Regarding Virgin Births...

[LAGC]

"Now the birth of Jesus Christ was in this wise. When his mother, Mary, was espoused to Joseph, before they came together she was found with child of the Holy Ghost."

Yes, and the Greek demigod Perseus was born when the god Jupiter visited the virgin Danaë as a shower of gold and got her with child. The god Buddha was born through an opening in his mother's flank. Catlicus the serpent-skirted caught a little ball of feathers from the sky and hid it in her bosom, and the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli was thus conceived. The virgin Nana took a pomegranate from the tree watered by the blood of the slain Agdestris, and laid it in her bosom, and gave birth to the god Attis. The virgin daughter of a Mongol king awoke one night and found herself bathed in a great light, which caused her to give birth to Genghis Khan. Krishna was born of the virgin Devaka. Horus was born of the virgin Isis. Mercury was born of the virgin Maia. Romulus was born of the virgin Rhea Sylvia.

For some reason, many religions force themselves to think of the birth canal as a one-way street, and even the Koran treats the Virgin Mary with reverence. However, this made no difference during the Crusades, when a papal army set out to recapture Bethlehem and Jerusalem from the Muslims, incidentally destroying many Jewish communities and sacking heretical Christian Byzantium along the way, and inflicted a massacre in the narrow streets of Jerusalem, where, according to the hysterical and gleeful chroniclers, the spilled blood reached up to the bridles of the horses.

--from Chapter 2, _God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything_ by Christopher Hitchens

[aquart]

1. I've always said the ascetic Jehovah was innocent.

But there was clearly someone in the neighborhood with a rap sheet as long as your arm.

[mrcheerful]

2. Well according to my 70 year old mother..........she had 6 virgin births

[struggle4progress]

3. Mark and John are completely silent here, as is the reconstruction Q

from Matthew and Luke. And Matthew provides almost nothing about the pregnancy, except a dream convincing Joseph he should marry the woman, despite her pregnancy, the argument being she is "with child by the Holy Spirit," which most people would probably consider a rather unclear explanation; this is followed by a mention of the town of birth and a miracle story in which the child becomes a refugee from the predations of the king. In Luke's elaboration, there is not just a single miraculous pregnancy, but two of them, followed by an unaugust birth in a barn, improved only a bit by an angelic annunciation to shepherds in the hills

Of course, stories of virgin birth offend all our modern scientific sensibilities -- but we are not so novel in that regard as we might think: the stories offended common sense even when first told

I certainly have no objection to anyone applying modern tools of comparative mythology to these stories, to shed light on any portions that might reasonably be thought to arise from earlier traditions, or to elucidate why the people who first heard them might have been interested, but what Hitchens is doing is very careless and sloppy work. He passes from a New Testament sentence to a scattered list of myths and from thence to the Crusades. It is not anything resembling intelligible argument: it is merely polemic. Geography very strongly suggests Meso-American traditions cannot have influenced Matthew or Luke, and the simplest historical chronology prevents any influence on Matthew or Luke from stories about Genghis Khan, for example. If one wants to read the stories with any insight, something different than Hitchens' approach is required, even if one does not want to read the stories literally

[Goblinmonger]

4. His point is not that Meso-Americans impacted

the writers of the approved gospels (though the strongest argument is that the Greeks WAY did). His point is that the concept of a virgin birth is not uncommon in mythology and is likely a meme that feeds a particular need thematically. Read The Hero with a Thousand Faces for a discussion of how the hero has developed over time.

[struggle4progress]

5. He not only rambles like an ill-tempered drunk: his mythology is sloppy.

In the Meso-American myth referenced, the goddess impregnated by the feathery ball already has some four hundred children, who set out to kill her, because they are outraged at her new pregnancy; they, and the daughter leading the rebellion, are defeated, with the daughter's head becoming the moon and the four hundred becoming stars. As a goddess with four hundred children seems an exceptionally unlikely candidate as a virgin mother when giving birth later, I think we may safely say that Mr Hitchens is extraordinarily careless in his mythology

To be taken seriously, one should at least pitch the ball over the plate

[Goblinmonger]

6. He doesn't claim in that excerpt that she was a virgin.

He says that the child was born of a god and not through normal coitus. I believe there are liberal progressives who tell us that the term "virgin" isn't to be taken literally in the bible but that it just refers to the particular "conception" of Jesus. Who's the sloppy one?

[struggle4progress]

8. Perhaps you are correct. I find it completely impossible to decipher

his thesis

He begins with a Biblical quote about Mary "with child by the Holy Spirit," launches into a paragraph of mythological examples in which nearly every sentence contains the word "virgin," and then suddenly he is going on about the Crusades. There is nothing like a logical progression of ideas there, and so the reader must supply it, which leads to predictable tendentious disputes about what was intended, a state of affairs that could easily have been prevented by a more adult style

[Silent3]

7. "...Jupiter visited the virgin Danaë as a shower of gold...

...and got her with child."

You can get pregnant from a golden shower!? Damn! Check one more item off the "safe sex" list.