There are good reasons to accept that the Christian topic of immaculate conception is grounded in the mistranslation of the Hebrew alma (which simply means “young woman”) as “virgin”: “It would appear that Western civilization has endured two millennia of consecrated sexual neurosis simply because the authors of Matthew and Luke could not read Hebrew” (Harris, The End of Faith).

There are also good reasons to accept that the seventy “virgins” awaiting martyrs in the Muslim paradise resulted from a mistranslation: in using the word hur, transliterated as “houris,” the Koran relied here on the early Christian texts that used the Aramaic hur, meaning “white raisins,” a delicacy.

“Your dad fucked your mom.”

“My mother was a saint!”

occams razor dontchaknow

Up until sex ed class I thought my parents had had sex three times, once for each kid. Knowing mom, it wasn’t much more than that. She was the, “Lie still and think of West Virginia” type. Poor dad. Wish he would have dumped that woman and had fun at the end of his short life.

The immaculate conception is one of the least interesting and relevant parts of what made Jesus “big J, the wandering prophet, the soul healer”. He embodied a revitalisation and vindication of monotheistic righteousness and the idea of objective moral truths. He was so wise he was compared to Solomon, and if you believe the stories that recount how he was challenging the status quo by treating women “normally”, not condemning folks when nobody is perfect (he was very much against all forms of empty virtue signalling), being a “servant leader”, and just waking the Jews of the time from their moral slumber, it’s easy to see why.

Only those who worship Jesus (when he didn’t even like being called “good”!) instead of worshiping God and following Jesus would think the immaculate conception is that big of a deal. Whether he had 1, 2 or 20 parents, what he said and did stand by themselves and are as relevant today as they were yesterday.