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It's important because the very idea of it is the most transformational concept ever devised. Even if you view "religion" as merely a useful construct for passing on family history and forming aesthetic tastes--the idea that god became man has far-reaching consequenses for political and social practices.

By re-alligning man's relationship with the all powerful "god in the sky", we radically alter all our notions of the individual's relationship to earthly authority--and vice versa, of course.

Which is why Christianity will, inevitably become the targetted enemy of the New World Order. It has to be. This is also why you find that global capitalists, left-wing radicals and bureacratic/mangerial functionaries have an affection for Islam. When you see all those men with their foreheads on the ground you should meditate upon the underlying assumptions about authority and the individual human's place in the hierarchy of the universe that such a physical posture betrays.

And all because Christians were able to fashion a brilliant melding of Jewish, classical Greek/Roman, and European pagan practices around the person of Jesus and his followers.

We also see, as the visigoth Ruling Elite tears us further and further away from our cultural heritage, certain loathsome Christian heresies have taken root. A sort of de-naturing of the faith is taking place--the anti-intellectual demands of a commercialized, democratic society--and the person of Jesus is subtly downplayed in favor of the Old Testament psycopath who is so beloved to so many "law and order" types.

Consequently the American people are much more bovine and complacent in the face of the grotesqely huge Imperial interventionist police/welfare state that now "protects" them from "evil" at home and abroad.

As Montiverdi so brilliantly puts it in "Christe, Redemptor Omnium":

"Christe, Redemptor omnium,
Quem lucis ante originem,
Parem paternae gloriae,
Pater supremus editit,

Memento, rerum Conditor,
Nostri quod olim corporis,
Sacrate ab alvo Virginis,
Nascendo, formam sumpseris...."

When a human being can stand upright under the sun and adress his "god" in this fashion it has revolutionary implications....

Merry Christmas. On to the barricades...

It's important because the very idea of it is the most transformational concept ever devised.

Great answer, and a good hint that the theory of substitutionary attonement is inadequate to an understanding of how God transforms and redeems time and matter through his intervention therein.

I have recently been thinking about prayer. Now, we all know that prayer is chiefly a means of conforming ourselves to God, but how are we to understand petitionary prayer if we also understand God as unchanging? I don't yet have an answer to this, but I have a hunch: God's receptiveness to prayer is somehow caught up with the Incarnation -- with his own entry into time. Perhaps this is part of what's meant when we see Christ referred to as the high priest through whom all must come to have access to the Father.