Yes I've heard that theory before and that the three wise men were seeking the next incarnation of there Lama in the same way some still do today.

Yes I'm completely convinced a bunch of Bronze age money grabbing morons set out to write a story to represent components of human psychology a science that would not come in to being for another eighteen hundred years and almost certainly did not set about to dupe idiots with yet another plagiarised scam magic godman myth.
That makes perfect sense.

@LenHazell53
Mythology doesn't come from the conscious minds of individuals. It comes from the collective unconscious. Today we can understand such phenomena in terms of psychology, but no such scientific understanding was ever necessary for myths to emerge from early humans. They had unconscious functions long before they had any conscious understanding of how those functions worked or where those images were coming from. Morons don't write stories so compelling that two thousand years later two and a half billion people, nearly a third of our species, still voluntarily adopt it as the backbone of their worldview. No money grabbing genius in history has ever been so clever as to invent such a powerful scheme, let alone "Bronze Age" morons.

Then when you add the mythologies of other cultures, the total comes to around 80% of our species. I can see the headlines now... "Handful of Bronze Age Morons Make Idiots of 80% of 21st Century Humans." Do the math. Something about that assessment just doesn't add up.

Please understand, I'm not arguing that the stories are to be taken as literal truth, but that they come from the collective unconscious (not from the conscious minds of primitive evil genius morons) and that they resonate with the unconscious minds of the overwhelming majority of humans (not with just the mentally impaired). We humans, particularly for the last four hundred years or so, like to identify with our conscious, rational minds, but the conscious mind is only a thin veneer over who we really are. Who we really are was not created by rational deliberation or purpose-driven thought. We are, in total, the products of irrational, non-teleological, random chance, operating in the context of the natural laws of physics... and THAT is what drives our behavior; not the cleverness of some imagined malevolent cabal of manipulative genius morons.

The thing that tempts us to dream of moronic genius manipulators is the exact same thing that tempts us to dream of ethereal heroic saviours - our collective, biological, instinctual, non-rational, subconscious minds.

@skado TLDNR

@LenHazell53

understandable