"Your religion is valueless if you treat it like a buffet, picking and choosing which of the doctrines you will and won't follow...."

True, Clinton. But you have to take into consideration who came up with which doctrine. And why. There are certain aspects of Christianity that most people these days assume are essential to the religion and were from the start. But not so. The whole idea of the virgin birth ascribed to Jesus was what amounted to a piece of "boilerplate." As my pastor friend said, it was a standard part of the story-telling surrounding religious figures at the time, and back then most people understood that these frills were pure hype. But not so today (where did we lose our smarts about this kind of thing?). The earlier texts said that Mary was "young woman," which, later on, got translated—whether as an unintentional mistake or deliberately, who knows?—but later religious leaders, trying to pre-empt the pagan virgin cults that existed at the time, picked it up and ran with it.

Is the virgin birth of Jesus an essential tenet of the Christian religion? No. It undoubtedly is to the fundamentalists, but they're—well, I'll just shut up for now.

Don Firth