Was the Lord Fertile?

[The Nehor]

14 hours ago, teddyaware said:

The problem is that people who believe in traditional Judeo-Christian marriage and family values, the sanctity of human life, the divine inspiration of the Founding Fathers and the sure hope that the American promised land is prophesied to govern the world in righteousness during Millennium are now considered to be Fascists by angry people who reject traditional Judeo-Christian family values, reject the sanctity of human life, believe the Founding Fathers were evil, and rejoice in the hope that the United States will one day become a brutal communist dictatorship are the clueless hypocrites who want to do the punching. Weird, isn’t it?

Which traditional marriage and family values? The early Christian “no divorce” ones? The chattel sex slave ones in the Hebrew Bible? I reject quite a few of them. Also the Founding Fathers didn’t give themselves or their work all the holiness you are trying to drown them in. A lot of the ideals of the Constitution came from the Puritans but they explicitly and deliberately cut the religious wackjob bit out because that was tried and didn’t work and they embraced a secular republic. Now we have people trying to do that. They must like religious wars and conflicts or something. The Founders weren’t evil. They were flawed and some were brilliant. I like Benjamin Franklin best.

And no one of any significance is advocating for some form of authoritarian communism. That is just a weird fever dream fascists have used since they first showed up. In both Germany and Italy they didn’t get a voting majority but they drummed up a fear of communism and people were willing to give them power to stop those filthy commies. It didn’t go well for them. And people are obviously still falling for it. To the point that they think a serial adulterer and sex predator being in power is the best way to protect “traditional Judeo-Christian marriage and family values”.

They took a culture war and sold it as a spiritual war. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic.

[3DOP]

1 hour ago, InCognitus said:

Thanks, I feel better.  I respect your views, and now I apologize for apologizing  

I have a meeting in 3 minutes, so I can't comment more now.  I hope I get more time to review your post a little later.

Heh, apology accepted!

[teddyaware]

On 11/1/2025 at 1:07 PM, teddyaware said:

At the outset, I must say I fully realize this thread’s topic could turn out to be very controversial and contentious, to say the least, although stirring up heated debate and Ill will is not at all my intention. Rather, what I’m submitting here are two very simple questions that I’m hoping can thoughtfully considered and addressed in a dispassionate, level headed manner. Here’s are the questions:

1) If the Lord was both fully divine and fully human while he sojourned in this mortal realm, do you believe it’s possible that he carried within his holy body living seed (spermatozoa), and if he did what are your thoughts about the reasonable probability that the Father of Heaven and Earth — God the Son — had a sexual nature?

2) Are there any inferences or implications that might be drawn, or interesting speculations that might be entertained, while focusing on this apparently very rarely considered possibility that God the Son had a fully functioning reproductive system, with living seed that might very well have been able to produce human offspring?

Some follow-up-up questions to the ones posed in my original post on this thread (see above):

1) If the Catholics and Protestants do in fact believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is fully human, in every sense of the word, how would it be possible to assert that the Lord is indeed fully human if the reproductive system of a human Father didn’t supply the paternal seed containing the human DNA that fertilized Mary’s ovum?

2) Is it possible to assert that the Lord is actually fully human if some sort of “lab grown” or “spiritually manufactured” spermatozoa impregnated Mary’s ovum without that fertilizing seed being the product of a human male reproductive system?

3) If the male seed that generated the Savior’s mortal body wasn’t the product of a human male reproductive system, wouldn’t it be more correct to say the Lord is actually a trans human hybrid and not fully human?

4) Even further, if in some way the Lord’s mortal body was miraculously produced without the need for some some kind of replicated spermatozoa, wouldn’t it be even more correct to say that he is a humanoid because the creator and manner of the creation of his body isn’t human? 

Edited November 25, 2025 by teddyaware

[Calm]

24 minutes ago, teddyaware said:

the Catholics and Protestants do in fact believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is fully human, in every sense of the word, how would it be possible to assert that the Lord is indeed fully human if the reproductive system of a human Father didn’t supply the paternal seed containing the human DNA that fertilized Mary’s ovum?

 

Why would it be a problem for a God who formed the bodies of the first man and woman?

