Echoes in Eternity

As always, Mark Steyn provides another witty example of why he is quickly becoming my favorite columnist, even better than Dennis Prager and Ann Coulter. This article again involves Steyn's central theme of demographics and reproduction, but with a new take involving the Christmas Story.

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If Christianity is just a myth, then it is, so to speak, an immaculately conceived one. On the one hand, what could be more powerless than a newborn babe? On the other, without a newborn babe, man is ultimately powerless. For, without new life, there can be no civilization, no society, no nothing.
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The Virgin Mary's pregnancy is not the only one in the Gospels. There's another that prefigures it, in Luke 1:13:

"But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John."

Zacharias is surprised to discover his impending fatherhood -- "for I am an old man and my wife well stricken in years." If you read Luke, the virgin birth seems a logical extension of the earlier miracle -- the pregnancy of Mary's elderly cousin. For Matthew, Jesus' birth is the miracle. Luke, a physician, leaves you with the impression that all birth -- all life -- is to a degree miraculous and God-given, if only because without it there can be no world. The obligation to have children may be a lot of repressive theocratic hooey, but it's less irrational than the secular self-absorption of a barren Russia, Japan and Europe. And, if Christianity is a fairy tale, it's a perfectly constructed one, beginning with the decision to establish Christ's divinity in the miracle of His birth: As the song says, "And man will live forevermore because of Christmas Day."
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