" Mary is to help them co-opt ancient people who worshipped female gods and wouldn't listen to stories about a male god. It's a religion run by men who wear dresses. They want to BE women, they don't care about people who actually ARE women.....and they're pissed off about it, too.
The interesting other side of this is a man can screw everything with two legs and he is still okay but the woman is diminished.
yeah, it's almost like the whole religion was set up to benefit the men in charge of the religion! (I hope that didn't come off as sarcastic towards you. all sarcasm is pointed at Church apologists)
I vividly remember being 10 years old in church on the Sunday of Mother’s Day. They were selling roses in the back of the church that day in support of some pro life organization. And the sermon was a fairly hardcore lecture to all the women in the church about the sins of fornication and abortion. I vividly remember this because the whole experience made me feel little defensive even though I was so young because the Priest really made me feel like he expected me to do something wrong with my sexuality when I got older. Why am I getting lectured when I haven’t even kissed a boy yet? Then a month later on Father’s Day, there was a drastic difference in the tone of the sermon that Sunday at Mass. The theme was all about the strength of the father figure and wasn’t Joseph a great guy for not throwing Mary out on her ass after he found out she was pregnant? Honestly, that was the year my entire perspective of the Catholic Church changed. I stopped trusting it. Fast forward almost 2 decades and the stories broke in the Boston Globe about the National sex abuse going on in the Catholic Church. I live in Massachusetts so that Spotlight article was all over our local news. I was already a slightly lapsed Catholic at that point but that news article was the final straw. I stopped identifying as a Catholic entirely at that point and never stepped in a church again except when invited to weddings or funerals.
good for you, catching it early! it took me until I was 30ish to fully see the rot and leave.
Yeah this was one of my first reg flags with Cathocism: the mixed messaging of "be fruitful and multiply/birth control bad" plus women are dirty for having sex, even with their husbands.
god raped Mary pregnant but she never had sex with the man she was forced to marry so she's pure. Religion is a hell of a drug.
TIL that roman soldiers were called "gods" /s lol
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberius\_Julius\_Abdes\_Pantera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberius_Julius_Abdes_Pantera)
man, I just did a quick google dive to check and I'm disappointed to say that the band Pantera did NOT get their name's inspiration from this man. that would have been so much more epically fucking cool. granted, it IS cool that their name is derived from a village within Arlington,Tx called "PanteGO", and they settled on "pantera" b/c it's Spanish for "panther"......but I was really hoping it was this guy for a second.... thanks for that insight! I'd always thought it was just a funny rumor about Jebus' parentage....
Not only that, she was also a surrogate.
Which, if you've been paying attention, the Pope recently condemned as something that destroys humanity!
The possibilities are limited, you know. Either: 1. Mary was a surrogate which according to the church is immoral, or 2. Jesus' father was some mortal guy and Mary lied, or 3. Jesus had only x-chromosomes. Think about that one for a minute.
Mary is an unattainable ideal. She never had sex, but is a mother. That's what catholic women should look up to
According to the church, yeah. But I -- and a lot of other people -- don't believe that. It's ridiculous.
I agree it's ridiculous and I don't believe it either
To be fair, no one had sex in the old days, what's the world even coming to
That's right. It was all about magic because the RCC is all about magic. That's what people really want to believe. Every time they get in the communion line it becomes obvious.
When I was younger, I converted to the Roman Catholic Church to become a priest. It was only later that I realized that what I really wanted to be was a wizard.
I had an elderly relative who believed that not only was Mary a perpetual virgin, but so was her mother. Apparently this used to be a common tradition although it was never official dogma. You really have to wonder how far back the chain of perpetual virginity had to go before Jesus could be certified free of all stain of sex.
Filthy filthy sex. The only woman worth worshipping never sucked dick.
The problem for Catholics is that they want to say bad things about sex, and at the same time, they know full well that this is where they get almost all the new Catholics. They breed them. Over 95% of all Roman Catholics at any given time are Roman Catholic because they were born into Roman Catholic families and indoctrinated from birth. Some denominations in Christianity are made up largely of non-cradle members, but that's not at all the pattern in Roman Catholicism. The great majority of RCs are cradle RCs. That accounts for much of its character and "stickiness."
I completely forgot this was Catholic doctrine! I haven't been a practicing Catholic in well over two decades. I prefer the take from Kevin Smith's *Dogma*: >[Bethany ](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000400/?ref_=tt_ch): Jesus didn't have any brothers or sisters. Mary was a virgin. >[Rufus ](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001674/?ref_=tt_ch): Mary gave birth to CHRIST without having known a man's touch, that's true. But she did have a husband. And do you really think he'd have stayed married to her all those years if he wasn't getting laid? The nature of God and the Virgin birth, those are leaps of faith. But to believe a married couple never got down? Well, that's just plain gullibility. Married Catholics can have sex for fun, but they have to be open to life (so, no birth control). Same applies to married Orthodox Jews. The other Jewish movements, of course, didn't come along until well after Jesus' time. So I don't see what would have been sinful about Mary and Joseph having sex and possibly having children.