[Calm]

30 minutes ago, teddyaware said:

Is it possible to assert that the Lord is actually fully human if some sort of “lab grown” or “spiritually manufactured” spermatozoa impregnated Mary’s ovum without that fertilizing seed being the product of a human male reproductive system?

Were Adam and Eve fully human in your view?

Do you see a clone as less than fully human if biologically identical to the original outside of aging and wear and tear, iow just a younger version?

Edited November 25, 2025 by Calm

[teddyaware]

23 minutes ago, Calm said:

Were Adam and Eve fully human in your view?

Do you see a clone as less than fully human if biologically identical to the original outside of aging and wear and tear, iow just a younger version?

Yes, I believe that Adam and Eve are fully human, which puts me in the good company of the early leaders of the church who taught that if the members of the church were spiritually mature enough to see beyond the deliberately simplistic, storybook version of creation portrayed in Genesis they would understand that our first parents gained their human bodies in the same way the rest of us do.

As far as cloned humans are concerned, since the bodies of clones are unwisely created in an unnatural manner in violation of the Lord’s commandments, I would place them in the category of being trans human. Even so, clones get their genetic makeup from both human male and human female DNA. It will be most interesting to see how cloned humans are going fit into the Lord’s plan of salvation since exaltation is a family affair that requires the sealing of children to their .parents. I sure hope the mad scientist lab technicians who do the cloning aren’t going to become the default parents!

 

[bluebell]

3 minutes ago, teddyaware said:

Yes, I believe that Adam and Eve are fully human, which puts me in the good company of the early leaders of the church who taught that if the members of the church were spiritually mature enough to see beyond the deliberately simplistic, storybook version of creation portrayed in Genesis they would understand that our first parents gained their human bodies in the same way the rest of us do.

 

 

Can you share the reference where an early church leader taught that that if the members of the church were spiritually mature enough they would know that Adam was born of a mortal mom and dad after a nine month gestation?  I don’t know that I’ve heard that before. 

[webbles]

3 hours ago, teddyaware said:

Some follow-up-up questions to the ones posed in my original post on this thread (see above):

1) If the Catholics and Protestants do in fact believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is fully human, in every sense of the word, how would it be possible to assert that the Lord is indeed fully human if the reproductive system of a human Father didn’t supply the paternal seed containing the human DNA that fertilized Mary’s ovum?

2) Is it possible to assert that the Lord is actually fully human if some sort of “lab grown” or “spiritually manufactured” spermatozoa impregnated Mary’s ovum without that fertilizing seed being the product of a human male reproductive system?

3) If the male seed that generated the Savior’s mortal body wasn’t the product of a human male reproductive system, wouldn’t it be more correct to say the Lord is actually a trans human hybrid and not fully human?

4) Even further, if in some way the Lord’s mortal body was miraculously produced without the need for some some kind of replicated spermatozoa, wouldn’t it be even more correct to say that he is a humanoid because the creator and manner of the creation of his body isn’t human? 

I'm a little confused.  Are you saying that the only valid way that a human can be born is if the sperm was created through spermatogenesis?  And if the sperm is created in any other manner, then the offspring is "trans human"?  What if someone mimics spermatogenisis perfectly in a lab (using a germ cell from another human), is that acceptable?  And if so, what if someone creates the germ cell from a stem cell (again from another human), is that acceptable?  And if someone created the stem cell by taking a female stem cell, pulling out the x chromosomes and modifying it into a y chromosome (by removing things, not by adding anything), is that acceptable?

[Calm]

3 hours ago, teddyaware said:

clones get their genetic makeup from both human male and human female DNA.

In what sense?  Because the original had a mother and father? Seems like it would be the same sense as Jesus if all the DNA he had was from Mary, just enough trimmed off to make the Y chromosome out of the X or whatever is necessary to alter an X into a Y.  It is quite possible that Jesus was a male version of Mary’s DNA as far as I understand Catholic theology (his body was fully human, not half man, half God).

Edited November 26, 2025 by Calm

[Calm]

3 hours ago, teddyaware said:

As far as cloned humans are concerned, since the bodies of clones are unwisely created in an unnatural manner in violation of the Lord’s commandments, I would place them in the category of being trans human.

