Since watching my son and his school comrades performing their telling of the story of the nativity, I've been thinking a fair bit. I'm not going to get all religious or anything, just objective reasoning. It occurs to me that either some supernatural deity did indeed organise it all, or as some think, and more advanced extraterrestrial race did it, or it never happened at all and is entirely a work of fiction, created by well intentioned skilled diplomats. Whatever, it doesn't change the important gist of the story. That mankind would be 'saved' because of what is supposed to have happened that day. And it's this last point that's got me thinking. From religious texts and the conclusions of scholars, it's clear that us humans have a very nasty character flaw. As a species we're uniquely capable of pure evil. Historical and present day events demonstrate clearly that that evil streak is still unfortunately present. What if the nativity story, whether true or fictional, was an attempt by some to demonstrate that we could, possibly, not constantly fight? Perhaps when the church instructed that we should all tell this story to everyone, perhaps it wasn't about politics and indoctrination, but rather an acknowledgement by the creators of the story that it's going to take an eternal, global effort to change human nature to try to eradicate our inherent bad streak. Sorry for the deep and heavy thinking on a Friday evening. I just couldn't stop pondering it.
I had a thought about that too. Clearly there are those that exploit and manipulate people's beliefs for their own reasons. Even from the story itself that much is clear. There are no women in the story at all, except for young Mary who quite frankly is portrayed as a needy airhead. I'm pretty sure that if the story were true, there'd have been a small army of very efficient more experienced women there to look after everything. So perhaps they were written out by male politicians later. But also what if, human nature being what it is, a later faction arose, and made it their objective to discredit the whole thing, again for their own reasons.