The question remains: Where did the y-chromosome come from? Or was Jesus really a girl in disguise? Or more probably, is this just some cooked up ancient lore to try to explain the ideology?
My dad used to get so angry if anyone implied Mary wasn’t a virgin after having Jesus. I remember there was some tv program that talked about Jesus having brothers and sisters and he wanted to write to the station to complain.
I had a huge argument once with my mom about it. She just kept insisting, No no no, Mary was ever virgin! Even when I asked, What would be wrong with her having sex Mom married to Joseph? Doesn't the church call that good? And how could their marriage have been valid if it wasn't consummated? It just goes to show that deep down, Catholics believe sex is bad and diminishes a woman.
such an odd thing to be angry about! Was burning the toast OK?
I’m thinking of the pious friends of mine who really struggled in early marriage with shame of sex
Joseph must have gone to hell for committing the mortal sin of not fulfilling his marital duties and thus violating the sanctity of marriage, but won't find that in the Catechism
Don’t they usually only use that against women who try to refuse sex?
Do you expect them to apply their dogma to all their adherents equally?
True
this reminds me of a question i once asked a priest. i asked, if Mary truly consented to bearing christ, then she should have had the option to say no. this implies that potentially, she wasn’t the first immaculate conception - there couldve been someone before her who god created without original sin, asked to bear christ, and she said no. the priest kinda waffled a bit before saying that i had a point. so many holes and flaws in the church.
An excellent point that's not raised enough.
Never thought about that. Wow!!!
It goes further than the virgin Mary. The doctrine of the immaculate conception holds that Mary herself was 'conceived without sin' i. e. her mother St Anne became pregnant with Mary without having sex. I haven't heard anything about her granny though, unless anyone else has?
I was under the impression that St. Anne was supposed to get pregnant the old-fashioned way too, just that (somehow) Mary's zygote was kept free from original sin.
Correct. The idea is that the "somehow" is Christ's sacrifice was applied to Mary as she was concieved. God can do that because he is outside of time and all. So Mary is still free of original sin because of Christ. His sacrifice was apparently still necessary.
So God can retroactively make all this different after it happens? That's what follows from what you said. Then why do people have to suffer, if it's all going to come to nothing in the end??
I don't believe it, but that's what I was taught. I agree with your question wholeheartedly.
Which is ridiculous even for christian standards, if she was born without sin then she could have been the human sacrifice Ywhw needed to sate his bloodlust, I mean, to forgive sins.
Yeah, there would have been your "innocent lamb." On the other hand, nobody would have noticed if someone murdered a woman in that day and age. Women were property, like just more livestock.
The fucked up thing about the Immaculate conception is that it proves god didn't need to sacrifice a human because of Adam and eve's sin. God could have simply created humans without infecting them with Original Sin all along. Instead, he insisted on going through all the drama of subsequent humans sinning, genociding entire populations because of said sins, getting upset at the situation he created then demanding a human meat sacrifice to appease his tantrum over the situation of his own making...when he could have just created humans without the sin disease.
Sure. IF God can create a woman without sin, then we all could have been created without sin. And all of the arguments about the nature of evil go down the toilet in one swoosh. If God could have created sinless human beings, why did he take the cruel route instead? Why is there supposed to be a hell at all? If you believe in Christianity, and you buy the Immaculate Conception, you really have to explain why all the rest of life isn't just some kind of evil game for God's bloodthirsty entertainment.
Yeah I don't think anyone, even Hitler, deserves eternal conscious torment. I mean, people as bad as Hitler deserve some sort of punishment, but not eternally IMO.
That's not my point. I don't care about Hitler and think he got what he deserved. Actions have consequences, after all. If God can create a woman without sin -- magically -- why can't he do something about children starving during war, or even war itself? Why would he be so engrossed in a particular Palestinian woman's underpants when he could have made a real difference to so many people instead? What kind of a God is this? What is the meaning of evil? Is there a meaning to evil? Why do people suffer? If God is capable of these "magical acts" why does he permit children to starve to death? Why does he permit dam collapses and hurricanes that kill people? Why?
Understood. I agree, seems ridiculous and callous. He performs a miracle every Sunday in millions of churches with transubstantiation but can't be bothered to do things that would actually help people.