So even though it would be biologically impossible to tell a perfect clone from the original, one is trans human and one is not?

What if cloning took place shortly after conception when still a single cell somehow without destroying the cell or perhaps after the first cell division, one cell is sacrificed, but the other just divides an extra time and both resulting zygotes were placed within the same womb at the same exact time, planted themselves and grew into full babies,  At birth there was no way to tell which was which since both genetics and environment up to that time were more or less identical and any differences would be similar to what happens with identical twins…which I assume you don’t believe one twin is transhuman.

 How can one be called trans human when you don’t even know which is which?

Edited November 26, 2025 by Calm

[Calm]

Bottomline, for Catholics the birth of Christ is a miracle as is the fact he is fully God and fully human.  There is no need to take it further as all things are possible with God.

[The Nehor]

9 hours ago, teddyaware said:

Yes, I believe that Adam and Eve are fully human, which puts me in the good company of the early leaders of the church who taught that if the members of the church were spiritually mature enough to see beyond the deliberately simplistic, storybook version of creation portrayed in Genesis they would understand that our first parents gained their human bodies in the same way the rest of us do.

Which of the two creation stories in Genesis were they describing this way?

9 hours ago, teddyaware said:

As far as cloned humans are concerned, since the bodies of clones are unwisely created in an unnatural manner in violation of the Lord’s commandments, I would place them in the category of being trans human. Even so, clones get their genetic makeup from both human male and human female DNA. It will be most interesting to see how cloned humans are going fit into the Lord’s plan of salvation since exaltation is a family affair that requires the sealing of children to their .parents. I sure hope the mad scientist lab technicians who do the cloning aren’t going to become the default parents!

Transhuman is a word that already has a meaning. That is not it.

Also presumably these people will be abominations that must be destroyed. That is the usual approach to people that don’t fit neatly into a good place in the arbitrarily created theological classifications of humans.

[3DOP]

18 hours ago, bluebell said:

Can you share the reference where an early church leader taught that that if the members of the church were spiritually mature enough they would know that Adam was born of a mortal mom and dad after a nine month gestation?  I don’t know that I’ve heard that before. 

Hi bluebell,

Thanks to you and others who have tried to understand and defend as best you can, the actual teachings of the Catholic faith.

I had hoped to show in my previous contributions to this thread that LDS and Catholic teaching on the humanity of the Son of God was more similar than perhaps many LDS think. 

I am thankful for the majority of LDS here who seem open-minded enough to see that what Catholics believe is close to what LDS believe in some important ways. To be sure, I am not advocating indifference to what separates us. There needs to be a balance. We need to acknowledge what separates us while appreciating what tends towards unity.  

One of the ways that we can discern if we have a correct and Christian balance is when it gives us pleasure when we are confronted with new information that shows that others with whom we are not in full unity are closer to our beliefs than we thought. Sure, let us rejoice partially in where we agree! Let us see partial brotherhood where it truly exists! 

But this thread illustrates the tension that occurs in the hearts of minority parties in our churches when evidence is presented to show that these other churches are not necessarily wrong about everything. There are some souls whose faith requires not only positive articles of faith to believe in, but in negative articles of faith to disparage and condemn as wicked or stupid. This is where they sometimes go off into error, and ironically crazy, esoteric error that separates them ideologically from their own communities. They experience no joy in discovering shades of gray in other religions that shed some little light in the darkness. 

In charity, I suggest that all who identify as Christians should lean towards trying to understand their religious neighbors in a way that was described by St. Peter Faber S.J., who was the last of St. Ignatius' original five (or six?) companions when conceiving the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). He wrote this letter to a correspondent without the subheading provided for better understanding:

Letter 138, May 7, 1546

He Advises Loving Them in Truth

The first is, that whoever wants to benefit the heretics of this time, must aim to have much charity towards them and love them in truth (in veritate), discarding from their spirit (our spirit) all the considerations that tend to cool their (our) esteem for them.

