Is pgd trying to break the rules and see how far he gets?

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The things you claim and the sources you find validating is obvious proof your thinking is totally beyond anything I've ever encountered before. Chickens may be easier but I doubt they are any more profound.

But to my mind what I have written above and what you believe, is junk, verbal or otherwise. There is zero evidence for these claims, in fact common sense would tell you that they are a nonsense. There are so many plausible explanations for the life of christ that it has me bewildered as to why someone would believe the supernatural explanation. Obviously you are aware of the implausibility of the biblical account or you would be willing to explore other possibilities and show how they are less viable than the supernatural one.

And yet both yourself and Orwell want empirical evidence for just about everything else, this standpoint, as I say above has me bewildered.

In the case of the Biblical account, the historical reliability in other areas tends to lend credence for those which are not yet archaeologically verified.

^ Dont get me wrong, I think the probability that there was a preacher named Jesus who either himself, his followers or both thought was the son of god is fairly high. What I am suggesting is there are more likely/natural explanations to account for this belief, a plausible example being; Mary became pregnant to Joseph out of wed lock, and in an attempt to save her life the family bribed some local authorities/midwifes etc. They used the prophecies of Isaiah as an explanation to the supposed virgin conception and from then on the lie escalated.

You don't seem to have much of a Biblical knowledge of angels.

Angels are only depicted as having wings in prophetic dreams and visions. When they appear as physical manifestations, they appear as men, though somewhat distinguished, such as dressed in all-white clothes. The two examples I immediately think of would be the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as well as the empty tomb after the resurrection. Each time they are described as men, but we may deduce that they are actually messengers of God.

For a very interesting, though fictional, interpretation of how angels manifest themselves in human form and their actual role as God's "hit men," check out "The Prophecy" film series starring Christopher Walken as a rebellious Gabriel (who Christians know as a fine trumpet player). It's not exactly Biblical because the storyline is based upon a supposed "lost chapter" of the book of Revelation. But I do like to think that their depiction of angelic behavior is not far off the mark!

For a more comical perspective, check out the angel Gabriel in "Constantine," played by Tilda Swinton. There are those who believe that heavenly beings are non-gendered, gender being something we possess as physical creations and not something relevant to the afterlife. Tilda Swinton's character is a kind of gender-bending take on that.

Actually, regarding the Jesus' birth, He was called the "son of Mary" by the residents of Nazareth or Capernum, I forget which, but the implied insult is that the only certain parent was his mother. In other words, the same meaning as the common phrase "son of a b***h". So, it would not be that people were viewing His birth as the fulfillment of Isaiah's dual prophecy, at least not until after Isaiah 53 was fulfilled as well as the resurrection itself which was necessary to convince the disciples who had fled after the crucifixion.

Are you totally unaware of all the religious paintings depicting angels? That would be rather incredible.

I'm well aware. However, you have to consider that an artist's depiction may be based on something NOT gathered from Biblical data. Manifestations of angels in the physical world are never described as some half-human, half-bird hybrid. As I said, those kinds of descriptions always seem to be reserved for some special prophetic revelation. One description is quite fantastic: Six wings, with two they covered their feet, with two the covered their faces, and with two they flew. How many paintings are you familiar with that depict angels as having six wings?

Also, angels are artistically depicted as female figures. Why is that? The Bible always describes them as male.

This is only speculation, but I have a guess: I think Christians over time sought to replace mythical images with their own. Winged beings sound a lot like fairies to me. Fairies and nymphs are typically shown as being feminine. So it would be easier to explain angels to people familiar with stories of fairies and nymphs as resembling them somewhat. And I think that it would only be logical to depict angels in such a way that they reflect the perfect beauty of an imagined celestial being personified as a woman.

I, for one, always wondered where the image of the fat-baby cherubim came from. Cupid?

Artists have their own reasons, whatever they are, for displaying images of celestial beings in certain ways. And those are beautiful works of art. An artist's interpretation, however, is a product of his or her imagination and not necessarily in relation to Biblical descriptions of them.

