Had a long chat with a pastor some years ago about matters such as the immaculate conception and Jesus' ascension to heaven in the body, that sort of thing. This particular pastor was the one who, after many years of not going to church, got me going again, not because of any "conversion" or anything like that, but just because I wanted to hear what he had to say.

"It's a manner of storytelling," he said. "If you examine the stories about prominent figures in all of the world's religions, particularly the founders or major prophets, you'll note that they're all supposed to have come to earth in some miraculous way, performed various miracles while they were here, and then departed in some miraculous way. Historically true? Extremely unlikely. Nevertheless, that's the mythology. The gynecological and obstetric details of Jesus' conception and birth are something no one knows. Nobody was there taking notes. So all this was added by storytellers, in the style of religious storytellers, after Jesus became a religious prophet. Same with Buddha, same with Krishna, same with Zeus, all of them. It's the storyteller's way of emphasizing that this was no ordinary person. But—what really makes the person extraordinary is not how they were born or how they died, but what they taught while they were here. The problem is, all too many people get hung up on the mythology and miss the whole point of what the religion is trying to teach."

I didn't have to accept the orthodoxy that put me off years ago. This was a pastor I could talk with.

Don Firth