Make an Effort So That We Are Loved by Them

It is necessary to win them over so that they love us and hold us in good esteem within their spirits; this is done by communicating with them familiarly on things that are common to both of us (nobis et ipsis), avoiding all disputes (disceptationes), where the other side (altera pars) seems to suppress the other; for it is first necessary to communicate on those things that unite, rather than on those that seem to show a diversity of opinions.

Faber was a Frenchman, canonized by Pope Francis in this century, and he is better known to the world as Pierre Favre. Apparently he was writing in Latin instead of French. I could not find the entire letter in my messy files and am providing what I could quickly find on the internet with this less than ideal English translation. It still does the trick I think. I only needed to add the parenthetical parts in black from the first lines regarding "our spirit". We might need to change ourselves to reach others. If the devil cannot get us to believe what is positively wrong, we can still be deluded into believing that others are worse than the reality. Basically, without good will towards those outside our communities we can easily tend to believe that they are more wicked or culpably blind than they truly are in God's eyes.     

Rory

 

[3DOP]

21 hours ago, teddyaware said:

Yes, I believe that Adam and Eve are fully human, which puts me in the good company of the early leaders of the church who taught that if the members of the church were spiritually mature enough to see beyond the deliberately simplistic, storybook version of creation portrayed in Genesis they would understand that our first parents gained their human bodies in the same way the rest of us do.

As far as cloned humans are concerned, since the bodies of clones are unwisely created in an unnatural manner in violation of the Lord’s commandments, I would place them in the category of being trans human. Even so, clones get their genetic makeup from both human male and human female DNA. It will be most interesting to see how cloned humans are going fit into the Lord’s plan of salvation since exaltation is a family affair that requires the sealing of children to their .parents. I sure hope the mad scientist lab technicians who do the cloning aren’t going to become the default parents!

 

So Adam and Eve were babies? Where is this revealed? What weight of authority should some ceremony of yours in 1975 carry with anybody else? You were given this insight that nobody else today possesses, excluding apparently, even current and recent LDS church leaders? You go on critically, asking how your fellow members can be so blind? They just want to follow apostolic authority. Show them where this an apostolic teaching and they will cease being "blind". It is too obscure if it is only some idea you picked up fifty years ago that they have never heard of from any church authority. 

I do not want to alienate you further, but allow me to suggest you need to consider that your expectations that your fellow LDS should have your belief is based on a personal experience that neither they, nor the authorities they have accepted shares?  

PS:

I was sure that I saw Teddy, that you learned of this teaching from some 1975 ceremony you experienced. I cannot find it now. Please accept this as a retraction of my comments above if I am mistaken.

Edited November 26, 2025 by 3DOP

[Calm]

40 minutes ago, 3DOP said:

was sure that I saw Teddy, that you learned of this teaching from some 1975 ceremony you experienced. I cannot find it now. Please accept this as a retraction of my comments above if I am mistaken.

 

[3DOP]

1 hour ago, 3DOP said:

So Adam and Eve were babies? Where is this revealed? What weight of authority should some ceremony of yours in 1975 carry with anybody else? You were given this insight that nobody else today possesses, excluding apparently, even current and recent LDS church leaders? You go on critically, asking how your fellow members can be so blind? They just want to follow apostolic authority. Show them where this an apostolic teaching and they will cease being "blind". It is too obscure if it is only some idea you picked up fifty years ago that they have never heard of from any church authority. 

I do not want to alienate you further, but allow me to suggest you need to consider that your expectations that your fellow LDS should have your belief is based on a personal experience that neither they, nor the authorities they have accepted shares?  

PS:

I was sure that I saw Teddy, that you learned of this teaching from some 1975 ceremony you experienced. I cannot find it now. Please accept this as a retraction of my comments above if I am mistaken.

Okay. I was mistaken. The comments about knowledge from a 1975 revelation was about something else, probably involving the Temple ordinance.I have no opinion about that. 

Thanks for the link calm.

[MustardSeed]

I think Teddy has an obligation to respond to these reasonable questions.

[The Nehor]

On 11/25/2025 at 2:17 PM, teddyaware said:

1) If the Catholics and Protestants do in fact believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is fully human, in every sense of the word, how would it be possible to assert that the Lord is indeed fully human if the reproductive system of a human Father didn’t supply the paternal seed containing the human DNA that fertilized Mary’s ovum?