The term "artistic license" is the bane of anyone hoping to find a media portrayal with accuracy to the source material, in general. In this case, it seems as if the media portrayal is all sand knows.

Addendum to my previous post:

Sand, something I find interesting about your reply is how it relates to Tilda Swinton's portrayal of Gabriel. She plays a MEAN angel. She's deliberately cast as a more androgynous character, a beautiful male figure that leaves you wondering whether she's a man, woman, both, or neither. It's very confusing, hence the comedy of it. I mean, Tilda doesn't have the most stereotypical "womanly" voice, either, so she comes across as being somewhat feminine and yet maybe even a touch of a teenage boy in playing Gabriel.

So as to how angels are factually depicted as being men and artistically as women, Tilda strikes what I think is a very good balance between the two. I'm not sure whether you'd enjoy watching "Constantine" as a movie since I'm not certain what your tastes are in film, especially with films like "Constantine" that are based on comic books as they tend to be exaggerated fantasy. But I'm also a fan of Tilda Swinton, and the irony and absurdity with which she plays Gabriel is not to be missed!

Since nobody - I mean nobody has ever seen an angel, no matter what nonsense you hold to in the Bible, the pictures painted through the centuries are as good a reference as any. We might as well be discussing dragons which also are physiologically unaerodynamic.

Waitaminnit - the reference work that describes the creature is less reliable than a painting?

If someone did a cover for Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars that depicted the Green Martians as being about four feet tall with pointy caps, would that be more reliable than Burroughs' own description of them as eight feet tall and four-armed?

(As for people portraying angels - I was rather fond of Alan Rickman's role as the Metatron in Dogma.)

The acceptance of Biblical descriptions of angels is as much fantasy as the pictures. I merely like to look at pictures. If all the innumerable pictures of angels with wings is nonsense then the public seems totally deceived.

Sand: The general public of today, whether believing or unbelieving, are generally better informed about what angels are and what they aren't as compared with the general public of, say, the Victorian era of academic picture-painting. Despite however many concrete angels you see in graveyards, you can be well-assured that the source texts (the Bible) from which we know anything about what angels are say nothing about angels being women!! ! Same thing about the little fat-baby cherubs. That sounds to me like the Church's way of absorbing mythical figures into Christian tradition (Eros or Cupid, who often shows up in academic art is a cute, little, winged, horny, fat baby carrying around a bow and arrow), something I'm not particularly fond of, yet it is what it is.

Further, if God is going to send hit men to do his dirty work after negotiation with perverse humans fails to yield results, WHY would God send a beautiful, well-proportioned woman with dove's wings (as much as I find that a turn-on) to get the job done? No offense to female readers, but I'm just referencing how angels have been depicted in pop art. I'm just saying you don't send someone who looks to you like mom when you were 5 years old! Sure, Tinkerbell can do some damage, but you don't send her to wipe an entire country off the map! You need someone who means business and LOOKS like he means business.

So you get someone who looks just human enough to interact with other humans. If you're dealing with a male-dominated society, you send men. And in the case of Sodom and Gomorrah, the two men who came to visit Lot to tell him and his family to leave immediately, it was apparent to anyone who noticed that there was something special about these two men in particular. So much so that a crowd of depraved gang-bangers gathered outside Lot's house so they could rape the angels. The angels dig Lot and his family out of the situation they'd gotten into, and then rain down hell-fire and brimstone on the two cities.

These are the kind of guys that, if you run into them, you don't mess with them. You do whatever they tell you to do and you offer them anything they want. I fail to see how a feathery fairy is going to be taken quite so seriously.

That was a funny movie!

Angels are claimed to take human form when talking to humans.

Aliens are sometimes claimed to take human form when talking to humans.

According to some psychic friends of mine, angels have no sex but choose their sex when appearing to humans, "Gabrielle" is known for taking female shape (You may have heard of her as Gabriel in the bible). But Miguel often goes male.

^^