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Comment by hadlock | Hacker News Reader

> Most Christians believe that

Do you have any sort of statistics to back this up? A survey of some kind? From my own experience, most people who are Christian subscribe to the lifestyle and teachings, but do not accept 100% of the bible as truth.

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It's... at least the official doctrine of most Christian churches, yeah, and that's usually held as a particularly important point. Catholics, certainly, and they're rather numerous. It is possible that many, or even most, Christians disagree with tenets of faith that their churches hold to be absolutely vital and indispensable, I suppose.

[EDIT] It's part of the Nicene Creed, even. I think it's fair to say that if most church-goers at most Christian churches told a priest or pastor that they didn't believe that God miracle'd a baby into the Virgin Mary, it would, at the very least, give the priest or pastor a frowny face and/or evoke a "wait... what exactly do you think we're up to, here?" reaction.

I don't have data for the whole world, but at least in the USA, most Christians (and the majority of Americans) believe in the virgin birth of Jesus Christ [0].

[0] https://www.pewforum.org/2017/12/12/americans-say-religious-...

Anecdotal, but I've never met or even heard of a Christian who believed in the virgin birth but thought it was the result of a natural process. Are there any examples of that you're aware of?

There was a Discovery channel documentary in the 2000s that tried to give "scientific" explanations for the miracles in Christ's life. Parthenogenesis was the theory they advanced instead of divine conception.

Sure, that sounds interesting and unsurprising. But was any of it believed by Christians?

How about the fact that over a billion people are members of the Catholic Church? The membership of which requires believing quite a bit of Biblical literalism.

Tbh that whole argument is always kinda weird: If those people don't believe in the whole thing, why are they members in a church about it? That's pretty much the only statistic you need.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-21443313

>If those people don't believe in the whole thing, why are they members in a church about it?

Usually they inherit the religion from their parents. They grow up with the church as family so even if they don't believe in the tenets/beliefs they still participate.

A lot of people are religious/affiliated with a specific religion due to inertia. Church attendance was compulsory for a lot of history. There are not a whole lot of people converting to catholicism/protestantism/judaism from other religions. I only very recently found out the technical differences between lutheranism and methodism, largely details around how/why baptism and taking sacrament from what I can tell, but growing up, we always went to one church and not the other even though nobody could tell me why.

> Do you have any sort of statistics to back this up? A survey of some kind?

The virgin birth of Jesus is an article of faith and dogma for Catholicism, itself a major branch of Christianity.

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