Follow up on Easter Musings

A reader has called to declare that the so-called Immaculate Conception of Jesus is such a jumble of irrationality that any discussion of it like my theory of improbability regarding the birth of Jesus is pointless waste of mental energy, noting:

• His mother Mary must have shown the usual symptoms of pregnancy resulting from sexual intercourse like missed periods and a bloating tummy for her husband Joseph to notice and initially consider quietly leaving her for infidelity like filing a no-fault suit of divorce in a US state trial court.

But he doesn’t and lets her pregnancy run its course, Mary obviously having a normal labor with vaginal parturition, because we see plenty of images showing her tenderly and blissfully holding the infant, referred to as Madonna and Child, a central theme in Christian iconography.

• This raises the issue of identity of her inseminator, i.e. the paternity of Jesus. Without today’s DNA testing we don’t have much to go on with here, except it must have been a post-puberty male unaffected by ED, erectile dysfunction.

According to the Population Reference Bureau roughly ¾ of the world’s 8 billion people are aged 15 or older, that is, post-puberty, of which half may be assumed to be males. Applying this rule to AD 1 when Jesus was born, the global population set at 200 million, we have 75 (= 200 x ¾ / 2) million men who could have ravished Mary to be the father of Jesus. Of course not all that crowd could be near enough to Mary in those days when travel is limited with insurmountable oceans and continents. Even so, 75 million is a big enough pool to draw any number of adulterers from.

• But all inquiry into paternity stops with an angel telling Joseph in a dream that Mary’s pregnancy is caused by the Holy Spirit, not adultery.
• In short, (3) negates (1), a bare-faced contradiction, like saying “You are my son” and, in the same breath, “You are not my son.”