re: #145 mmmirele

The grim reality of being a woman in pretty much any time, including today, is that Jesus could have been the product of a sexual assault. Which is my second thought as to what I think actually happened, after the most obvious, which is that Mary and Joseph got a jump start on the wedding night.

The thing we have to keep in mind is that Galatians, an authentic letter of Paul’s, has nothing to say about a virgin birth. In fact, Gal 4:4 says that Jesus was “born of a woman, born under the law.” Which excludes a lot of fancy thinking, in my mind, that Mary was a virgin, or that Mary herself was immaculately conceived. In fact, Paul didn’t *care* about Jesus’ birth. Neither did the writer of the Gospel of Mark, who just launches into John the Baptist and skips the whole infancy and childhood narratives.

I’m gonna be blunt and say that I believe the virgin birth idea is one of the worst things to come out of Christianity. It does nothing good for women at all. That’s because no other woman could be a virgin mother and give birth (at least before the late 1700s) without sex. It made sex dirty when it was wedded to original sin (no thanks to Augustine). The virgin birth is unhelpful as hell.

i have no (ahem) dog in this fight so to be a wet blanket, this whole discussion is an explanation of the birth of a child.
it assumes these were in reality, fact and truth, actual specific individual people at all.