[Tax-chick]

Ask any man.

I could, but I imagine that would tend to cause me to despise him, which is hardly the Christmas spirit.

But that aside, I think the idea that Jesus was not born naturally is theologically parlous, driven by the misogyny and biological ignorance of the writers. If Jesus did not have a natural human body, from His conception until His resurrection, and if His mother did not have a natural human body, then He is not fully man and fully God, but something else.

[Mrs. Don-o]

I think the idea here, Tax-Chick, is that breakage, tearing, bleeding and pain were not intended "from the beginning" to be part of the procreation of our kind, just as death and rotting in the grave were not intended "in the beginning" to be our denouement.

In "Eden 1.0," before sin, true human nature flourished according to God's unimpeded postive intent: Adam and Eve were humans as humans were intended to be. This is called Original Justice: in harmony with God, with Nature, between each other, and within themselves, with no injury, whether physical, emotional, or spiritual, and no strife.

It is only after sin, and the heritable consequences of sin, that painful bloody strife came to be part of the sexual and generative mix. Think ho often in the history of womankind, childbearing has been a Monomachy between life and death. Check out the curses in Genesis 3:14-20.

It follows, as fitting, that if Jesus Christ is the New Adam, and our Lady Mary the New Eve, who, through His grace and power, helps set upright what Mother Eve had put upside down, Mary would not be subject to all the physical signs and natural consequences of sin: the things which fit together in the category of "corruption," in the sense of "tendency to dissolution, deterioration, decomposition."

So it is not that Mary is super-human. It is that she is Human; she is the Standard Model; she is of an equal nature with Original Eve. It is we who are sub-human; or if that sounds too harsh, let's say we are substandard, damaged goods. We're dingy, dinged. She's in mint condition. <> The significance of "Beata Maria Semper Virgine" (written on the catacomb walls) means that we were not meant to be broken into, or broken out of. The procreation of children was meant, in the zip code of Eden (the word means "Delight"), to be pure unblemished unadulterated joy.

[MarkBsnr]

Ask any man.

I could, but I imagine that would tend to cause me to despise him, which is hardly the Christmas spirit.

I was referring to the excuse of PMS that enables the female to engage in egregious behaviour whilst excusing all of it and blaming it on the males in her life.