Okay, I have seen some good criticisms of the concept of the Trinity. This is not one of them.

On 11/25/2025 at 2:17 PM, teddyaware said:

2) Is it possible to assert that the Lord is actually fully human if some sort of “lab grown” or “spiritually manufactured” spermatozoa impregnated Mary’s ovum without that fertilizing seed being the product of a human male reproductive system?

Yes, it is very easy to assert that.

On 11/25/2025 at 2:17 PM, teddyaware said:

3) If the male seed that generated the Savior’s mortal body wasn’t the product of a human male reproductive system, wouldn’t it be more correct to say the Lord is actually a trans human hybrid and not fully human?

No, he’d be a demigod. Or maybe a fully God fully human being. Or maybe something else. This is still not what a transhuman is.

On 11/25/2025 at 2:17 PM, teddyaware said:

4) Even further, if in some way the Lord’s mortal body was miraculously produced without the need for some some kind of replicated spermatozoa, wouldn’t it be even more correct to say that he is a humanoid because the creator and manner of the creation of his body isn’t human? 

????????????

[Calm]

On 11/26/2025 at 2:22 PM, MustardSeed said:

I think Teddy has an obligation to respond to these reasonable questions.

I definitely think there is an obligation to address people’s questions when criticizing others’ faith rather than just proclaiming one’s own.

[MustardSeed]

I mean, if you’re gonna come on here and act like people are idiots on a regular basis I think you better prepared to back up your opinions or at least acknowledge them as such.

[Orthodox Christian]

On 11/17/2025 at 3:42 PM, 3DOP said:

Thanks Orthodox Christian. No offense taken. I thought of deleting the post, and should have. Too late now. I don't think it would be worth the time to explain how your reading of my poorly conceived post is understandable, but off the mark. Please accept my apologies.

No worries, God bless. 

[MiserereNobis]

On 11/25/2025 at 1:17 PM, teddyaware said:

Some follow-up-up questions to the ones posed in my original post on this thread (see above):

1) If the Catholics and Protestants do in fact believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is fully human, in every sense of the word, how would it be possible to assert that the Lord is indeed fully human if the reproductive system of a human Father didn’t supply the paternal seed containing the human DNA that fertilized Mary’s ovum?

2) Is it possible to assert that the Lord is actually fully human if some sort of “lab grown” or “spiritually manufactured” spermatozoa impregnated Mary’s ovum without that fertilizing seed being the product of a human male reproductive system?

3) If the male seed that generated the Savior’s mortal body wasn’t the product of a human male reproductive system, wouldn’t it be more correct to say the Lord is actually a trans human hybrid and not fully human?

4) Even further, if in some way the Lord’s mortal body was miraculously produced without the need for some some kind of replicated spermatozoa, wouldn’t it be even more correct to say that he is a humanoid because the creator and manner of the creation of his body isn’t human? 

Miracles and mysteries, my guy.

I find it interesting that you gloss right over our paradoxical belief that Jesus was 100% human and 100% God, and then focus on minutia about sperm. If we're getting nitty gritty scientific, you could simply point out that something cannot be 100% this and 100% that at the same time.

Yet, Jesus was  

[Calm]

32 minutes ago, MiserereNobis said:

you could simply point out that something cannot be 100% this and 100% that at the same time.

Yet, Jesus was  

I can be 100% a Latter-day Saint and 100% American.  It’s not paradoxical unless they are in the same category…like 100% LDS and 100% Catholic.

Perhaps a better analogy is being 100% carbon and 100% helium (same category, closer to what we think of as substance when speaking of God)?

Is it Catholic doctrine that humans and God are in the same category?  I thought it wasn’t, that God is seen as intentionally sharing some of his attributes with humans, but that would be okay because there is overlap between, as in the aspect of God that can’t be in humans are not in humans and the aspects of humans that would contradict the Being of God are not shared by Him.

Maybe you are just repeating a common criticism based on misunderstanding logic and/or math (Venn diagrams anyone)?

Edited November 29, 2025 by Calm