////Me? I prefer being irreligious to atheist or agnostic or whatever, because I have never to my knowledge sat and wondered "I wonder if this Jesus dude really did do the conjuring tricks? I wonder if Lazarus really was full of maggots? I wonder if he did rise from the dead and jump on a cloud a few weeks later? I wonder if his mum was a virgin? In wonder if the concept we call God does notice or give a fig about individual humans? Did Noah get everything in a boat and screw his daughters?

For me, there is little reason to dig any further than the ludicrous concept of the actual questions.////

I wonder what the original author had in mind when he wrote it. The trouble with atheists is that they assume he was either deluded or a shyster and that it's all lies and falsehoods. But I question this. Virgin birth is far older than the Christian religion. What does it mean at the root? When the Egyptians watched the little dung beetles hatch from the dungballs their parent buried in the earth, it seemed to the Egyptians that these little beetles were emerging from Mother Earth rather than from a parent. They were virgin-born. The only-begotten son.

To quote Hor-Apollo, the 5th century Egyptian priest: "To denote the Only-Begotten of a father, the Egyptians delineate a scarabaeus! By this, they symbolize an only-begotten because the creature is self-produced, being unconceived by a female."

Not for nothing did Church Fathers Augustine and Ambrose, among others, refer to Jesus as "the good scarabaeus."   Augustine wrote: "He is my own good beetle, not so much because he is Only-Begotten, not because he himself, the author of himself has taken on the form of mortals, but because he has rolled himself in our filth and chooses to be born from this filth himself."

The one born from a virgin is the one who comes to transform us. His beetle form is representative of transformation--the dung beetle making the dungball. The Egyptians represented their god Kheper as a potter with a scarab for a head. According to this website:

http://www.kheper.net/

"The word Kheper means evolution, metamorphosis, transformation, coming into being."

Here's one image. Most other images simply depict him as a scarab:

kheper

It's not a person who transforms, it is our consciousness. It is what transforms and is also the transformer. The disservice organized atheism (and yes, it is organized as much as people as Mr. Shaw will deny it) performs is that it basically makes a mockery of these scriptures without trying to find any meaning to it. To them, some unscrupulous idiots used them to pass off a historical Jesus, therefore it is all lies. The message that consciousness is not ripe yet and is waiting to transform and be transformed is lost, trodden over. And hence, the state of world such as it is is as much a product of organized atheism as much as of organized religion. Both are guilty of the exactly the same crime.