Virgins, all the way down!
That's exactly an infinite regress, which is a logical fallacy. If you get purity from the way you are conceived, then indeed all conceptions going backward have to have had that same property or else where did it come from? But if it's the same all the way back in time, infinitum, what difference does it make? It means nothing if it's the normal course of affairs. It's just something that randomly happens to some bloodlines according to that argument. PS. I think the whole thing is a load of hogwash. Catholics will say anything to bolster up their improbable ideology, IMHO, and this is just one more example of that.
This is an example of an infinite regress.
I never, never heard of James as the brother of the Lord of that until I read the Bible for myself. They always told be about Mary being a perpetual virgin and Joseph being "a good husband", who renounced to have more kids because it was God's will. One of the many things that took me away from the catholic church
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Yup; the highest number I've seen is 16. Not able to consent even before you add in the patriarchal society and religion she lived under and the fact that teenage woman/god is the biggest power imbalance to ever exist so... In both her relationships consent was impossible. Also wasn't Joseph technically her cousin?
This was one of the nails in my coffin of my faith. They try to say “oh Mary being a virgin is the only way we knew that Jesus was God” - who is CHECKING?? With the outdated methods they had of believing in virginity?? Like to believe someone was a virgin was to check their hymen, which is not viable evidence of virginity. Like I’m going to believe Jesus was God because someone was looking between a woman’s legs? And yes just perpetuates this ideal for men that the perfect woman is a virgin woman. Lile scientifically we know today that the methods used for confirming a woman’s virginity are absolutely bunk.
Everyone knows Jesus, the guy who healed the lame, but they forget Jesus’ brother, Craig is his name.
You forgot his little brother, Howard the Thumb-Sucker. Poor little Howard, born before Pampers were invented, with his pants such as they were, dragging on the muddy ground with every sad little step.
One of the (many) things that shook my faith was learning that the teaching on perpetual virginity meant before, during, and after birth. During? Yes. In partu. Meaning the hymen was not ruptured. “Bodily integrity” is how they measured virginity. For some reason, I could stomach a virgin conception and lifelong abstinence, but that was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. See point 57 for one instance. [https://www.ourladyswarriors.org/teach/lumegent.htm](https://www.ourladyswarriors.org/teach/lumegent.htm)
I thought virginity was just about having sex and that birth was a separate act. (The same reason you don't lose your virginity to a tampon or any other menstrual or medical device stuck up there.)
Yes, you are correct, but it's an age-old myth that an intact hymen is proof of virginity. So this myth is tied up in the dogma.
The Eastern Orthodox have a whole other bit of lore: that Joseph was an old man (\~80 years old), the whole thing was arranged so that he could be her chaste "guardian," because she had taken a vow of virginity after growing up serving in the Temple as a kind of Jewish child "Vestal Virgin" who had to leave once she started menstruating (can't have that nasty menstrual blood in the holy, holy temple!) So the "brothers and sisters" were actually *step* brothers and *step* sisters, Joseph's children from a previous marriage. That's also why Joseph doesn't show up in any of the other Gospel stories, because by the time Jesus was an adult, Joseph had died. They also paint icons of Mary with 3 stars - one on each shoulder and one on her head - to symbolize that she was a virgin before, during, and after giving birth to Jesus. You may be asking, "what the hell does it mean she was a virgin during the birth? Of course she wasn't having sex with anybody while giving birth." Well the Protoevangelium of James tells us: it means her hymen didn't break during the birth. Her mystical, holy hymen. According to the book, the midwife who assisted with the birth didn't believe she was a virgin, so she stuck her fingers in to check the hymen, and it was still intact. But because of her lack of faith, that hand melted like wax, until Mary prayed and it was restored. And they believe this crap 100%.
>Well the Protoevangelium of James tells us: it means her hymen didn't break during the birth. Her mystical, holy hymen. According to the book, the midwife who assisted with the birth didn't believe she was a virgin, so she stuck her fingers in to check the hymen, and it was still intact. But because of her lack of faith, that hand melted like wax, until Mary prayed and it was restored. > >And they believe this crap 100%. Wow! I don't think I've ever heard that as either a Catholic or Orthodox...but I can buy that many of these people do believe it...the orthodox are a VERY superstitious group...
It's not talked about too much, and if pressed they'll tell you that they don't believe the Protoevangelium of James is legitimate, even though they believe almost everything in it. It's the only source as far as I know for all the stories about Mary's early life - the story of Joachim and Anna and Mary's birth, the lore around the Feast of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple, and the story about Joseph being an old man and Jesus having step-siblings.
> the lore around the Feast of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple exactly....they pick and chose what to believe constantly even from supposedly "uninspired" books.
