>>>And you don't think the frightened, pregnant girl, out of wedlock, is a more likely explanation then the immaculate conception?
>>
>>Haha, a practical application of Occam's Razor.
>
>Say what?

The simplest explanation is usually the right one. Occam's Razor basically says that once you have a simple explanation for something, embellishing it only makes it more unlikely to be true.

>
>>
>>It sure sounds like a possible explanation. But then again, wasn't Mary already married when she got pregnant? At least, that is what the Gospels state, IIRC.
>
>Not sure about her marital status when she got up the duff. If she was married then sorry, yes, stoning was the punishment for adultery, wasn't it? Check this hypothesis:
>
>I don't know whether Joseph had been away on a protracted carpentry conference and Mary had her fling. Joseph obviously loived her and forgave her, but ghe couldn't claim the child to be his own, so they concocted this stor
>
>>
>>Anyway, the point is that the the importance of the entire question of whether this particular miracle - or any other miracle for that matter - happened, in the case of Christ, has been exaggerated.
>>
>>About the question of miracles in general, one Mirza Abul-Fadl (a Bahá'í scholar) wrote something in the sense of:
>>
>>If you want to buy a tyre, you will look at the quality of the tyres, and not judge the vendor by his ability to convert plain tyres into gold tyres.
>
>Don't get the point of this allegory but, damn yes! if my tyre dealer could convert the tyre into gold I could go and get is assayed, sell it, and go a buy all 4 corners with a fraction of the proceeds! :-)