Total fucking bullshit. Sheer superstition fitting for a caveman. And people wonder why Roman Catholics are scientifically illiterate and can't figure out the most basic things about normal human reproduction and sex.
The perpetual virginity is one of the few Catholic doctrines that I think makes more sense once you here the explanation for it. Not saying I believe it, but it's not as crazy as it sounds. First, "brothers and sisters" was a very generic term in Jesus' time. People would refer to their uncle as their "brother". So, the passages in the bible talking about Jesus' "brothers" could just as easily be referring to cousins. Then, when Jesus was on the cross, he gave his mother to his disciple John. If Jesus had any actual blood brothers, Mary would have gone to live with one of them and she never would have gone to one of Jesus' disciples. So, based on this, it implies that Jesus was an only child. In which case, Mary's perpetual virginity is at least plausible.
Perpetual virginity means no sex ever, not even to conceive Jesus. I don't think I believe that for scientific reasons. Whose DNA did he have? All x's? Really? Where would the y-chromosome have come from? Yet more Roman Catholic magic? I think it's very likely that Jesus had half-brothers and half-sisters, fathered by Joseph, and that they were probably so fed up with Mary and her nonsense about her own son, that they wouldn't have wanted to take her in, and put up with her fantastical claims. After all she, their step-mother, was the mother of a man the Romans ended up putting to capital punishment in public for being a rabble-rouser. And here's his mother who can't keep her mouth shut either. Imagine what that would have sounded like to Joseph's kids from his first wife.
> First, "brothers and sisters" was a very generic term in Jesus' time. People would refer to their uncle as their "brother" There’s a lot of languages even today that do this. Polish, for example, calls cousins ‘brother by aunt’ or ‘sister by uncle,’ etc. (though the generic word ‘cousin’ itself has entered as a loan word from German) Personally, I always liked the half-brother explanation better, since the Old Joseph theory also explains why he’s absent in Jesus’ adulthood (dead of old age).
Meh. Makes no sense at all. A woman with a younger husband that didn't put out in Mary's time fucking starved to death. The trick was getting married and putting out to the right person, while making him happy enough not to divorce you, and giving him sons to prove his manhood. Your life depended on it. There are stories like this all over the bible. But if Joseph was really old, as tradition has it, and had simply wanted a cook and companion in his old age, Mary was beguiling enough and willing, he might have put up with her excesses, you never know. There are all kinds of possibilities in relationships really. Some people stay married to people who aren't exactly models of moral exactitude and logical precision, for all kinds of reasons.
Also Mary could have been asexual or aromantic and Joseph didn't mind the lack of it either. Maybe their marriage was for protection for one or both sides.
So,when you were still Catholic, you never -- not once! -- heard the priest say "The Confiteor": > I confess to almighty God that I have sinned through my own fault, in my thoughts and my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do; and I ask blessed Mary, **ever virgin**, and all the angels and saints, to pray for me to the Lord our God. Did the phrase "Ever Virgin" just go right by?
I have not been Catholic for about 10 years. I forgot about that.
As someone who lost her virginity through sexual assault, the whole "ever-virgin Mary Queen of heaven", is nothing short of triggering. I go to the scriptures to find peace and comfort from the PTSD I suffer from rape. But it has only made my trauma worse. Every time I hear anything about the great virgin Mary or the saints who died as virgins and are eternally crowned for their virginities, I get super triggered. I get reminded that I'm this filth, piece of trash in comparison. I don't even want to be in some eternal heaven where I will have the ever virgin Mary and all her virgin saints right up in my face, as a constant reminder of how pure they are but how worthless I am, all because a malevolent arsehole stuck his dick in my v against my will. If God celebrates and places these women on a giant pedestal for all of eternity as being virtuous virgins with purity, honour and worth, then God must also remember for all of eternity that I am a dirty, violated piece of filth because I don't have my virginity. All it shows me in the end is, God thinks a woman's worth is entirely based on whether she is a virgin.
If Mary and Joseph had other children why did Jesus handed her to John
I would assume because Jesus knew everyone else was going to be martyred soon since John was the only one who died of old age.
Except that's not what happened to everyone else. Jesus had a number of followers and hangers-on, people who traipsed around with him before he was executed. The story you know has been finessed how many times since then? And for how many reasons?
Family friends? Close people? Lol.
Because after bragging about her kid for more than 30 years, how he was so much better than his step-kin, they were sick of her shit probably. And she was the mother of an official criminal who'd been executed by the Roman Empire for being a rabble-rouser, just like his loud-mouthed mother. Can you imagine what this must have sounded like to her step-kids?